You Can't Fake Real Empathy

I work on the phones. It isn’t a job I would have chosen, if I’d had a choice. It was the very last on my list of preferred jobs, right after “taxi driver.” But there weren’t any academic positions in the middle of the pandemic and certainly German Literature wouldn’t have been where universities were hiring anyway. So here we are. I work on phones. All day every day. And yet, I still struggle when I have to call customer service at another company.

There are variations on scripts with every company, but most companies have some kind of script that begins with a “How is your day going?” and then moves to some kind of a kind reassurance that “I can help you.” Which is fine, if you’re not calling in for the fifteenth time, to do something that should have been fairly simply, and now you’ve had about nine different unique answers and none of them have worked (some of them were suggested more than once). I don’t want you to tell me that you can help me before you actually know if you can help me or not. It does not make me feel reassured for you to tell me that you can help me when I do not trust that you even understand what the problem is.

The problem, in my opinion, comes down to this: real empathy is not a script.

Companies that have customer service like to pretend that it IS a script. They want to get their customer service staff to hand out empathy right and left to all the customers who call in. But that isn’t how empathy works. Empathy isn’t easily produced and there isn’t an unlimited supply of it. Not for anyone.

What can be handed out to everyone without any real connection or concern for it drying up? Fake empathy. A script. Automated kindness, words that mean nothing.

Look, I work on phones. I hand out fake empathy all the time. Real empathy? That goes out less often. I don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to cry with every person who comes on the line with me. Most people don’t deserve it. Most people are dealing with a small problem that has an easy-to-explain solution. They may or may not like the solution, but I can’t change the reality of their situation.

Plenty of the time, it’s a problem of your own making, and believe me, we’re going to have an easier time if you can admit that and we can get on to solving your problem together. I have a lot more sympathy if you ask me for a favor and to do something nice for you even though you know it’s your fault that you’re in this situation. Alternately, you may just need to vent a while and I can also be silent while you do that. I don’t think worse of you for this, because we all need to vent sometimes.

Then there are the people who call in who are truly having one of the worst days of their lives, because life is sometimes shitty. These are people who have had a loved one die and are scrambling to figure out how to go on. They are people who have been genuinely mistreated, sometimes by my company or someone in my company. I offer my real empathy to these people. Sometimes I cry with them. Sometimes I cry for them, even after I hang up the phone.

I will say that in my experience, people I am capable of expending my empathy on are often the ones who are the least angry—even if they deserve to be. They seem to have an incredible capacity to explain the situation for the umpteenth time (something I have not been able to do when I was in their shoes). They see that the people who work on phones are human beings and deserve to be treated as such.

Learning how to be nice is a useful social skill. But it isn’t empathy. Empathy is sitting with another person in their pain. It’s listening to where they really are. It’s feeling WITH them, not just saying nice words.

I value empathy highly. But I don’t make the mistake of confusing it with social niceness. And I very rarely want it from people who are strangers to me (it happens in health care sometimes that I need empathy, but even there it’s not often). I believe I’m a highly empathetic person, maybe too empathetic. But even saying that makes me smile a little because if someone says I’m too empathetic, I think what they’re actually saying is that they don’t know what empathy is. They think being nice is sufficient to all situations, and it’s not. It’s very precious, very rare, and I don’t give or accept it easily.