March 30, 2021
Most people are, so it’s a good bet.
We are so plugged in…email, Slack, IM, text, post, comment, reply, reply, reply. We are sending and receiving messages all day, every day. So you would think that in this time of hyper-connectivity that loneliness would be at its lowest in human history.
It’s not – recent surveys report that we’re lonelier than ever, with loneliness getting worse from 2018 onward. 61% of Americans reported feeling lonely at the beginning of 2020.
Aside from this being a mental health challenge, you can see it at work – customer churn rate and employee satisfaction. Yeah, I said it – your customers are lonely and that’s your problem. Here’s what I mean:
- 68% of Customers report “bad customer service” as the reason to switch to one of your competitors
- Customer service isn’t just the number of support inquiries received or the time to resolution
- We need to talk about how customers feel after the issue gets resolved
As an aside, surveys also show that the vast majority of employees leave either because of a bad manager or because they did not feel valued.
So how do loneliness and feeling valued tie together?
Loneliness is caused by a lack of (1) emotional validation, (2) group acceptance, and/or (3) purpose.
Recently I was at the park with my sister’s kids. When my five-year-old nephew was seeing his older sisters climb up on top of the monkey bars and he just really wanted to be up there himself.
He wasn’t tall enough to reach the bottom rung at all and it was just too high for his Auntie (me) to feel comfortable hoisting him up there.
Teary-eyed, he said, “I just want to hang upside down like they can.”
So we found a bar that was low enough for me to feel safe, and once he climbed and hang upside down all by himself, the joy burst out of his little body and he wanted to share it with me! “I did it! Did you see me? I did it!”
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Adults need as much emotional validation as children. We just have more emotional regulation skills and a different scale of experience.
You might feel as sad and envious as my nephew did when you see your peers get promoted or buy a house.
When our customers are dissatisfied, we tend to get defensive and want to convince them that we can solve their challenges. Customers, though, just want to be heard. Unfortunately, research shows that only 23% feel “listened to” after a call to customer support.
Curiosity and validation will go a long way. Avoid defensiveness by tapping into your need to understand. A simple, “I can hear your frustration. Can you help me understand a little more?” will go a long way.
Would you stay in a group where you feel like the weirdo?
Most of us would have the confidence in ourselves to leave that group, thinking “they are the weirdos, not me.” A lack of group acceptance or belonging is called social loneliness.
For customers, group acceptance can be translated to knowing that how they use your solution is “normal”. When they are failing to achieve their expected outcomes, they will almost always blame the vendor. Most organizations have implementation plans to help prevent this from happening, but when it does, consider the clues from social loneliness.
Customers want to know that what they are trying to build/do will work. Sometimes trusted advisors are better received when they are peers rather than from inside the vendor’s organization. Referral customers, user groups, user communities all can be an unusual but highly beneficial source of confidence. Help them to feel that they are not alone in their project. Be a conduit to help them grow their own professional network.
What does it all mean?
Existential loneliness is caused by lack of purpose. It shows up in our personal lives as a mid-life crisis, or need to find purpose/fulfillment/new direction.
Customer existential loneliness is harder to spot. Sellers always assume that the buyer knows exactly what they are trying to solve and what the outcomes will be.
Any customer success manager knows that the people that implement and maintain a solution are almost never the ones that make the purchasing decision, and they come up with different requirements for success.
Overcoming this type of customer loneliness should be relatively straightforward in the process: work the sales playbook, uncover expected outcomes, and co-create a plan to achieve the desired results.
Bringing it to the customer’s attention is more artful. They may not be aware of this underlying frustration; they may want to blame the solution or their coworkers, etc. Help them connect the dots by asking about the organization’s vision, the purchaser’s vision, and why this solution is one critical piece of that larger vision. Vision is purpose, whether it is overcoming a challenge or creating something entirely different.
TL;DR how to help your customers overcome loneliness
- Individual loneliness is caused by a lack of emotional validation. Counteract this by listening fully to their concerns, then ask curiosity questions, and finally validate their emotions.
- Social loneliness is caused by a lack of belonging or group acceptance. Counteract this by creating social togetherness via referrals, user groups, user community engagement. Be a conduit to help them grow their own professional network.
- Existential loneliness is caused by a lack of purpose. Counteract this by getting curious about vision, anchor discussions about what success means to them, their boss, the original purchaser, and their larger organization.
Sending and receiving messages is stale, stunted, sometimes lifeless without emotions. Communication is a commingling, communal, cooperative act. I share, you share, we feel together. We transform internal thoughts into external expressions.
Communicating with curiosity, empathy, and genuine emotion is the actual building block of all relationships.
