The widening empathy gap

Despite the universal, global impact of COVID-19, everyone is experiencing it differently. Everyone we’ve been engaging with through Customer, Now understands the severity of the human impact this pandemic is having. And yet, their personal experiences are vary significantly. Some have lost their jobs, most haven’t. Some have strengthened their financial situations, most haven’t. Many haven’t experienced negative physical health impacts, some have. Many have strengthened their relationships with their loved ones, closest to them, but many haven’t.

What we’re seeing through COVID-19 is an enormous disparity of experiences (especially in the extremes). Where your reality isn’t mine…and we are having difficulty seeing the realities of others for the truths their realities represent. As we have spent So. Much. Time. with ourselves, in our small worlds, the worlds of others have become more distant and harder with which to connect.

We are seeing an emerging human truth of a widening gap in empathy between people experiencing the same thing, very differently. Where your reality isn’t mine and because I’m spending so much time focused on and managing through MY reality, I have less empathy for yours. And so the gap widens…between me and you. My understanding and appreciation for your reality as something different and yet just as real, human and meaningful as my own.

As time draws on, the Claps for Carers aren’t as loud. The messages of brands blend together. The next press conference sounds like the previous. Patience wanes, judgement grows, and empathy is harder to come by.

And yet, we all have the capacity to change how we connect. To reflect on what others may be experiencing and shift our perspective to theirs. To think beyond ourselves. To understand we may not understand and yet we can connect to how others’ are feeling. Because while our realities may be different, we all have experience feeling loss and confusion, growth and uncertainty, hate and love. By connecting through the universality of feelings we can lessen the empathy gap between us.

Nothing is changing faster than ourselves.What’s happening with customers right now and what should business do next?

Suddenly, these two questions became a lot more complicated; the answers require us to get beyond the numbers, headlines and hyperbole in search of simple, scalable human truths.

That’s why we’ve launched Customer, Now., a project to document, explore and understand lock-down, and what follows it, from the customers’ perspective.

Through our global communities, we are tapping into the human truths behind customers’ experiences in real-time; exploring their inner worlds more deeply, and creating fresh, generative insights and implications to share with our community.

There’s one guiding insight that’s immediately become clear: in this fast-changing situation, nothing is changing faster than ourselves. This is what we’re exploring through Customer, Now.

It’s not uniform change, nor is it constant. It’s an evolution of our inner lives, our relationships, family, friends, home, health, work and, inevitably, our customer behaviour. And it’s more rapid than we’ve ever seen before.

Through Customer, Now. we'll deliver to our community an insight, and its implications, every week. With this work, we have one simple aim: to drive a brighter, more progressive, customer-inspired version of tomorrow.