5 ideas you should borrow from Zendesk’s ‘Empathy Lab’ to transform service and support experiences

Shane Schick tells stories that help people innovate, and to…
Imagine you get the go-ahead to hire a renowned (and no doubt expensive) design and consulting firm to come into your company’s headquarters and spend time identifying some of the best ways to make the entire experience of being there a whole lot better.
Then, just as you’re ready to put them into practice, COVID-19 hits and you have to think of how to shrink down all those big ideas so they can manifest themselves in Slack.
The consulting firm I’m taking about is IDEO, and the customer whose plans were hijacked by the pandemic is Zendesk, best down as a maker of customer service applications.
I’ve already covered much of the company’s Relater virtual summit on 360 Magazine, but the one about its “Empathy Lab,” as the session was called, keeps nagging at me.
According to Tiffany Apczynski, Zendesk’s vice-president of public policy and social impact, the goal was to have the IDEO spend time with its support team “surface big challenges to building relationships, and what the easy solves might be.”
This yielded some really simple action items that any organization could do, but one that a shelter-in-place situation means no company can do, unless they do it online.
At first, I was
Shane Schick tells stories that help people innovate, and to manage the change innovation brings. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Marketing magazine and has also been Vice-President, Content & Community (Editor-in-Chief), at IT World Canada, a technology columnist with the Globe and Mail and Yahoo Canada and is the founding editor of ITBusiness.ca. Shane has been recognized for journalistic excellence by the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance and the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.