Training for empathy

WSJ “Cubicle Culture” Jared Sandberg traveled to New Delhi for his most recent dispatch (published yesterday and available to all right here), a visit to Wipro, one of the outfits that some American companies outsource their customer-service to. It’s pretty interesting stuff. There are bits on the way the firm is managed (sounds fairly progressive) and the role that these jobs are playing in boosting India’s own consumer class. But of course it’s the how-to-deal-with-service-rage stuff that I wanted to read the most:

While most calls sent overseas to India are innocuous information exchanges, there’s only so much that can prepare someone for the hair-pulling frustration that confronts Wipro’s escalation desk, where frustrated callers end up when demanding to talk to a supervisor. Only employees with a proven track record of patience get promoted to the desk.

To prepare for that assignment, they role-play angry callers. Much is scripted, like leaving a follow-up voicemail to see if a technician’s visit resolved a problem. But agents aren’t trained to respond to rage with anything specific. Listen and solve the problem, they say, and the customer will mellow. Amid entreaties to reboot, one can hear the language of sympathy: “I know how you feel.”

But only experience can prepare employees for consumer rage, managers say. Before Wipro’s Mr. Banerjee managed the escalation team, he was an agent. One of his first calls involved an American who ran over his briefcase with his car. His pen survived but his laptop didn’t. The man said he’d write a letter of commendation to the pen manufacturer but would write to newspapers to complain about the computer maker, where he had friends in high places, Mr. Banerjee recalls. “Nothing trains you for that,” he says. No matter how unreasonable or stupid, he adds, “You have to be empathetic.”