Empathy Expansion Kit: Feedback as a Gift and Empathetic Responses to Criticism

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to our Empathy Expansion Kit episode. We are focusing again on empathetic responses to criticism. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa.
Today we're talking about best practices for receiving and responding to customer feedback and criticism in ways that demonstrate an understanding and some appreciation. And in our last Empathy Expansion Kit episode, we touched on this a bit, but we wanted to dive deeper because it's really hard to cover in just 10 minutes some of the important areas here. Tullio, so this might be hard to do, but is it important for businesses to reframe feedback as a gift?

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:58)
Yes, absolutely. There's some businesses that you're going to get, like we mentioned in the last episode, you're going to get positive and negative feedback, depending on who you're dealing with, and especially high-volume type of businesses. Let's just highlight one, for example, moving companies.
If you've done any research on moving companies, the reviews are all over the place. There's not one single moving company that has all the top reviews. I mean, there's some that have higher reviews than others, but you'll find with every good review, there's a negative one. And the negative ones, if the feedback from the company is empathetic, they soften the whole problem. But if the feedback is defensive, then it just turns people away. I just went through this experience personally.
And one of the moving companies, the feedback, like the people responded, they were defensive. And I was like, do I want to do business with a company that if I raise an issue, they just get defensive about it? Even if they're right, just having that attitude, that's, I didn't feel comfortable with that. Like they don't understand me. This is so stressful, this whole process of moving. There's no empathy in the process that I'm going through. You know, I know this is your business, but this is a big deal. You could be a little more human-like in your response, right? So, and then the company that had, we're so sorry this happened, let us make it right, here's what we're gonna do.
That felt more like, wow, these genuinely understand that things can go wrong, but they're gonna try to make it simple and easy to solve it. So the way you respond to criticism, it can be a gift, the criticism. The way you respond can turn into a gift or it can be a curse. The way you respond can be a curse. If you're defensive and have attitude, it's not gonna work for you. But if you're humble and empathetic and you stay in this frame of mind of connection, you're gonna have a lot of success. And that's the key thing. It's not about being right.
Even if the customer says something that's so out of left field that they're so wrong about it and you know that they're wrong about it.
It's not about being right.
It's about maintaining connection. And that requires tremendous empathy and tremendous humility to be able to say, what's the higher purpose here? I wanna maintain connection. And I'm also having other people watching how I maintain connection. So what I say and how I say, it's gonna either be a gift for other people to say, these guys are nice guys I wanna do business with, or it's gonna be a curse that's gonna show my cards as just having an attitude, trying to be right and argumentative. Even if I am right. And it's like being in a relationship with people in real life, right? We just strive for connection or strive to be right. And sometimes trying to be right ends up destroying a relationship. So it's the same principle, really.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:59)
So, this makes me think about how AI is coming online with some of these customer feedback loop, channels and things like that, and how AI is actually scoring higher than humans in a lot of areas here. And I think it's kind of what you hit on a little bit. It's these triggers, right? We're human.
And there's really three key triggers here. So you've got this truth trigger, this first one. So it's when we believe the feedback is wrong or unfair. We're just, you know, we're gonna get defensive about it, right? So maybe that moving company was just getting defensive because it was either wrong or unfair.
Whereas, you know, something like AI would be a little bit more treating it as a gift in some way and thanking someone and expressing a little gratitude for the feedback, even though it's totally, you know, not right and it could go into the process of explaining that really well without being totally triggered. So there's this other trigger, it's the relationship trigger. So this is when we're affected by who's giving the feedback.