Keywords :
empathic accuracy; empathic design methods; empathy; service design; service employees; Design method; Empathic accuracy; Empathic design method; Empathic designs; Empathy; Service companies; Service employees; Service support; Services designs; User-centric; Human-Computer Interaction; Computer Networks and Communications; Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Software
Abstract :
[en] Effectively prompting empathy from service employees towards users is a challenging yet essential endeavor to support user-centric approaches plebiscited by service companies. In this study, we investigate to which extent emotional and engaging users' insights - under the form of love and breakup (LB) declarations to a service - support employees' empathy towards users. We played back to railway employees (N = 230) six audio recordings of passengers' love or breakup declarations addressed to the service. Through quantitative measures, we analyzed the employees' ability to recognize passengers' emotions (empathic accuracy), their resonance with their emotions (emotional resonance), and several additional indicators of empathy. Our findings show no direct increase in employees' empathy but shed light on key factors influencing emotion recognition and resonance, and on employees' perceptions of their ability to impact the passenger experience. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of using LB declarations to trigger service employees' empathy.
Funding text :
This study is supported by the Luxembourgish Railway-CFL. The funding source has no involvement in the study design; the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; the reports writing; and the decision to submit the article for publication. We thank the HCI research team at the University of Luxembourg, in particular Margault Sacre and Etienne Le Bihan for supporting the statistical analyses, and Kerstin Bongard-Blanchy and Sophie Doublet for their overall support on the project. We also thank Sophie Lacour, Tom Nickels, and all the employees of CFL who participated in this study. Last but not least, a special thanks to Joshua Dawson for proofreading the manuscript.
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