Hello! 

I'm John Jamieson and my passion is for bringing humanity back into business, primarily through encouraging the personal, caring, human element back into Customer Service - reminiscent of the old local corner shop's relationship with its customers - by providing both audits of your Customer Experience, as well as consultancy support for improving it.

Put simply, we look at:
How good are you making your customers feel by connecting with them personally - as individual people that you value, are interested in and enjoy interacting with? And how can we improve it?

"People may not remember exactly what you did or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel."
Tony Hsieh, CEO Zappos

But what should we call this?

Crucial as this aspect of the Customer Experience is, strangely enough, there's still no accepted industry name for it. Companies have had to invent their own terms for it (maybe you already have your own?), such as:

- Excellent Personal Service (Simplyhealth)
- Personal Emotional Connection (Zappos)
- Friends Experience (Friends Provident)
- Emotional Experience / Engagement (Avia, and generally)

If you know any more to add to this list, or already have a programme
for the Personal side of your Customer Service, please do let me know!

Way back in 1992, when I created the concept and first started consulting for this, I had to invent a suitable term, so I simply called it Customer Empathy. It's not perfect, but people quickly related to it, and so I still use 'Customer Empathy' with clients as the interim term, until they decide upon their own words.

Since then, I've been encouraging businesses in the UK and around the world to simply focus on how they are making their Customers FEEL. Even established names, such as First Direct, Virgin and BT have had their eyes opened and benefited enormously from this approach.

Why Customer Empathy / Personal Service?

It's all based on common sense: as a customer yourself, you're probably already aware that service that makes you feel more loyal to a company is as much about making you feel good at a human / personal level (valued, cared for, important, happy and so on), as it is about getting what's delivered 'right first time'.

It's no longer not just what you DO for your customers, but also HOW you are actually making us FEEL, as people.

In my previous life as a business and technology management consultant, I noticed that my clients were making an awful lot of effort to get their processes right for the customer, but not a lot of attention was given to how it felt to be a customer on the receiving end. In fact, it wasn't even thought possible to objectively measure feelings (and even now, that's still usually assumed to be so).

But, as a customer myself, I knew that how I felt was really the only thing that mattered to me. So I pioneered and developed the Customer Empathy Audit based on a new objective methodology I invented for measuring feelings on an absolute 1 to 10 scale. When used for the overall average feeling of a company's Customer Experience, I called it an Empathy Rating.

Service is getting personal

20 years ago, calling a large company was typically a dismal experience: in those days Company Empathy Ratings were mostly in the 4.0 to 5.5 range (Feels Bad or Neutral). But in the last few years, even the lowest companies score at least 5.5, and the best companies have been achieving Empathy Ratings in the 6.5 - 7.0 range (6.5 is the beginning of the Feels Good range), and that's a huge difference: basically from feeling bad at a personal level to feeling good, in just a decade or so.

And so now common sense is prevailing and companies are finally giving more and more commitment to bringing the personal side fully back into the Customer Experience. However, Personal Service is still relatively undeveloped, with even the very best companies struggling to exceed an Empathy Rating of 7.0 out of 10. 

"Is your team using emotion words like 'care'?"
Darren Cornish, Director of Customer Experience at Norwich Union:
Avia (previously Norwich Union): "Insurance at core, care at our heart"

This is exciting because it means there's still huge room for improvement!

Until now, it's been unusual to come across an individual customer service interaction with an Empathy Rating around 7 (feels good), and an 8 (feels very good) was exceedingly rare, let alone a 9 (feels extremely good) maybe just once in a blue moon, and a 10 (feels fantastically good) was literally unheard of.

Yet, working with my clients, we have proved that not only are these higher rating 'Feels Good' personal interactions now possible, they can become the everyday Customer Experience norm. And yes, it does feel great - not just for the customer, but also for the customer service agent, and actually, for the whole company.

"Customer Empathy is, by far, the most important and meaningful to me of all our Board's customer service reports. It's the only one I'm really interested in!"
CEO of a UK Insurance Group

You too, can quickly achieve some amazing results through significantly improving your 'Customer Empathy', helping you stand out from your competition with outstanding, memorable and personal Customer Service - so that Customers love your company (pun intended!) Because it actually IS possible to establish an emotional connection, or even bond, with them - to capture their hearts as well as their minds.

Traditional Customer Service programs tend to focus more on WHAT you should do, even down to what tone of voice to use. This can lead to service-with-a-smile mentality, but, as we all know from being on the receiving end: if it's not sincere, it backfires! As a result, Customer Service training programs and staff performance measures often try to control the customer interaction so much that it risks de-personalising it and makes truly personal interactions all but impossible. Accordingly, standard Customer Service measures are often not showing the whole story and can even be seriously misleading, giving a false sense of confidence.

So, for Customer Empathy, we focus on HOW you are coming across - how you are making customers feel. We always start with an assessment of your current 'Customer Empathy' - because there's nothing like raw, hard data combined with and real experiences of how it actually feels to be a customer to help get your team's attention!

" Right from day one, John provided us with valuable insights into how we could not only improve the service but also how we could go to a fundamentally higher level of service than we had ever contemplated...  and has helped us understand how to define and consistently measure our service interaction with customers. " John is a living example of what he preaches and has consistently delivered beyond our expectations in both the content and the manner of his support. He has been worth every single penny! "
Keith Mansfield, Head of Individual Customer Services, Friends Provident click here for full testimonial

Have an interest or passion for Personal Service too?
How to get started

If all this is already something you relate to - or hopefully, are even passionate about - I'd very much love to connect with you; with my 20 years' experience, I have a lot to offer.

By all means browse this site, but a quick discussion will help you get much clearer; so I would encourage you to simply contact me for a chat to discuss your own situation and how to discover just how it feels to be one of your customers right now (or how to quickly improve it).

Actually, because there's nothing like some first hand experience, I will usually offer to do a small free Empathy Audit 'taster' for you (I call your company a few times and feed back some impressions to you) to give you some experience of this approach with some of your own customer calls to help our discussions.

So, please do get in touch; I look forward to talking with you soon. 

John Jamieson (previously John Pearson!) Phone (UK): 0208 133 2413 (International): +44 208 133 2413 Skype id: john.jamieson1 Email:

Summary of Services offered: 1. Feedback on how it currently feels to be a customer of yours:     - A range of Customer Empathy Audit options     - Definitive objective 1-10 measures on aspects how it feels     - Subjective/ cultural fingerprint assessments     - Experiential reporting back, so you can feel it too     - Highly motivational (quickly engages people) 2. Learn to objectively measure soft 'Feelings' yourselves:     - Transfer of Empathy / feelings measurement skills in-house     - Target organisation with Feel Good goals     - Bring soft measures right down to advisor level 3. Personal Service Programme Development Consultancy:     - Empathy Introductory Seminars     - Empathy Development Workshops     - Experiential Empathy Training 4. Cultural Change for Customer Empathy / Personal Service:     - Strategic Consultancy up to Board level     - Change Programmes support     - Supporting true Values development     - Vision development 5. Presenting your success:     - Executive Presentation development     - Executive Presentation coaching     - Awards submissions     - Seminar development and management     - Presenting With Passion courses

Discover exactly how GOOD it FEELS to be one of your customers
And how it can feel a whole lot better!