Dive Brief:
- Customers are more satisfied with their service when a representative expresses empathy, according to a Level AI analysis of 35.1 million conversations.
- When a representative explicitly validates a customer, conversations scored an inferred CSAT score of 3.94 on average on a 5-point scale. Conversations without explicit emotional validation scored 3.52 on average.
- “The lift showed up almost everywhere, but its size changed a lot by category,” Rob Dwyer, CX executive in residence at Level AI, said in an email. “The pattern seems to come down to two things: how much emotion the customer brings to the conversation, and how much the agent can actually do about the outcome.”
Dive Insight:
Customers appreciate empathetic customer service, especially in high stakes or uncertain situations, and favor brands that provide it.
Research shows that consumers prioritize empathetic service when choosing brands. A 2025 Zurich survey found that 3 in 5 customers would be willing to pay more to use a brand that demonstrates care. Most consumers, 86%, say empathy and human connection are more important than a quick response in providing excellent customer experience, a Five9 survey from last year found.
Despite such research, empathy isn’t all that common in customer service calls. Only about 18% of the 35.1 million conversations Level AI analyzed included explicit emotional validation.
“Empathy has always been the skill everyone in CX says matters, but almost nobody measures with real rigor,” Dwyer said. “For leaders, the takeaway is that empathy is now measurable, and anything you can measure you can coach.”
Level AI examined the conversations across 85 companies spanning industries from technology to healthcare and wellness. Technology and SaaS benefited the most from agents explicitly acknowledging customer emotion, with a 14.8% lift in inferred CSAT. Financial services and insurance also benefited from a 14.3% lift.
When the stakes are high and resolution is still within reach, whether that be a disputed charge, locked account or a payment that didn’t go through, empathy is more likely to improve satisfaction.
“The customer is anxious, and acknowledging that anxiety changes how the entire interaction lands,” Dwyer said. “The same holds for a broken travel plan or a delayed order where the agent has room to move things forward.”
Empathy improved customer satisfaction less in conversations where the outcome is constrained and the agents have less control.
Dwyer points to healthcare, where much of what drives satisfaction is coverage decisions, care timelines, clinical uncertainty. In healthcare and wellness empathy only provided a 1.8% lift to customer satisfaction.
“An agent can acknowledge how hard that is, but acknowledgment has less room to move the score when the underlying answer is out of their hands,” Dwyer said. “Utilities behave in a similar way. Empathy still helps in both, it just can't compensate for the constraint the customer is really reacting to.”
