Active Empathic Listening as a Tool for Better Communication

Abstract

Volume of the consumer conversation is expanding day by day. Many leading companies worldwide are recognizing the importance of listening to the costumers and feel that it is not the same thing as it was five years ago. Listening in the present context involves many other criterions such as granularity of individual opinions, leading indicators, unfiltered sentiments, etc. This increasing speed and volume of conversations and its rapid development as a market force have made listening as one of the biggest challenges faced by the present corporate world. One type of listening which is being highlighted these days is Active Empathic Listening (AEL). AEL is a cognitive process involving the steps such as sensing, processing and responding. The study adopts the items from the recently developed Active Empathic Scale to test whether there is a significant correlation between the three elements of listening empathetically. The study also tries to find out if empathy in listening can make a person a better communicator. The study further provides the evidences to prove that training with the focus upon empathic listening can improve the overall listening abilities and justifies the emerging need of proper training and guidance to help the employees/prospective employees to understand the role of empathy in the process of listening.

Keywords: Listening, Active Listening, Empathy, Communication

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