Empathy vs. The Script: How Human Connection Transforms Customer Service
Airports. Those fluorescent, too-bright liminal spaces where you're suspended between time zones but, weirdly, also between your own internal clocks. Airports are less places and more existential traps, where time ceases to make any real sense and your entire day can hinge on whether or not Zone 3 boards before or after Zone 2. It’s where you can’t tell if the hours are dragging by or disappearing in these weird 45-minute chunks you only notice when you’re trying to calculate if you have enough time to grab a sandwich that costs $14. In other words, airports are designed to make you both hyper-aware of how little time you have and also how absolutely powerless you are to speed it up.
It’s here, in the fluorescent limbo of Gate 14B, that I first started to think that customer service wasn’t really about solving problems at all. Or maybe it is, but not in the way we think. No, it’s about managing something deeper—this creeping, low-level frustration embedded in modern life where everything is designed to disappoint us, even when things technically work out. I’m standing in line, trying to get on an earlier flight, because I’ve finished my meeting ahead of schedule and now all I want is to get home. You know the feeling, right? The fantasy of peeling off your shoes, zoning out in front of something—anything—that approximates entertainment (The Golden Bachelorette, for instance, which, in a very real sense, is entertainment but also kind of isn’t).
When I finally get to the desk, the agent looks at me, but not really at me—more in my general direction—then back to the screen, which is where her real attention is. Her voice, flat and pre-recorded in that specific corporate tone that manages to sound both tired and official, something like a voicemail greeting. "You booked a non-changeable fare. I can’t switch your flight." The words that come out of her mouth aren’t hers, not in any meaningful sense. She’s less a person than an interface for a faceless corporate machine, and her words are as automatic and unthinking as the ding of an elevator reaching its floor. The words don’t come from her—they come through her, like she’s been trained to utter them so many times they’ve been bleached out by overuse, the way a microwave beep has no real connection to the food inside.
Now, there are a few different ways this interaction could have gone. In one version, the one I suspect is most common, the agent gives me the information in that clipped, transactional tone that makes it clear my situation is less of an issue and more of a speed bump in her day. We’ve all been there, right? When you can feel the indifference practically oozing through the Plexiglas barrier separating you from the person who’s supposed to help you. But you know what? She’s right. She’s following the rules. I don’t get on the flight. But I'm leaving the counter feeling like I’ve been punched in the gut by corporate policy.
But let’s imagine for a second that there’s another version of this interaction, one where she says the exact same thing—“You booked a non-changeable fare. I can’t switch your flight”—but this time it’s different. She leans in, a little conspiratorially, maybe with a quiet sigh. A slight inflection in her voice that’s barely noticeable but enough to make it clear that she, too, is trapped in this system, and in some obscure way, we’re on the same team. You know that tone—the quiet acknowledgement this isn’t just a bureaucratic issue anymore, it’s our shared, tiny tragedy. She’s as much a victim as you are, and the script she’s reciting is both a shield and a prison for both of you. She can’t fix it, and we both know that, but in some weird way, her willingness to acknowledge the sheer stupid unfairness of it all makes the whole thing feel a little less... pointless. It’s still pointless, but now it feels like we know it’s pointless, and that’s almost enough.
Maybe she tries a few things, clicking away at her keyboard, talking about how she’ll check with her manager even though we both know it’s not going to work. But the fact that she’s trying—she’s in the trenches with me, even for a second—changes everything. And the outcome is the same. I don’t get on the flight. I still spend three extra hours at the airport, but now I don’t feel like I’ve been dismissed or ignored. I feel like we had a moment, the agent and I, and somehow that makes the whole thing just a little bit better.
The Problem Isn’t the Problem
If you’ve ever worked in customer service, you know this dynamic well. You’re in the unenviable position of being the face of disappointment, of telling people “no” with a smile. And here’s what I've discovered: It’s not the “no” that breaks you. People hear “no” all the time. In fact, you start to expect it after a while, this quiet certainty that whatever you’re asking for probably won’t happen because—why would it? The real problem isn’t the word itself but the vacuum it leaves behind, this eerie, hollow feeling of detachment that comes when you realize that no one is on the other side of it. The word “no” isn’t the bad guy here. It’s the way it’s delivered—without connection, without even the faintest recognition that this moment means something to you. The worst part is, you’re not even angry about the policy. You’re angry about feeling erased.
This isn’t just airlines. Think about the last time you called your internet provider because your Internet went down, or the time you tried to return something only to be told the return window had closed. These moments of customer service frustration are universal, and so is the feeling of being brushed off by someone who’s technically correct but emotionally absent. It’s not the outcome that gets you—it’s the way it feels like they don’t care. What turns frustration into anger isn’t the policy itself—it’s feeling dismissed.
Empathy, in these moments, is a bit like pressing 'pause' in the middle of a video game—it doesn’t solve the problem, doesn’t change the rules or the outcome, but it gives you a moment to breathe, to remember that there’s a human on the other side of the transaction. It’s not a cheat code that lets you win, it’s more like one of those hidden glitches in old video games where you find a wall you can walk through, and suddenly you and the agent both have this brief moment of connection in an otherwise rigid, inhospitable environment.
You’re still going to lose. The flight is still full. But somehow, it doesn’t feel quite as brutal.
When someone takes the time, even just a second, to try, to get their hands a little dirty in the hopeless mechanics of the system—even if they can’t fix anything—it becomes something else. It’s not about the result; it’s about the fact that for one small moment, someone was willing to share in your powerlessness. They didn’t solve the problem, but they made it feel a little less lonely. You still leave without the thing you wanted, but you don’t leave angry. You leave with the sense that someone, somewhere, gets it.
Why Empathy Is Hard (And Why We Don’t Do It More)
If empathy is so powerful, why don’t we use it more? The answer is depressingly simple: empathy is hard work. It requires time and emotional energy, two things that most customer service agents, managers, and pretty much anyone who interacts with other humans for a living are in short supply of.
There’s a reason people rely on scripts and protocols. It’s easier. It’s safer. If you follow the rules and stick to the script, you can go home at the end of the day without feeling like you’ve been emotionally wrung out. The problem, of course, is that sticking to the script doesn’t make anyone feel human. They reduce people to problems, and interactions to transactions to be processed. It leaves everyone involved feeling a little more hollow.
In some ways, customer service interactions mirror life in general. The outcomes are often out of our control—there will always be canceled flights, missed opportunities, and unchangeable fares. You can’t rewrite airline policies or retail return deadlines on the fly. What is in our control is how we respond to those outcomes, and whether we let them dehumanize us or become opportunities for empathy. And empathy, let’s be clear, isn’t about fixing things. It’s about showing up and trying.
It’s about saying, “I see you. This sucks. I’m here with you in the middle of it.”
Empathy as a Radical Act
Empathy, despite what the HR brochures and TED Talks would have you believe, is not just a soft skill. It’s actually kind of radical. It’s weird to think of empathy as rebellion, but that’s kind of what it is, right? It’s this tiny act of defiance, like trying to grow a flower in the cracks of a concrete sidewalk. You’re pushing back against a system that’s explicitly designed to strip away anything that feels human, reducing us to barcodes, ticket numbers, productivity metrics. It’s refusing to be a cog in the machine, even for just a second. The whole system is designed to move you along, make you invisible, and empathy says, “No, I see you.” It’s not getting the outcome you want. It’s recognizing the outcome, in most cases, doesn’t actually matter as much as whether or not you feel like a human being while you’re getting there.
The Infinite Game
The more you zoom out—and let’s be honest, the only real perspective on life is from the macro level—the more you see that customer service is just life in miniature. It’s the same endless negotiation between systems too large to control and individuals too small to matter. And, just like life, there are these little moments where you get a flash of connection, where someone sees you, and for a second, you’re not just a data point. But those moments are rare. Mostly, we’re all just waiting for someone to show us a little empathy while we fumble through the machinery, trying not to get ground up by it.
The real challenge—if we can call it that—is finding those absurd, almost miraculous moments of humanity that manage to slip through the cracks. These little, defiant bursts of connection, like tiny, stubborn flames refusing to be snuffed out by the gale-force winds of corporate indifference. Moments where someone—an agent, a rep, maybe just another person in line—actually sees you, not as a data point or a problem to fix, but as an actual human being. And for that brief flicker of time, the machinery pauses. You stop being just another customer, another cog in the machine. You become a person.