Personally, I find this attitude pretty derivative. Why should a worker feel empathy for a customer if that empathy doesn't have any meaningful impact on them?

Personally, I find this attitude pretty derivative. Why should a worker feel empathy for a customer if that empathy doesn't have any meaningful impact on them? It's a good thing to say to a founder of a company, such as the owner of a small business. It's a pretty useless thing to say to an overworked support staff... Answering more calls or putting out more fires very rarely benefits that role. Hell, I've seen support staff get told attempting to help a customer too long is a negative, and they're doing a bad job. Even in the best cases, I've often seen drive met with a management that just makes that effort the new baseline... "Great job, guys! Our ticket wait time is down 30% , now let's keep it there!" So sure - have empathy for your customers. Don't have it blindly at bad jobs.