Editor's note: Tanya Krim is the founder and principal of TKInsights LLC, a Teaneck, N.J., research firm.

I’m in my fun forties so I’ve been around a while. But in all my 40-something years, I have never seen a movie at 10:30 on a Wednesday morning. I don’t “do” movies in the day as I am usually busy working on a research project or running someplace for work or on an errand related to the well-being of my teens. Movies, for me, are associated with a relaxing evening, an entertaining treat that comes at the end of a frenetic day or during a weekend.

But one Wednesday last summer, my friend Rachel, who has been subjected to eight surgeries in the past 18 months because of breast cancer and complications resulting from it, expressed the desire to go see a movie at 10:30 a.m.

Rachel has suffered so much in the past year and a half, specifically in the four weeks when the MRSA infection in her left breast’s saline implant necessitated its removal at least for the foreseeable future. It might be “just” months of walking around lopsided but it might be longer than that. If the surgeon can’t fix it, Rachel is contemplating having to also remove the saline implant on the other side so that she doesn’t look imbalanced.

The excruciating details of her ordeal left her depressed and in need of a kind ear. Given the fact that I have unfortunately honed my auditory and empathic skills with other breast cancer-inflicted friends and also interviewed many breast cancer survivors in my role as a qualitative researcher, I have been there for her, checking in daily several times when the going gets especially tough.

My close contact with her meant that, when she texted me to ask me to join her at the 10:30 a.m. movie, I felt compelled to put my life and work responsibilities on hold and march into the AMC theater near us with her.
It meant that I only sneaked a peek at my e-mails on my cellphone once or twice over what became an unexpectedly five-hour morning-early afternoon experience.

As I looked around the theater to see who else was attending this morning movie, I saw some single women of a certain age and some senior citizens. I started manufacturing stories to myself about why this individual was here at this time of day alone versus the other.

And then I stopped myself. Twenty-four years as a qualitative researcher has taught me that most people are onions, comprised of multiple layers, and it is only once you take the time to converse with them that you learn what is going on beneath these layers.

This layer concept was, of course, top-of-mind for me on a literal level with Rachel because of her conversations with me about her butchered chest. She had expressed her concern about wearing layers of clothing to conceal the fact that she was currently sporting only one saline implant. Her other side was flat.

The highly enjoyable movie was a cute, lighthearted piece of messaging about girl power and, fortunately, did not contain any potentially emotive cancer/disease references, although one of the movies featured in the previews touched on something like this – which Rachel noted with a dark comment. I instantly prayed that our movie would be upbeat and happy.

The power of retail therapy

After the movie, I was glad when she suggested doing a little shopping before her 3 p.m. meeting with the plastic surgeon. To me, this indicated that her depression was lifting – at least temporarily. She also started talking about the power of retail therapy, which reinforced my impression that she was having a “decent” day.

We ambled into Macy’s shoe department as she had confessed to having a thing for shoes and announced that she would love to look around there. My instant hunch was that shoes felt like “safe” products to shop for as her feet were unscathed by her breast cancer experience. I relished the prospect of her being able to feel whole and normal during her hunt for a pair of shoes. I realized that she would not have to be anxious about whether they would look OK on her feet – she had made reference to me the previous week about how difficult it now was for her to shop for tops because she did not look “normal.”

Once she had circled the shoe department, assessed what was currently en vogue and not fallen in love with any particular pair, I cautiously inquired whether she might like to rummage around in the clothing department.

The inquiry was cautious, I realized, because I was wearing my friend hat as well as that of a perceptive qualitative researcher with years of experience conducting in-store ethnographic studies with consumers. Time had taught me that it is always essential to listen, to wait for revealing cues about when to probe about something and when to wait for the respondent to volunteer the information at their own pace.

Rachel responded to the question affirmatively and enthusiastically and we headed to the clothing department. Shirts, she said, were what she wanted, as she thought that if she had some new ones, she would feel happier, fresher and less focused on her condition. A new item or two might help her begin to heal from the loss of her left saline implant and the resultant overwhelming self-consciousness.

I walked behind her gingerly, watching her every move, silent. In spite of the fact that I had branded this day “morning movie, out of the office, friendship hat day,” the ethnographic researcher in me appeared to be out in full force – although, at this point, I was in denial of it.

I watched as she fingered certain items of clothing, observing her facial gestures and color/style preferences while feigning interest in clothing for myself nearby. I listened for remarks about the merchandise she was touching and soon began to understand which features she was looking for in a shirt given her current absent left-breast implant.

She didn’t want clingy styles or material. She didn’t like horizontal stripes as these were too fattening. She didn’t want a short shirt that would end too midriff as this might potentially reveal too much of the breast area she was trying to conceal. She wanted a loose, peasant-style kind of thing or a longer, looser cardigan-like number under which she could place a tank. She gravitated to bold colors – pinks, turquoises and royal blues rather than oranges and yellows which did not suit her skin tone; whites and creams were also acceptable. Buttons worked if they came up high enough. Too wide a shirt/top was unacceptable as it felt sexless; then again, too narrow was problematic as it was likely to trigger greater self-consciousness.

As I saw the items to which she was gravitated, I pulled out a few which I thought might appeal to her. I softly asked “How about this?” and either handed it to her to add to her try-on pile or quickly placed it back in its home.

Rachel’s mood lifted as she strolled among the different brand sections in the store. Her tonality changed; there was more bounce in it and this was matched by a sprightlier, more dance-y spring in her step. She appeared to be suspending – at least temporarily – the traumatized breast cancer victim emotions and entering into the more pleasurable shopping zone “regular woman” field of emotions. She was snatching back some moments of joy, seizing some primal female retail happy moments, emerging from the oceans of tears and weeks of black despair into a sunnier landscape with azure seas, bright lights and happy sounds.

After about 30 minutes of immersion in the clothing department, leaving no shirt unturned, she entered a fitting room with about eight shirts. I allowed her her privacy and took a pew in the waiting area rather than doing what we women do so often when shopping with each other – talking through the fitting room cubicles about how the clothing looks, joking about how an item accentuates a certain body part, identifying the items which are cute/sexy/working and would match this pair of pants/skirt as appropriate.

I knew that this female consumer needed to be left in the fitting room to confront her reality alone. Her shopping experience at this point could not be comparable to those of most other women in the fitting rooms as she probably could not avoid looking at her scarred chest and/or was just choosing to close her eyes when putting on her shirt. How awful to feel overwhelmed by one’s blemishes and to have the need to look away from one’s own body.

A lesson for me

I recognized that this retail experience was therapy for her and a lesson for me in empathy as I needed to be warm and caring, yet respect her feelings and her choices by not asking too many questions about what she wanted or rejected. I didn’t need to probe and dissect. This was not the shopping trip where Woman 1 says to Woman 2 “Try it on for me again and I’ll tell you what I think.” No. This trip called for sensitivity and tact. I sat there, wondering how she would emerge from the fitting room. Would she feel the joy of having found an attractive item and/or would the reflection she had seen in the mirror cause her mood to take a dive? Would the lighthearted movie morning now move into a darker space?

Of course I was hoping that she would find something that fit well and made her smile but I did not know for certain if this would be the case. She finally emerged from the fitting room with two white shirts – one for her and one for her 20-year-old daughter who had been incredibly supportive to her over the past 18 months and especially over the past torturous month. Her face communicated a blend of sadness, frustration and resignation rather than the satisfaction of having unearthed an exciting and desirable item of clothing.

How I wished that Harry Potter or Hermione Granger had been around to ensure that she could have left that fitting room with an armful of shirts which would have elicited a huge, bright smile and retail satisfaction glow.

We spent a little more time shopping and then did Starbucks – much the same as I surmised many other female friendship pairs in the mall were doing.

Multiple thoughts

We sat for a while and then headed back to the parking lot. As I was walking around the mall with her, multiple thoughts crowded into my brain: Were there other female friendship pairs in the mall in the same boat – one trying to perk up the other? Did our mall companions see that a heroine was walking next to me? Did they see that Rachel – mom, daughter, sister, friend – was trying to have a “regular” day and triumph in spite of her situation? In spite of the trauma of walking around feeling ugly and defective? Did they wonder, the way I did, how she (and millions of other women) could be courageous enough to go shopping the same way as the other women who have two of their own breasts?

Did any of the sales assistants or other shoppers realize what issues Rachel now had to deal with going shopping? Could they begin to understand that the merchandise on display might be assessed by her with a different set of eyes and needs? Did they guess that this woman felt deformed and was looking for some pretty shirts/tops which might restore some much-needed self-esteem?

Did anyone offer her some real help while she was shopping? Not that I saw. And if they had, would they have been trained to imagine that a woman shopping in their department might be looking for a line of “restore-my-self-esteem-and-image shirts”? I was pretty sure that I had not seen any signage for a department carrying those shirts.

I dropped Rachel off at her home in time for her to prepare herself for her next plastic surgeon visit to assess how the implant-free left breast was draining the fluid from her most recent infection.

My takeaways from my mid-morning moviegoing, non-office day were that:

  • I had done a full and satisfying day’s work. The mid-morning movie had been a vehicle which provided a wonderful window into another person’s courage in the face of a harsh reality. It was just as busy and exhausting a day as if I had been in the office. And I had, unexpectedly, collected some rich insights about customer service in the process.
  • The feel-good payment received from having another suffering human being want to spend time and share their emotions with you is far more valuable than any paycheck.  Maybe corporations should institute a flexible “Do a Good Deed Day.” Employees could choose the day on which to volunteer and could select the deed that speaks most to their heart. It might visiting an old person in a care facility, taking a sick friend to a movie, cleaning up a local park or rebuilding a home destroyed in a tornado. The possibilities are endless.
  • There is a huge opportunity for retailers to truly take empathic customer service to the next level. All salespeople need to be trained to use their heart as well as their eyes when approaching customers. Currently, most of them don’t.

Having a sales assistant reach out and “handle” Rachel’s “situation” in a humane, warm fashion would have gone a long way to making the store trip memorable in a positive way regardless of whether a purchase was made or not.

Sales assistant training across the board but perhaps especially in clothing departments should emphasize that: the in-going assumption should be that every customer has a story to tell; many customers are burdened by a harsh reality which impacts their shopping behavior – even if this might not be apparent immediately; the goal should be to dial up the empathy quotient and connect in a humane way which enables a big secret-keeper such as Rachel to share her secret so that she leaves the store as an extremely satisfied customer either with merchandise or without.

  • It is time for senior management to think outside the box and maybe step away from their offices and laptops and walk around other locales to observe and experience some of their key target audience segments’ realities.

The first stop for clothing retailers’ senior management might be doctors’ offices – oncologists, plastic surgeons or hospitals dealing with breast cancer patients/survivors or psychologists’ offices. It is here that the stark truths and shades of the human experience landscape are powerfully visible. Once seen, the brutal reality and raw emotion is never forgotten.

And it is this deeply emotive human condition/truth which needs to be communicated from the top down in our corporations. Sales assistants everywhere (but I am focusing on clothing retailers because of my day with Rachel) need to be fully armed with this information and have to value and want to deliver on superior caring, empathic customer service. Because a lot of their customers are paddling like mad to stay afloat.

One kind word, one warm smile, one genuine offer to walk around and help them find some items means the world to them. It makes them feel valued first and foremost as a human being.

And, yes, from a business perspective, it might also well mean repeat business.

  • Customers are more likely to return to the store and repurchase if they have received higher-level, high-touch customer service. If the customer has had a deeply emotionally satisfying interaction with a sales assistant, she is more likely to return to the store even if the prior trip did not end with a purchase because the store is now associated with warmth, friendliness and sincerity.
  • Last but not least, there is an opportunity to create a new product line of attractive shirts/tops which target women suffering from breast cancer-related issues.