Today’s prevalent discourse regarding empathy is a perfect example of how the call center industry is routinely led astray regarding some of its most critical agent performance issues. The empathy narrative widely espoused by pundits, what I call The Empathy Myth, claims that Covid-19 has resulted in customers expressing more of their problems to agents. It is said that the solution is to prepare agents to offer empathic responses, for example, “I know this must be painful fo