While organizations and researchers have traditionally conceptualized customers as consumers of their services and products, there is a growing recognition that organizations need to develop more collaborative relationships with clients. In this research, I explore one implication of this shift- how employees respond to client conflicts. In a multi-method qualitative study, I studied patient advocates, hospital employees who mediate conflicts between patients, family and staff. I develop a process model that shows how mediators construct a web of discrete social interactions that, over time, enables them to develop an empathetic account of the conflict, and then selectively deploy it to engage in sensegiving. The process model integrates research on emotions and sensemaking in novel ways. I identified how emotion work triggers emotion dynamics in interactions that facilitate or disrupt sensemaking and sensegiving. I show how plausible accounts are developed over the course of social interactions and that mediators pivoted from sensemaking to sensegiving when the account was characterized by empathy. Overall, this research shows how mediators actively generate, interpret and influence their own and others' emotions, and that mediators' emotion work contributes to the success of collective sensemaking.