Creating the Caring Machine: The Four Stage Journey

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show.
Can businesses build a caring machine? What does that even look like and why would you do it? I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with Tullio Siragusa, and Ash Maher. How are you guys doing today? Good?

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:34)
I love that smear in the mood.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:37)
There was this research paper that came out in the American Marketing Association, titled The Caring Machine, Feeling AI for Customer Care.
Basically, can we create an AI caring machine for customer service is basically what this is about. Part of the paper proposed a new customer journey model based around emotions. And that's what I want to get into today. I know it's not politics or Hollywood celebrity stuff. We're certainly not that podcast. But if you want to dive in the future of business consciousness and where it's going, if you want to build an authentic business and understand how you're going to be challenged in the age of AI, we've got you covered.
So today, we want to break down these four stages of this new customer journey model.
So this is basically this paper is coming off the premise that establishing an emotional connection with your customers will increase sales and improve customer lifetime value. This is something that we preach nonstop. And, you know, this is what our AI CMO is all about is building that emotional connection. And if you haven't stopped over, go to aicmo.io, get on the wait list. We're getting really close to our release of that.
But that is a tool that's going to help you make this emotional connection because it's super powerful. So something we're deeply focused on. Now this paper, it proposes a new four stage customer journey model. It's a super empathetic model. And the paper is really about where AI can come in with like chat bots and stuff like that. So it's coming from that angle quite a bit. But they surveyed more than 300 CMOs and chief customer officers. So this is a very in-depth sort of survey going on here. So we're going to dive into this and hopefully make this a little more exciting than, you know, putting together some IKEA furniture or something for you. So we've got some fun ways to illustrate the various stages. So real quick, here's the four stages. And then, guys, I'm going to get your reaction, I think, up. We'll dive into each one of these. So the four stages are emotion recognition, emotion understanding, emotion management, emotional connection. This is the four stages of this new customer journey. So let's dive into this first one, emotion recognition stage. So if I was to show you a meme that would illustrate this picture, the one with the boyfriend and his girlfriend and the other girl walks by, and he looks back, you know, he's just reckoned that his catches his eye. He zeroed in on something, some emotional response happened there.
This first stage is really about identifying that emotion that the customer may be having in there. So where it's coming from a lot of times is like a chat bot or something. So if you're chatting, have you, I know both of you, you've been through some customer service nightmares, probably where you're just angry, right? Then you're coming in there.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:50)
Yes, that's when you activate the Caring Machine.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:54)
Yeah, the switch in Tullio's head that turns into Caring. So it's like AI is they're talking about, can it recognize this?
And so, yeah, give an example of where you guys maybe have been a little themed coming in, you're coming in hot, something just messed up.

**Ash Maher** (4:14)
Yeah, I was going to just jump in real quick. For me, I recently just had an issue with an airline, and we're trying to get our flight canceled so we can get the money back into our accounts. And I had to deal with an AI, so I came in hot.
At one point, I'm like, wait, am I talking to a human or a robot right now? Tell me, I demand to know who I'm talking to. So I had my moment, and I think I was talking to an AI, but I knew how to soothe me and give me where I needed to go.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:40)
So this is, yeah, like kind of a perfect example almost about that.
It's understanding, okay, it's got to be able to understand your emotional stage that you're coming in at. It's got to recognize what those issues are. And one of the challenges they said is that maybe people might not be truthful sometimes in what the emotion is. You know, they might say, how are you feeling? They may give some other answer. And so the accuracy of AI would be kind of compromised if it's going purely based on the single point of, you know, recognition. Like, how are you doing? Oh, I'm fine. I'm fine.