Empathy Expansion Kit: Empathy at Every Touchpoint of the Customer 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. In this short Empathy Expansion Kit episode, we are discussing the importance of empathy at every touchpoint in the customer journey. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio siragusa. Hey, Tullio.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:32)
Hey, everybody. Hey, Stephen. Good to be back.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:36)
So if you want to deeper dive into this topic, check out our podcasts on the Four Stage Journey. This redefines customer journey with a new emotional connection model. We covered that about a month ago. Also in February, we covered the traditional customer journey model there and why empathy is important. Both of those go into very specific detail and in an in-depth manner. So this is going to be again a short 10-minute run through here. Tullio, I always see the customer journey as one area where marketers are really forced to think empathetically. Why is that the case?

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:19)
Well, you really can't fully understand the customer needs and pain points unless you are empathetic in your approach to understanding. So in the customer journey, it really is about understanding and addressing the customer needs. But it's not just their transactional needs. It's tied to their desire and also the pain points that you might be trying to solve, right? So empathy enables marketers to kind of put themselves, not only in the shoes of the customer, but also think of themselves as the customer. So how do I want to experience this? What is it that I need? Not just transactionally, but experientially. And then you can design experiences that resonate at a much deeper level, you know, at an emotional level. For example, you know, by empathizing with the frustration of a complex checkout process, a marketer can design a purchasing experience that can lead to a higher conversion rate, you know.
So it's just putting ourselves in the customer shoes and also understanding the desire behind something, not just the transactional requirement. I always equate it to this. It's like, what is the real fulfillment that the customer wants to get out of this, right? Is it if they're buying a suit, for example, is it just to buy a suit? Or is it that they want to show up looking super professional at an interview? Or they have an event that they're going to and they want to look really polished, they want to feel great about themselves. The suit is just the transaction, but the experience that they're looking for is more an emotional, something that they want that's a personal fulfillment tied to either go into a wedding, or an event, or an interview, or whatever it is, that will make them feel great about themselves wearing that suit.
As a marketer, if you understand the real need, the desire of the buyer, you can align how you position that suit to them. Not as just a transaction, I need a suit because I'm going to a wedding. It's more like you're going to look like a million bucks at this wedding. There's different approaches that empathetically understands the desire behind why someone wants something, not just the product or the service itself. That's a vehicle to get to fulfilling a desire. Empathetic marketing is really about going deeper and understanding the desire behind something.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:05)
The more we understand about the customer and what's going on in their lives, what's going on in their heads, that's a competitive advantage because I can now be more relevant. I can now talk about that wedding suit or that business interview suit in some way, and this is a little different customer journey than just come by a suit. Now, I can really address some of the emotions going on there, actually get them imagery and stuff like that in that whole process. You can put that just a line with whatever they're going through. It's this process of relevance. Quickly on that discovery awareness stage, we're using a lot of data to really zero in on the audience. So, not just demographics, but psychographics. If I'm running a Google campaign or something and I'm on a keyword for suits, I may also find out there are these other things going on, like these life moments. Google will actually give me data back on, hey, this person is 10 times more likely to own a lexus, five times more likely to be an avid news reader, or 15 times more likely to be in family activities, whatever the case is going on. I can learn a lot from that and find out, okay, the people that are really buying this suit right now, these are the ones who are 20 times more likely to be going through a business interview or something, some process or looking for a new job.