Empathy Expansion Kit: Empathy at Scale - AI in Customer Experience Personalization

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
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** (0:16)
Hello and welcome back to the show. This short Empty Expansion Kit episode, we are talking AI, customer service, and personalizing the customer experience. Can you create empathy at scale this way? I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa. Hey, Tullio.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:37)
Good to be back. Let's do it again.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:40)
Yes, sir. So we've talked about this in depth previously in the Creating a Caring Machine episode a few months back, where we dive into the emotional customer journey. How AI can use an empathetic approach to help customer interactions.
We'll touch on that briefly here, but if you want like a deeper dive on that, check out that episode. We go into a lot of detail there. One of the great advantages of AI is its personalization and its ability to do that on scale. So you really need to understand your client base and whether AI will work for them or in a particular situation, whether AI is the right choice here, but there have been a lot of studies where customers are coming out more satisfied with their AI interaction than the customer support humans. So we're kind of losing the battle there, to the human touch is losing it to the machine. People are having better experiences a lot of times. So, yeah, don't push this off as being something that's not going to work. It's actually sometimes working better. Tullio, let's, how does AI enable empathy at scale? How can we do that?

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:08)
You know, you said something interesting, how AI sometimes can enable us to work even better. And the truth of the matter is I've seen it and it does. In fact, you can empathize your messaging, your approach to even how you structure your organization, how you go through change, leveraging AI, you can prompt it to help you do it effectively. And it would do it the way a masterful design technique practitioner might do it or even better, right? So, you know, how can AI enable empathy at scale? So that's the question. And so there's a few things that AI can enable. One is the data-driven insights. You know, I think back of the old village where everybody lived in a small village and everybody knew each other. And how did you learn things about your neighbor? And how did the shopkeeper learn about what neighbors wanted? It was through the gossip stream. You know, the gossip stream, these data bits of information that was shared amongst everyone. Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that? That's the equivalent of data, right? What's going on in customers' minds and what are they spending their time on? What are they focusing on? All right, so analyzing this data, AI can analyze it faster, more efficiently, and help understand preferences, predict needs and personalize interactions in near real time, if not real time. So that's a key thing of AI. We've had access to data, analyzing and synthesizing that data took time, even with a lot of advancements in analytics and computing power. But AI just brings it to the next level because it can permutate thousands of the scenarios, where you would need thousands of people, analysts to do that. So that solves that. Now, also, it can automate personalization, right? So AI can automate personalize recommendation, content, communication. And this makes customers feel value, right? Because they've, all of us want to be understood. And immediately it creates a sense of comfort and trust. And you can just relax because it's like they get me, they understand me. So you can do that at scale, right? This whole idea of one-to-one marketing that Peppers and Rogers used to talk about in the 80s, it's come to real life today. It is actually happening. It's doable and AI makes that possible. And then there's companies that do this well. Companies like Amazon, for example, where they personalize your shopping experience.
They even use AI and streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, so that you can deliver highly personalized streaming experiences that resonate with customers and individual. And in fact, sometimes the worst thing that you can feel is like, I don't know what to watch on TV, right?
All of us have had that experience. And I remember the days used to click through channels, right? Or used to use a remote, or you have to look at a guy to see what's coming up. And it took, you'd spend more time trying to find what to watch than you actually been watching it. So now with AI, it's so intuitive, so much faster depending on what you'll watch and what you like, it starts to make recommendations. So you're viewing experiences faster. You don't spend hours trying to plan what to watch, you actually can just enjoy yourself. So there's definitely a personalization. Now, the challenges with using AI to empathize with your customers, it really comes down to the culture of the business. We've talked a lot about what is your purpose as a business, because that's going to dictate even how you use AI. If your purpose is to only generate shareholder value at whatever cost it takes, we've had numerous discussions or even scandals that have happened of how that can go very badly and how it could go very wrong, right? So AI would just automate a lot of that, where it could go very badly and very wrong a lot faster. So empathy plays a big role in how you interact with the individual. So maintaining authenticity is key. So without it, you can create a very impersonalized robotic experience, which would undermine genuine empathy, because then the people start to feel like they're just being pushed something. Even if it's something that you might need, the way it's being pushed feels very clinical and transactional. So it would steal from the experience of that genuine relationship. So it's key to make sure that empathy is constantly infused in these AI initiatives with purpose and intention and the customer's interest to put first. And it'll produce the results it needs to produce. But without that, if you just focus on, how can I tweak this to generate more sales? You might end up causing a problem that will backfire.