Empathy Expansion Kit: Scaling Personal Touch in a Growing Business

**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're talking about scaling personal touch in a growing business. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa. Hey, Tullio.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:33)
Good to be back. One more week to have some fun with this.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:36)
Yes, sir. All right. One of the challenges of scaling is losing your culture in the process. Sometimes you get stretched too thin, sometimes things are just going fast, you don't have time to be thoughtful. But maybe you've thrived when things were small and you've had this ability to connect with customers on a deeper level. Now you're adding more store locations. Maybe your e-commerce store is cranking out orders at high speed and those interactions aren't what they used to be. This is where we talk about our Bliss concept, Build Love Into Scalable Systems. That we specifically mentioned, scalable is very important to this because otherwise if you just build into a system and then when you start to scale, that system fails and crashes, then that love you built there is fleeting and we want something that works as your business grows. So Tullio, let's talk about some of the challenges of maintaining personal touch at scale.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:42)
Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head. Scaling is very challenging and it requires a lot of planning and a lot of good leadership to experience plays a big role. But for example, increasing a customer base.
Larger customer base can make it difficult to maintain one-on-one interaction and personalized service. So you grow your business, you grow revenue, but you might lose touch with some customers.
If that was the key thing that generated the business, then you could essentially lose touch with what actually helped you gain momentum. So that's challenging. So diluted interaction is part of this. With more customer, it becomes harder to provide them same depth of interactions that they've come to expect. So scaling that is challenging. There's also a loss of intimacy that happens that comes with that. The close personal relationship that were possible with a smaller customer base can become strained and as the business scales, that can lead to interactions that feel less personal and more transactions. Like I just need to get back to you, finish this transaction, move on to the next one. I've actually seen that. I've seen executives pull back when they lost relationship, for example, with the founders or the executives of a company. Because as you scale, also who you interact with changes too, so that impacts the relationship as well. Then response time, that's probably the biggest challenge. Scaling up often leads to delays in response time, and that could be frustrating for customers, and make them feel undervalued, which is the danger zone in terms of maintaining the relationship. There's also operational complexity that comes with scaling, like for example, sometimes in order to scale more efficiently, we try to put more processes in place, but those processes could lead to more rigidity, which compromises your need to be flexible, and the ability to deliver personalized services. It's like more process, so you could scale, but that also means less flexibility, that you can serve your clients better. So balancing that is tough. And consistency across teams, that's probably the most challenging. With scaling comes more hiring, speed and veracity of hiring, the ability to get everyone up to speed on how we do things, that's challenging, ensuring that all the employees, regardless of location and department, maintain the same level of empathy and personal touch can be very difficult. Those are some of the key challenges that businesses face when they're scaling the business.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:32)
So let's talk some strategies here to overcome this.
So one of the things that you need to do really is you have to empower employees so that they can make decisions. Maybe you were handling these decisions, now you got a bunch of employees now, you've got to be able to give them the power to make those decisions and they don't have to run something with the ladder constantly which can be frustrating. In order to do that, you got to provide some clear boundaries for them. So here's an example that always comes to mind. Ritz Carlton, for example, they give their employees like a set budget. I think it's $2,000 and they can solve a customer problem, whatever it is on the spot with this amount of budget. So allows them to still maintain that exceptional service without needing, like I said, to go run it up the ladder to a manager or something. It's like, okay, I'm going to be able to solve this problem. I can do it this way, this way, or this way. Gives them a lot of freedom, and you've got that boundary of that budget there. So another example here is Chewy, and this is an interesting one because it's like a e-commerce scenario. Maybe you've got someone typing in an order, maybe you've got them calling in, placing an order with Chewy and talking about something. What they've done is they've allowed their employees to have some autonomy to go above and beyond. So if they hear about someone who's lost a pet, and they're canceling their service to Chewy, they're now allowed to send them a handwritten note or send them flowers. It goes above and beyond, and it helps build that very personal human-to-human connection. It's something that, just giving them a little instruction, hey, you can do this to connect with this person in this very difficult time. That's a huge way to provide some freedom and also a little bit of boundary that they can work within to build that same personal human connection at scale. So, Tullio, what else can we do to help with that person in touch and scale?