Empathy in Action: Tactics to Implementing the Four Stages of the Caring 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** (0:18)
Hello and welcome back to the show. We're following up on our podcast of whether a business can create a carrying machine, particularly through the use of AI.
What does that look like and why would you do it?
As part of that, there was this emotional customer journey process, and that's what we're diving into today. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher.
So let's recap real quick that four-stage newly proposed customer journey that's based on emotions. So you've got this first stage of this customer journey, that is emotion recognition. So identifying the customer's emotional situation accurately. How can you do that? We talked about that in the last show and how the difficulties might be with AI and things like that. So you got this first stage of emotion recognition, then it jumps to emotion understanding. So you express empathetic understanding of the customer's emotion.
Then you go into the next stage, which is emotion management. You win the customer's heart by providing helpful recommendations. And then lastly, you have this emotional connection stage. Establish an emotional connection with the customer. This is when your customer ride and die with you. If you're able to win them over really well, they'll be a customer for life and you see the lifetime value really come to play in this last stage. So guys, let's dive into this emotion recognition stage. So if you know your business, this might be a stage where you get to know your business a little better. What are the pain points, the emotions around those pain points? Tullio, what's this look like on the ground? What can we do to kind of pull this out and apply it to our business in these later stages?

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:12)
Yeah, this is actually like in design thinking principles, this is the very first stage. It's the empathize stage, right?
I like to think of it first as curiosity and then as empathizing. So it's really how do you go about identifying the emotional state, not just the transactional need of a customer, but the experience, the desire for something that they want to feel. How do you go doing that? So there's a few things today that make this a little easier. In the past, you had to go and interview a lot of people and talk with them and create a whole community of potential customers or users and continuously learn from them. And that is still highly encouraged. I would encourage doing that. But there's some tools now that can help this tremendously. For example, there's AI chatbots that also do sentiment analysis at the same time. So it's not going beyond just kind of fielding the call, so to speak, but actually analyzing using natural language processing to detect things like frustration, anger, or even the happiness level of a customer's message, right?
How fast they type, you know, did they type accurately or is it kind of gibberish? That can tell a lot about the state of mind of someone.
And then there's also that's using chatbots. Then if someone's calling a customer service center, there's voice recognition software that can also detect changes in tone, in pitch, in the speed of the call. And again, that can indicate emotional distress or satisfaction. And then finally, for like online scenarios, you can use facial recognition, where you have visual interaction, possibly on a video call, for example, right? You can use facial recognition to identify emotions such as facial expression. This technology can actually even be used in a brick and mortar scenario, where someone, for example, is on a line and it could be camera set up where it does the analysis and can provide a pop up to the end user saying this particular customer is angry or this particular customer is happy. There's a lot of technology that can do that. But the end goal here is to really identify who to serve better and faster. So an example would be an AI chat back on a retail website, for example, depending on the customer level frustration, it might immediately escalate it to go talk to a human being.
There's nothing more frustrating when you need help and you know it's going to be a live agent that can help you.
And you sort of feel like you're in the menu's jail, so to speak, and you just get even more frustrated because you just want to speak to someone. You know you need to speak to someone. So those kinds of technology in action, what do you do with it? You can escalate a call, you can have someone react to it faster, perhaps a supervisor or manager could deal with a circumstance that would require that immediate attention. But the goal is to use the emotional state understanding of the customer and then take action on it in a way that serves them better.