The Customer Journey: Why Empathy Is Key to Success

**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 to the show. I'm Stephen Sakach and we have Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher with us again.
Today, we are going to dive into the customer journey. As I mentioned in the last show, the customer journey can be quite simple like, your car is on the side of the road and you need a tow right now, so you're going to pick up your phone and you're going to take care of it right then and there. Very short, simple start of the customer journey for that tow truck company acquiring you as a customer. Sometimes though, the customer journey is quite complex. I sat in a Google meeting where we discussed the 800 or so touch points in the process that it took you to buy that car. So 800 touch points along the customer journey for this bigger ticket purchase, which of course you may now be regretting because your car is getting towed, which is also part of the customer journey.
So if you're a small business owner or you're working in a small company, this may be new territory for you. If you have some marketing background, it's probably something you're pretty familiar with. But we're going to talk about some nuances you may not have heard before. In fact, if you listen in to the end today, because we're going to talk about this in a different way, you're going to hear something you probably never heard before. So the customer journey, it's really one of the more basic exercises that in empathy that companies go through. You're putting yourselves in the shoes of the customer, and before they even become a customer, and often well after, the customer journey is this simple exercise in emotional intelligence that most companies are trying to take on.
Ash, so in that regard, when you are taking on a new client, one of the first things you're trying to figure out are the customer personas you are working with. Right? Who are you trying to reach?

**Ash Maher** (2:21)
Absolutely. So, I mean, the customer avatar or the, as I said, customer persona is probably the most important part of the marketing journey. You start there by really understanding at the deepest level who your customer is. And traditionally, in traditional marketing, we went as deep as understanding what television shows these people watch, what books they're into, what are their biggest pain points, what are their goals and objectives.
And really, we would create characters out of these individuals. And once we have that persona, then we're able to create the whole journey of what does this individual go through from point A, or the awareness stages to say, to point Z, right? Which is the loyalty, how do we turn that person to a brand ambassador, right? But it all starts with that deep understanding of the customer. But when we talk about tradition, we really, I think we really cusp the surface of the customer persona. I know there's design thinking involved. And I really want to hear what Tullio has to say about how we can take this to another level.
Because I don't think anyone cares about magazines and when it comes to targeting your audiences and what they listen to. But understanding at a deeper level, what are their pain points? I think that's really telling there.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:27)
Yeah, and that's the key. There's the traditional way of doing it, which will help you understand how to have a transaction with the customer. And that's good. That'll probably get you some customers.
And then there's the creating the experience that makes the customer want to stay with you and continue to work with you because they feel like they belong to something.
I have to go back and give the example of like Steve Jobs, who's masterful in design thinking. When you think of the Mac, when it first came out, it wasn't nearly as good as the PC. In fact, I would say their say was probably subpar in terms of its capacity. But what did he do? He created this culture that if you're one of the cool kids or the creative kids, you use the Mac.
Even if you couldn't cut and paste easy, you had to do three different steps. Because you were part of this culture of the creative, you use the Mac. So he connected at a very emotional visceral level with individuals that wanted to be part of a creative community and succeeded at this to the point where you would buy a product that was subpar in terms of its technical capabilities to the PC because you wanted to be part of the creative community. Now, today, fast forward, it's the number one personal computer in the world. But when it first started, it was started based on the sense of community. And that's the whole point. Stage one, it really comes down to curiosity. There's five stages to design thinking. I like to think of it as seven. I add curiosity before the first stage, which is really to empathize. The second stage is defining the state that the user is in or the problem. Third is to ideate, which is where you challenge your assumption and you start creating some ideas or how to solve them. Fourth is prototyping. This is actually where you start to create a solution that you're going to test in the marketplace. And then five is testing your solutions out. I like to add an element of curiosity up front and then a stage seven, which is really continuous improvement. So in the curiosity stage is, how do I help someone see themselves as a customer or as a user?