The Chat with Ellza Malok Pt4 - The Human Touch in Business: Balancing Technology and Empathy

Episode Overview

In this episode, Ellza Malok shares her unique perspective on the intersection of technology, psychology, and business leadership. She explores how companies can leverage AI and automation while maintaining human connection and why empathy remains a competitive advantage in today’s digital landscape.

From her experiences growing up in Kosovo to her career in data science and marketing, Ellza’s journey offers deep insights into how businesses can build more meaningful, people-first experiences.

Key Takeaways

1. The Power of Human-Centered Leadership

• Businesses should prioritize people, not just profits.
• Quote: “We are a company that makes money, but we are also responsible for the 3,000 people that we employ and their livelihood.” – Ellza Malok
• Leadership is about fostering teams, supporting employees, and driving meaningful impact, not just hitting financial goals.

2. Why AI Can’t Replace Human Connection

• AI is a powerful enabler but should support human creativity, not replace it.
• Over-reliance on automation leads to generic and uninspired customer experiences.
• Businesses must invest in human engagement– especially in customer service and sales interactions.
• Example: Live chat is most effective early in research and at the final decision phase – both requiring human touch.

3. B2B Must Learn from B2C

• B2C brands have mastered frictionless experiences (e.g., Amazon, Netflix).
• B2B companies are still slow to adapt and often force customers through unnecessary hurdles.
• The future of B2B buying should feel as seamless as an e-commerce checkout.

4. Balancing Automation & Empathy

• AI should be a tool for enhancement, not a shortcut to remove humans.
• Example: CGI in movies – when overused without human artistry, the quality drops.
• The best businesses use AI strategically while ensuring a genuine human experience.

Final Thoughts

✅ Technology should amplify human creativity, not replace it.
✅ Customer experience is the real differentiator in business success.
✅ Empathy, psychology, and leadership drive long-term impact.

00:00- Terry Wilson: 

Getting that feedback from the customers that say no and understanding again, it’s the, it’s, that’s where the gold is. It’s in the transactions that don’t complete or that don’t progress is where you can really find out what the obstacles were, what the needs are that aren’t being met and make them look at your backgrounds, being shaped by a very wide range of unique experiences from growing up in Kosovo to deep dive in fascination in psychology.

00:25- Terry Wilson: 

How these personal experiences influence the way that you lead your team and approach client relationships today.

00:33- Ellza Malok:

So I grew up in what is now called, was formerly called Yugoslavia. And I grew up in a very weird time in Yugoslavia where it was their last, Couple of years of being in existence honestly, I saw something that as an adult, I continue to learn from I saw, you know, 6 or 7 ethnicities that seemingly. We’re very close to each other at the beginning of my childhood and was intermarried with each other, celebrated their holidays, celebrated their traditions into, a full on genocide across two different cities. And it’s, it always baffled me around how does that happen in a span of two years? Which is very short to go from, praising celebrities for kind of crossing ethnic lines and in terms of family creation and partnerships to deeming another party and I recognize that this is getting to be a very morbid topic, but it was just so interesting to me. Because I, I remember the way my mom talked and my mom still talks about Yugoslavia being like a very safe place to live and nobody really bothered you and ethnicities just got along with each other. And that was a thing. There are problems to go to the, one of the most extreme levels that you can go into. And I think that perception Was the key element around it. I did not start BMG because I was so in down with perception that I wanted to really research it. I did it because I worked for incentive agency. And I said we want to understand how we incentivize people, we should learn about their psychology.

02:12- Ellza Malok: 

And then they’re like, cool, but we’re not going to fund it. So I went and did it myself. It wasn’t really until a few years later that I realized, oh, thats why that happened. Or I can see these elements start to piece together. And then as I grew up stateside, I went into data science and my early period, because. I’m an immigrant kid and that’s what you do. You go into a science and math field because starting starving artists aren’t cool. As my mom

02:41- Ellza Malok: 

like to say

02:42- Ellza Malok:

heh heh heh pivoted Then I pivoted back into my

02:43- Ellza Malok: 

creative .

02:44- Ellza Malok: 

side. Because that’s who I’ve always been. I definitely don’t come from a. Math and science were always easy, but they weren’t necessarily interesting growing up. There were just things that I knew how to do. Now I get to do things that are very interesting and go back to the elements that I found very important, which is empathetic drives and empathy, like leading from a very humanistic mindset. Because I think that, companies and organizations can make as much money as they want, but what’s really important to me. And I had a, Old CMO that I reported to who, who phrased it so well. And I still quote her we are a company that makes money, but we are also responsible for the 3000 people that we employ and their livelihood. And I take that with a very serious grain of salt, even when I help with my clients. And that’s the way that I approach it is I am not just helping them make money. I’m helping them, foster their team and drive a certain growth or launch a new drug that could help. Millions of people and some of those elements.

03:44- Ellza Malok: 

So going back to the purpose of why we do things. And my I, if you ask my mom what I do, she probably wouldn’t, she probably wouldn’t be able to tell you transparently. But it’s it’s still a lot of fun to be able to be in this space and go back to the kind of human elements that, that I grew up on and fostering that the things that I just believe in.

04:04- Ellza Malok: 

And that’s. I think most people are honest and kind and so on, and they just maybe have a rough way of showing it. And that’s my motto.

04:13- Terry Wilson: 

It’s interesting. I think that’s one of the reasons why we’ve got on so well over the years. And it’s not that, you just, when you spoke about that, it takes a village, it takes a village. And when you’re in an organization, too often I see people that are sure you have to be focused on the profitability and ensuring that a business is sustainable and that it’s growing, but you can’t lose sight of the fact that you’re also responsible.

04:37- Terry Wilson: 

those individuals that work for you. It’s putting food on the family on the table. It’s feeding their family. It’s educating their kids. It’s educating their further. It’s supporting so many people beyond the individual that you speak to. They’ve got their greater responsibilities as well. And I think that, that If you have that as an underlying value set or awareness that coupled with your natural curiosity, I think is something that just absolutely, it’s screams then, this whole component of psychology because that, that for you, probably the great unknown.

05:09- Terry Wilson: 

We talk about space and we’ve only explored 5 percent of the world’s oceans. I think there’s less than 0. 5 percent that we know really truly about the human brain, human psychology. So thanks. Thanks for sharing that. Appreciate it. And not morbid reality. People don’t necessarily realize that, everyone’s got a story and on where they come from.

05:28- Terry Wilson: 

So I really appreciate you sharing that with us here today.

05:33- Ellza Malok: 

Yeah, thank you. It’s a story that transparently had you asked me five, six years ago, I probably wouldn’t be able to share. It’s only the last couple of years that I it’s, it, I realized how important it is and a friend of mine who’s in early childhood development really showed me like just how much impact those first few, 10 years of your life. really make an impact on you.

05:55- Terry Wilson: 

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I can’t imagine what it’d be like to be in that environment. My grandparents actually met in a concentration camp. And my mother was born in a concentration camp in Germany and came to Australia when she was three years old with the family. So there’s aspects I think that affect us all.

06:14- Terry Wilson: 

Sometimes it’s in the genetics and from the stories that you hear in your childhood as you’re growing up as not as much as the individual, experience, but there’s a level of awareness there, that’s for sure. So again, thanks for sharing that. I appreciate it. Jumping topics slightly. With the raise?

06:33- Terry Wilson: 

Not exactly ’cause it’s still talking about the human side, I think. But with the rise of AI and automation in marketing, how can brands ensure they still maintain a human touch, in their campaigns and the results that they’re delivering?

06:45- Ellza Malok: 

I have been actually seeing a really surprising number and I’ll use commercials because that’s my main factor of let me see how things are going. Just some really unique ways to spin this through. And I think that AI like all technology is a great enabler. And in many instances, especially in smaller organizations, it’s also a little bit of an equalizer. You can do things that you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to, because they would have been too costly, too hard to do and so on. And the way that I think about it is. The more human touch you can create, the better, how you ingrain that comes at every stage of a campaign or a program creation it’s. Who’s generating the idea? Is it is it, who is the deciding factor? What is the criteria? What are those elements? I’ll use it to the equivalent of CGI because this is a good way of how It should not be done. I was watching pirates of the Caribbean. I’m like, Oh my God, this was like amazing.

07:43- Ellza Malok: 

And that was, 16 years ago or some really long number when the first movie came out. And then I saw a show that was, fairly recent 2020 or so. And it also used CGI. I’m like, but they’re not, they’re using the same technology. But the quality is drastically lower just from a visual perspective. I had a collegue of mine who’s a videographer say that’s because the technology has overtaken the time that a human will the technology has become more important than the human using the technology.

08:17- Ellza Malok: 

That was the critical factor. And I think that’s a really good way to view AI. If you don’t give humans enough time to iterate and play with, which is what happens in CGI is rather than. Offer the opportunity for post production to really fine tune those elements and get the detail really white, right? It’s very much an art form as much as it is as a technical skill. You lose the effect in this case, literally. And I think AI is very similar. You can quite easily. Spin out, ask chatGPT or Claude or whoever to give you 15 different social media posts. They’re going to get the same as it, as another company that asks for 15 social media posts. It’s the human component that would make it really interesting. And that goes in every stage. There’s just some really cool things that you can do, and it should be seen as a door opener, not an automator in my thought process. There’s automation for other things. For God’s sakes, please figure out a better way for me to steam dry my clothes. That would be nice. That would be amazing. And put a creativity back into people. Cause I think that’s actually where the human touch is going to play.

09:30- Terry Wilson: 

I think e Elon’s in the process of building robots, housekeeping robots, isn’t he?

09:35- Ellza Malok: 

Oh, that’d be great. I’ll be the, I’ll be the first buyer.

09:40- Terry Wilson: 

It’s interesting, we’ve toyed around with a, we’ve toyed around with a lot of AI in our business. One of the things, obviously, is as a live chat service and a human based live chat service. The question always comes up. Oh, what about AI chatbots and so forth?

09:54- Terry Wilson: 

And, they have a place. There’s no doubt about that. And I obviously speak to our customers to find out whether there’s a desire to move to something that’s more AI based. And it’s a pretty resounding no at this stage. It’s they’re playing around with different things as well. But the reason that they’ve engaged us is because they want that human connection talking to their prospects at that stage of the buying process.

10:17- Terry Wilson: 

And live chat is one of those things that, You are engaging very early and also very late. It’s when they come to first do their initial research and part of the dark social and be anonymous. But it’s also at the stage where they’re ready to reach out and take the next steps as well. That human component in there is, I believe, important in our clients do as well, obviously.

10:40- Terry Wilson: 

The AI that we’re playing around with, and one of the things I’m looking at the moment is potentially using AI to create videos. I hate doing videos, I hate social media, full stop. And I looked at it and thought if it’s a human message, but it’s coming from AI. An AI avatar or something along those lines.

10:57- Terry Wilson: 

I wonder if it, if the fact that it’s a AI avatar, does that remove from the message or will it be enough of a uniqueness to actually capture attention so that people do hear what’s being said? What’s your thoughts on that?

11:13- Ellza Malok: 

So we haven’t done a ton on Avatar replacements, but one of the ones that we did do is stock photos. and we have a lot of research around this, that it’s much easier for you to put an animated photo versus a stock photo because a stock photo is so generic that in the human mind, it basically reads as blank.

11:34- Ellza Malok: 

I think that the avatar, there’s a quality question around, like how human is it going to be? Can it pass the uncanny value barrier, those kinds of things around it. And then there’s a how much does. That looked like Terry and how much does it sound like Terry or build that emotional connection around it?

11:58- Ellza Malok:

I think voice is getting pretty close,

12:01- Ellza Malok: 

From that, that’s made some really good strides. I think if you use an avatar, you have to decide, what element of it, but an area that if I’m a big Late 90s, early 2000s, like those high tech sci fi shows or like minority report and some of those. So I look at it. I’m like, how close is this to what they imagined? Because I

12:22- Ellza Malok: 

Some areas, those would be cool. Not my minority report for obvious reasons, but that’s 1 of those that I. I think would be interesting and it might be like an interesting nostalgia play. If you can tie it to something that is much more emotionally connected, like a TV show or what have you and might be a good spin on that, something that’s, It’s very new, but plays on something that’s old and classic.

12:47- Terry Wilson: 

Interesting. It’s interesting. There’s so many options these days. You could even upload a a couple of photos of yourself and it will actually do your voice in there that AI takes on your voice and it will turn your photo into a live voice. Video as well. It’s the things that are capable of doing these days are mind boggling, quite frankly.

13:11- Terry Wilson: 

We’re mucking around with all that sort of stuff. But and the same with the AI chatbot components on the front end, we’re doing a little bit of work with that, but it’s not, it On the surface, it looks great. Have chat with ChatGPT. But when you’re digging down into specific questions about specific products and problems and concerns that people have got, and you’re talking about five, six, seven figure deals, that’s potential on the other side of this.

13:36- Terry Wilson: 

We’ve been doing live chat for a decade now. So we’ve got the, in terms of conversations and data to teach, we’ve got, More than enough, still I’m not able to get an LLM to a situation where I’d feel confident in letting it sit there and have a conversation unsupervised without having one of our team members beside it.

13:57- Terry Wilson: 

It’s just, maybe that’s just me, but we’re not

14:00- Ellza Malok: 

Yeah, I’m inclined to agree, at least with where technology is today. And I think the bigger element is that rapport building that you would have and being able to tell a joke that lands, which requires a lot of taste that we know technology doesn’t have, that’s a human thing, right? And I think that there’s just, there’s so many layers of what makes human that it’s much harder for you to replicate and I think then you have to go back to purpose if you’re going to use in this scenario, social media postings could probably create a narrative around it and a story around it and then do it justice. With that way, doesn’t incur on your own personal time, but you should have these human element touch points because they become much more invaluable at the end of the day. And I think actually, when I, when we think about concierge service that can be automated or what have you from people X or whatever the next company Elon Musk creates is going to be called that would be interesting just to say do people spend more if they have a human concierge instead of a robot or some of those things to take into consideration. But it’s just such an interesting time to see what technology kind of drives and how we put humans at the forefront. And I say that as we’re talking about blue zones and some of these other elements where technology can be such a great enabler and solution provider for those, but at the end of the day, it’s the people that have to make the decision to do that X, Y, and Z even if the technology can get you 90 percent of the way there.

15:39- Terry Wilson: 

I’m reading a fascinating book at the moment called Alchemy by Rory Sutherland, and one of the stories he tells in there is that, this whole concept of providing better service and managing costs within an organization hotels went through a stage of getting rid of the bellhops, the doorman, and putting in automatic doors, automatic revolving doors or automatic sliding doors.

16:02- Terry Wilson: 

And they thought this is going to be much more efficient. People can come through and But what they didn’t factor in was the. added value, the perceived value of the patrons by having that bell hop there, whether it’s the prestige of having another person to open the door for them, whether it’s the dopamine hit you get when somebody recognize you and calls you by your name as you’re walking in there versus somebody that’s watching what’s going on and just understanding what’s happening to give you insights to the organization.

16:30- Terry Wilson:

It’s not always as it seems on the surface when you’re looking at what you might. think is the right way to solve a problem is in fact quite counterintuitive to the real problems that are actually being solved. It wasn’t about opening the door, it was about all the other aspects that go along with having

16:48- Ellza Malok:

Emotional. Yeah. It’s that emotional connection that you’ve built. And to your point that separates the Ritz Carlton’s from, the Homewood suites or some of these other different types of organizations that, that go in. And if you are looking for the hospitality space is a wonderful space to actually look at. If you’re thinking about how AI to be used and so on, because They do a ton of testing and they get experience exposure on both consumer and business. And they, most of their tactics actually end up being more consumer flavored which I know you and I have talked about in the past is, B2C is looking a lot more robust in this kind of age than B2B B2B tends to be behind.

17:29- Ellza Malok:

And actually a lot of the things that B2B is adapting is. Things that have been tried for decades in the consumer world.

17:37- Terry Wilson: 

and look, I’ve actually mentioned this before, the research that we did across 5006 websites, the insights that we gained there in terms of how far ahead they were. e commerce or b2c consumer marketing is in terms of the user experience in that buying process and sure they’re heading somebody towards a checkout so you know they’re motivated because it’s immediate consequences that those marketers are going to see versus the future uncertain consequences that marketers in B2B see because their outcome is a lead into a pipeline that may or may not be qualified.

18:21- Terry Wilson: 

And so in terms of the actual real dopamine hit, which is the revenue at the other end of it, it’s so far into the future and so uncertain. I don’t think that there’s necessarily the, in some cases, I don’t think there’s the motivation. to deliver the type of experience that e commerce or the consumer brands deliver for B2B for their clients in B2B.

18:44- Terry Wilson: 

But the reality is it’s still people. If you could deliver an e commerce type experience to a B2B buying experience, I think that, you would absolutely set yourself miles ahead, worlds ahead of your competitors in the same space.

19:01- Ellza Malok: 

Yeah I’ve worked with a handful of blended companies, meaning they sold in both markets and compared to their competitors, They were not only stronger with their B2B in arms because of the user experience,

19:17- Ellza Malok: 

About it. End of the day those B2B buyers are also B2C buyers of just different things. So rating you, even though they know that this is a different buying experience, they’re still rating you on where you fall. And if you fall short then you fall short. So compared to somebody else. So there is something to be said about the consumer. First mindset that CMOs in consumer with consumer brands, CPG, e commerce and how quickly they can pivot and turn around that to your point, B2B does not have that muscle. And I think it’s going to actually be very critical to have, because we all have access to information. Something I could buy off of, particular website for a business need this to print some of these, business business needs I could buy anywhere else. So what’s the difference, the experience,

20:16- Terry Wilson: 

Absolutely. It is. It’s the experience that is the difference. You’ve got the other compact factors as well, but it’s, the experience is the first impact. That’s the very first impact. That’s what everything else gets framed.