A recent personal experience I had of this was when I was flying out of Newark on United Airlines and sat down to have dinner at one of the nicer full-service restaurants in the airport. In a similar vein, at some Babies R Us stores, employees will bring a chair to pregnant mothers who are standing in line to pay, recognizing that this can be tougher for them than other customers. One often-cited example is retail stores that have special nursing lounges that meet the needs of new mothers. Ideally, these gestures of value also reflect some insight into the customer's needs. It means delivering something of value that is unexpected. The last major category of 'moments of truth' are opportunities to create unexpected delight. This makes a lot of sense because the average Ritz-Carlton customer will spend $250,000 with the Ritz over their lifetime. Insiders term this the "Service Recovery Paradox," and it’s why Ritz Carlton empowers their hotel workers to use their judgment and spend up to $2000 to solve a customer problem without manager approval. This usually involves a sincere apology and a significant gesture of compensation.
But ironically these "screw ups" also have the potential to become some of the most positive moments in the customer journey if handled artfully. Cancelled flights, data loss from crashed hardware, or salmonella in your sandwich have the potential to be disastrous moments of truth for your relationship with your customer. Not surprisingly, some of the crises that have the greatest impact on the relationship are those that the customer perceives are caused by your brand. We spoke with consumers who were, for example, loyal Allstate customers because of a claim experience their parents had 30 years earlier. In a study, my team ran on insurance customers, for example, the moments that were the most remembered and had the most significant impact on the long-term relationship were during moments of crisis. In the case of insurance, this is very often a "claims" situation- when your car is totaled, or your house is flooded. When your customer is in crisis, the way you respond is a heightened moment that has a disproportionate impact on the long-term relationship. If you over-deliver on expectations, consumers can pat themselves on the back for having done a great job in making the decision, or beat themselves up for having been "duped." This aspect of self-judgment creates an emotional connection that elevates these moments in the journey to "moments of truth." So not only is your brand on the line to deliver on expectations, but the customer is evaluating themselves to determine if they made the right choice. Will Rogers said, "You never get a second chance to make a good first impression." And in the case of brand experiences, one of the reasons why these moments are important emotionally is that they often reflect a certain risk the customer has taken - a leap of faith that they have done the right thing in ordering that iPhone or booking that resort. Apple realized years ago that the moment of "unboxing" a new toy such as an iPhone was a key moment of truth and so put an extensive focus on the packaging experience. When you first walk into the BMW dealership after looking at magazine ads for years, or when you first arrive at the Caribbean resort that you spent months researching and hours traveling to, these are moments where a customer's eyes are wide open to evaluate the relationship and determine whether the brand is a good fit. There are three key characteristics to look for that indicate that a moment in the customer journey may be a key "moment of truth." So how do you know which are the moments of truth?
Multiple research studies we have conducted for various clients confirm that not all moments have the same importance to the relationship. Each time your customer uses your product, checks your site, views your social post, or does anything else to connect with your brand, this is part of the customer journey. What are the moments of truth? Your complete customer journey is probably composed of a large number of interactions.
So how do you prioritize? I suggest you start with the moments of truth. There is a need to prioritize improvements so that the customer journey can be shifted toward the future state over time but in phases. This process can sometimes be quite daunting because when the future state vision is ambitious, the gaps are very significant. The process involves determining the highest value future-state story, then comparing to the "real world" current-state journey so that we can define the work that needs to be done to shift the journey to the future state. We work with many brands to define these types of future-state customer journeys.
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