moments of truth in customer experience

Moments of truth in customer experience were first discussed by a Scandinavian airline to identify the various touchpoints a customer has with a company, each of which are an individual opportunity for a customer to form an impression.

After transforming SAS Airlines to be one of the most successful in the industry, Jan Carlzon, former president of Scandinavian SAS Airlines wrote a book called “Moments of Truth: New Strategies for Today’s Customer-Driven Economy” and defined moments of truth as:

“Anytime a customer comes into contact with any aspect of business, however remote, is an opportunity to form an impression”.

In the airlines case, examples of these moments included the purchasing of a ticket, check-in, security, the boarding gate or boarding the plane, plus many more.

To identify all of your own company moments of truth, you need to go beyond the obvious touch points because there are potentially so many more informal or indirect moments when you look at the customer journey in closer detail. For example, if a customer witnesses a member of Cabin Crew from a different SAS flight helping a customer with a bag at the baggage collection. That wasn’t necessarily a direct or foreseen moment of truth, but it helped the customer to form an impression. Or if a customer sees a Cabin Crew member acting tired and snappy at a taxi driver as they get into their taxi at the destination airport – does this contribute to their over-all impression of the airline?

It’s these moments that have the potential to really enhance an over-all customer experience, or to make it really mediocre.

How to determine your moments of truth

To understand what your services moments of truth are, you need to really understand your customer experience. You should take the time to fully understand the various customer journeys for yourself and identify all of those small moments of truth, from someone doing a Google search and finding your website, to someone finally placing an order with a member of your team.

Do you really understand who your customers are? To ensure you understand every customer journey, you need to think of every type of customer and truly understand them. What are their goals? What frustrates them? What do they value? What extra things might they notice?

Once you understand the current customer experience, bring this in line with your brand values to see how they align. Are these the moments of truth you actually want? Should there be more? How do they perform? Are any of them mediocre or even terrible? Why?

While we are focusing on customer experience in this blog, take a moment to also think about your other stakeholders. What moments of truth do your employees, shareholders, visitors and partners have? They form part of the company experience and indirectly, they can have a major impact on the impression customers get. Consider every single stakeholder journey – not just your end customer!

Bad moments happen – so how do you turn them around?

Every brand has had some bad moments and some negative moments of truth – its inevitable. What really matters is how we handle them and if we are able to turn them around.

The difficult element of moments of truth to control are that they involve human interaction and therefore, emotion. Aside from technological interactions, moments of truth tend to happen between a customer and the frontline employee – are your employees emotionally equipped to make that moment remarkable?

Moments of truth tend to happen at moments when customers have unknowingly invested a high amount of emotional energy into the outcome, such as dealing with a cancelled flight or losing a suitcase. The handling of these moments tends to take place between the customer and a frontline member of staff, and it is this interaction which could make or break the moment of truth.

It’s one thing to update your company policy to ensure that these failed service events are dealt with appropriately – but you can’t write a policy telling your employees how to behave, speak or smile at a customer. This has to form part of your company culture and has to come from the top down, so it is instilled into every single moment of truth, even the indirect ones.

It’s all in your culture

If you want to improve the customer experience, it is important to identify all moments of truth and truly understand whether they are delivering a remarkable or mediocre experience for your customers. However, moments of truth can often take place in unexpected circumstances and are sometimes inevitable, and it’s these moments of truth which you cannot directly prepare for.

Instead, it is important that the customer experience outcome you desire is instilled as part of your company culture and is present in every single aspect of the business, from the website to the front-line employees dealing with customers. Want to be considered approachable and helpful? Make sure your website is easy to use and helps customers find what they are looking for. That is their first impression! Want to make customers feel happy and looked after? Make sure your employees are happy and looked after first.

Need a little help getting started?

Richard at Brightstone has been working with companies, large and small, helping to identify moments of truth and introduce company-wide culture changes for many years and can help you to transform your customer experience.  If you would like to learn more or would like Richard and the team help, just get in touch!

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