How to pick the “moments that matter” and what to do with them?
An article by Kim Verbrugghe, Head of Product and Experience Design at Orchard
Frictionless isn’t the answer to better CX
Many CX designers will tell you to find the pain points and then go fix them, rendering the experience ‘frictionless’.
Now, ask yourself this: why is it that IKEA still won’t assemble that bedside table for me?
The short answer?
Because they don’t always listen to their customer. And because frictionless isn’t always the answer. In IKEA’s case, the business is successful thanks to their low-cost model of DIY shopping, pick-up and assembly. You mess with the model, you mess with your profit. In essence, you need to find the moments that matter to your customer, but don’t matter to your bottom-line.
The long answer also includes understanding cognitive and memory biases (like The IKEA effect). But that’s for another time.
Innovate your CX with ‘Moments of Memory’.
The positive effects of memorability
We care because a memorable experience can create a series of positive flow-on effects for brands:
· Brand awareness and recall
· Loyalty and repurchase
· Advocacy
· Positive feelings of nostalgia
Being memorable. Easier said than done.
You’ll have an average of 70,000 thoughts today and over the course of your lifetime, you will hold up to one quadrillion pieces of information. Out of those, our short-term memory can hold up to 7 pieces of information at the same time… But only for around 20 seconds. Tricky.
So where do we start?
Step 1: find the moments that matter
When you’ve mapped out all the user journey steps, pain and gain points, you can review the CJM again and highlight the moments that matter:
· Customers are happy to walk away from your brand in those moments
· Customers have intense emotions in those moments ranging from positive to negative
· Customers have to make decisions important to your business
· Customers are going through a transition
· Customers aren’t behaving the way you want them to
· Customer’s behavior has dramatically changed
· Customers will talk about them to their friends
· Customer’s have to repeat the same task or action
· Customers have to put in effort to achieve their goal
· The moment was really rare to the customer
· It was the first or last experience with your brand
Step 2: Work out your strategy
Ignore, satisfy or delight. Yes, you read this correctly. Some moments that matter can be ignored and you should do exactly nothing. So when do you apply which strategy?
Strategy 1 | Ignore
Understand your business’ operating model. How is the business making money and would interfering with this moment, interfere with my business success? Ask yourself:
· Can I reduce my operational costs?
· Will I increase my profit from changing this moment?
· Will my customers walk away from me if I don’t do anything?
· Would addressing the issue match your brand’s purpose and values?
· Does my customer ask me to fix this?
· Can or will any of my competitors replicate my business model AND do this part better?
· Are there better / smarter ways to do this?
If the answer is NO to most of these questions, then you do absolutely nothing. If the answer is YES, then let’s move on to your two other strategies: Satisfy or Delight.
Strategy 2 | Satisfy
Satisfying a customer means that you are meeting their expectations. Understand the expectations your customers have of that moment. What are the baseline requirements to be part of that category? What is your competition doing in this moment?
You need to satisfy your customers if:
· This is important to them and they’ve asked for it
· They could walk away if you don’t address the issue
· It’s a baseline requirement for the category
· There are no excuses in terms of cost or operating model not to do it
· There are better or smarter ways to do this
Strategy 3 | Delight with your unique Moments of Memory
Sometimes satisfying just isn’t enough. Delighting a customer means that you’re completely surpassing expectations and are taking the experience to a whole other, emotional level. These are the moments that will be remembered, and shared.
You need to delight your customers if:
· The moment is currently contradicting your brand’s values (e.g. simplicity)
· The moment is considered really important to customers and their small and large goals (e.g. financial security)
· The moment is badly executed by your competition and gives you an opportunity to stand out, switching customers
· The moment will influence how they remember you (e.g. emotional intensity or the last moment)
· The moment is a moment of truth (hearing about it for the first time, seeing the product for the first time, buying the product, experiencing the product)
As a commercial entity, it is impossible to delight your customers in every moment of their experience. So you will need to make choices. Some moments that matter are universally similar, especially if you look at memory biases. Others are completely unique to your brand and category. But applying these guidelines will get you closer to the right choice for your CX: to ignore, to satisfy or to delight. And closer to creating some memorable experiences too.
Can’t get enough?
Want to hear a fantastic example of a “Moment of Memory”, created by the Ritz-Carlton? Read this article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stuffed-giraffe-shows-wha_b_1524038
Listen to this interview: https://www.gayleallen.net/cm-090-dan-heath-on-creating-moments-that-matter/
Sources:
https://southtree.com/blogs/artifact/10-unforgettable-statistics-about-human-memory
https://medium.com/@GAllenTC/creating-moments-that-matter-80acae275e3
