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Customer Experience

Moments of Truth

5 min read Translated from the Arabic original

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how the value of a product or service is shaped in the minds of consumers? When you receive a service from a particular provider, you may form an impression that the service is genuinely valuable, based on how well it met your needs. That sense of value isn’t only about the money you paid; it also reflects the effort you invested to obtain the service in the first place.

Moments of Truth (MOT)

A Moment of Truth is any interaction or situation a customer goes through whose experience strongly shapes their attitude and impression toward the organization, positively or negatively. Some studies suggest that for every negative moment of truth, an organization needs twelve positive moments before the customer forgets the bad one.

The term was first introduced into the business world by Swedish academic and management scholar Richard Normann, who defined it as the moment when perceived quality is created in the customer’s mind. The first book to carry this term in its title was published in 1987, where Moments of Truth were defined as the opportunities organizations can create to make a difference in their customers’ interactions.

That book, full of valuable leadership lessons by its author Jan Carlzon, describes these moments as the instances in which a company proves whether it is succeeding or failing — the moments in which we prove to our customers that we are the best option available to them.

You will also find many other definitions that, together, give you a sound understanding of the concept. I even found a colloquial use of the term: one dictionary defines it as the critical moment that could cost a bullfighter his life if he doesn’t act wisely — meaning the moment the bull collides with the red cape held by the matador.

In the age of information, enormous effort has gone into building tools and solutions for communicating with customers and tracking their interactions with organizations. This focus drove a major leap forward in CRM software. However, these solutions don’t really help business owners understand their customers’ impressions and experiences in order to improve them. This is where Customer Experience Management plays an important role in large organizations: identifying the most critical Moments of Truth and pinpointing the touchpoints associated with them.

Touchpoints

There is often confusion between Moments of Truth and touchpoints. The truth is that touchpoints are a subset of Moments of Truth, not the other way around. So let me elaborate a little on the definition of a touchpoint: a touchpoint can be defined as any stage at which a specific interaction occurs to meet a customer need at a particular time and place.

Touchpoints can be classified into three main types:

  • Static, non-interactive touchpoints — such as notifications, newsletters, product packaging, brochures, or seeing an advertisement for a service or product. The customer’s exposure to them creates the touchpoint.
  • Interactive touchpoints — where the customer interacts and there is two-way engagement, such as mobile apps and IVR (automated phone response).
  • Human touchpoints — when the touchpoint involves direct interaction between the customer and a company employee, regardless of the communication channel.

Each Moment of Truth contains anywhere from two to several touchpoints. If Moments of Truth are the opportunities to leave a positive impression on customers and stakeholders, touchpoints are the actual interactions through which positive or negative impressions of that moment are formed. The role of customer experience management is to identify the Moments of Truth and their related touchpoints across each stage of the customer journey, study them, and research them to measure how customers actually perceive them.

For example, in the telecom industry, setting up an internet subscription is considered a Moment of Truth. The touchpoints surveyed within this moment might include: the technician who performs the installation, the appointment-scheduling process, and adherence to the agreed appointment time.

How to Identify the Most Important Moments of Truth

Global best practices have catalogued the Moments of Truth that customer experience teams should pay attention to across different industries. Take banking as an example: the most important Moments of Truth identified in this industry include opening a new bank account, filing a complaint, applying for a personal or mortgage loan, meeting a relationship manager, reporting a fraud case, reporting a lost or stolen card, updating customer data, and errors that result in withholding a salary or compensation.

Another way to identify Moments of Truth, when global best practices are hard to access, is through Customer Journey Mapping. A “journey” here means the path a customer takes to obtain a particular service. This process is somewhat similar to documenting and analyzing business processes: each service journey is studied on its own, and every stage of that journey is then analyzed for improvement — whether by removing steps or reducing the time required to complete a stage.

Once you have a complete view of all customer journey maps and have conducted some direct research with customers on them, you can pinpoint the weak spots and the most sensitive Moments of Truth to focus on. Note that each journey map may contain one or several Moments of Truth.

A third approach relies on marketing research that studies the reasons behind customer churn. After a customer stops doing business with a provider, the company reaches out to investigate why the relationship ended. Through these reasons, you can often trace back to the last experience that pushed the customer to walk away. When the same experience comes up repeatedly across different customers, it is almost certainly a Moment of Truth that the company needs to pay close attention to and continuously improve, in order to avoid losing more customers.

Closing

I’d love readers to share their thoughts. Customer experience management is a relatively new field for me — I started working in it only a few months ago — and I wanted to share what I’m learning along the way. So please don’t hold back on your valuable comments.

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