Great Experience Moments Make Great Experience Memories

The experience with the most great moments will not be remembered as fondly as the experience with the greatest moments. I know that sounds like I’m saying the same thing, but it’s different, and the difference is important. Why?

I talked about this in the latest edition of the #CX Patterns Podcast, which you can listen to here, or read on for more details about how to let go of CX perfection and experiences that get remembered more fondly by your customers.

Why doesn’t an experience need to be universally great from beginning to end?

Because our memories just don’t have that kind of storage capacity. We aren’t going to remember everything that happened to us. It’s too much data. Humans, your customers are much more likely to remember the peak moments of an experience, and the end. That means that the rest of the experience, while not irrelevant, is much less important to absolutely nail.

This is great new for customer experience teams. It means that a more memorable experience is also, potentially, more operationally efficient to deliver. You can make customers wait in line, think of Disney World. You can charge higher prices. Think of Apple. And you certainly don’t have to stand out in every moment.

Great Experiences Are More Operationally Efficient

CX teams can marshal resources towards the most important moments, touchpoints or sections of any journey, and satisfice the rest.

Nailing 3-5 moments in an experience is a whole lot easier than having to nail every moment in the experience. Customers don’t expect perfection, and frankly you can’t deliver it. So let go of the fiction of end-to-end perfection.

Research and experiments demonstrate that far less than the entire experience gets remembered. Only peaks, and ends get remembered. Memories are not faithful, factual recreations of events, but rather emotional motifs, built around a small subset of the total moments.

First, Focus Your Resources

So what should you do to reflect the importance of key moments, and the lack of importance of everything else?

First, lighten your load by looking for any touch points or journeys where you are over delivering. Do any examples jump out to you today??

Think about how you might turn a wasted peak moment that a customer doesn’t really care about into a good enough, not very memorable experience.

This is tricky because if you ask customers directly, they will likely tell you that they want the current, better version of the experience. Instead, rely on your data as to whether this elevated experience is contributing to the long-term loyalty behaviors you want from customers.

Here are two examples to motivate you that this is doable. Both L.L. Bean and Mercedes-Benz cut back on their lifetime product guarantees, L.L. Bean in terms of restricting how long and in what condition products could be returned, and Mercedes-Benz in terms of how long they provide roadside assistance for their cars. Both brands found that the customers who were taking advantage of those services weren’t their target customers. For Mercedes-Benz, the roadside assistance was most used by owners who had bought their cars used, and were realistically never going to buy a new car directly from the automaker.

Stop over-delivering when it doesn’t matter so that you can over-deliver where it does matter.

Second, Determine Which Moments Should Be Memorable

Identify the moments that matter most to your customers, and that they will form strong memories of if you get them right. This requires you to map journeys of course and identify the crucial points, turning points in your experience. Many of these will be obvious – the check-in at a hotel, the claims experience for an insurer, and the like.

For rental car companies, one of the critical customer journeys is the pick-up of the car. Enterprise Rent-A-Car innovated this experience by bringing cars to customers, and that kind of innovation is great if you can find opportunities to do so. But realistically, you will find far more situations where you are refining and nailing the delivery of an experience that your competitors could also deliver, but you just happen to be doing it better. So look for how to do the important moment better.

Third, Nail The Important Moments

Great, memorable moments benefit from narrative drama – a trough before the peak heightens the perception of the peak. Coming back to Enterprise, in addition to their “Pick You Up” service, Enterprise has plenty of standard locations, including the whales of the rental car world, airport locations. Enterprise has the same rental car shuttles that other providers have that bring you to the same lot full of cars with the same sad little building at the center. And when you get dropped off to check-in at that sad, little building, you see the same scenario that you would find any other rental car provider: A long counter with kiosks, maybe 1 or 2 employees ready to serve customers, and a snake line in front of that counter that is filling up fast with the other customers who were lucky (or aggressive) enough to get off the shuttle bus before you. Enterprise continues to look like every other rental car provider for the next 30 seconds or so as a line forms. Moods drop, as customers recalculate how long it will be before they escape to freedom behind the wheel of their bland, midsized econobox.

And then something magical happens. A door opens from behind the counter, and a posse of smiling employees come striding out to staff the rest of the kiosks behind the long counter. In seconds, the line evaporates, and even if you aren’t immediately served by one of the new employees, you now know that your wait won’t be long. You can see the moods of your fellow travelers visibly lift when Enterprise plays its “appearing” trick.

Why do they do this? Couldn’t they just staff the counter from the start and set their customers’ minds at ease? Well no. Where’s the dramatic flair in that? Enterprise has figured out something that other companies would do well to learn for themselves. Story matters. Drama matters. Narrative arc matters.

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