Memory Is A Time Machine - And CX Teams Must Time Travel With Their Customers

The goal of delivering consistently great experiences is to generate breakthrough loyalty behaviors with your customers.

As a result of great customer experiences, customers should

1. Stay customers longer
2. Expand their relationships
3. Tell others to become your customers
4. Cost you less to serve.

The key thing to keep in mind is that the loyalty behaviors happen in the future.

You want to project forward to think about what will have to be true the next time your customers, and potential customers are in the market for your service, whether that’s tomorrow or three years from now, for them to choose your brand again?

What’s the best way to generate those loyalty behaviors?

Here’s yet another part of customer experience that has been neglected – cultivating and making more salient the memories of positive experiences.

The more you can do to reinforce for customers that they’ve had good experiences with you, the more likely they are to return and be your customer again.

Memory is a time machine. The same principle that led Don Draper to recognize the nostalgic possibilities of Kodak's Carousel, a device that "takes us to a place where we ache to go again," that same impact from the photos in the Carousel is what CX teams should strive for in reinforcing memories.

This matters because the memory of the experience guides future loyalty behaviors, and so reinforcing positive memories is the shortest path to ensuring future loyalty.

And so smart companies work to reinforce positive memories. There are two ways to do this.

1.???? Ask customers to take a specific follow-up action that reinforces the memory

2.???? Reinforce key moments of the memory in follow-up communications

Asking customers to take follow-up actions that reinforce the memory

The most common way to do this is through a follow-up feedback survey. If the surveys are well-crafted, and come at a reasonable interval after the experience, they will strengthen the positive emotions that customers have from experience.

Conversely, if the customer had a negative experience, the survey is a chance to find that out, and then to intervene to address the frustrations, rewriting their negative experience memory with a new, more positive experience end. It’s never too late, and the power of experience ends, and service recovery

But let’s stay focused on reinforcing positive memories. The survey asks customers to recall their experience, and can measure the strength of their sentiment about the experience, and then reinforce the positive emotions they associated with it.

But that’s far from the only follow-up action that companies can take, and yet most companies treat it as such.

Leaving reviews is another obvious follow-up action. This is primarily focused on products, and it shouldn’t be. Companies can and should ask customers to review the experience itself – buying the product if it’s a pure ecommerce interaction, or the experience of receiving the product in a more immersive interaction (like staying at a hotel, eating in a restaurant).

TripAdvisor is a great example of how to do this. In their case, they’re not even the company that delivered the experience to you that they’re asking you to review, but in leaving a review about your travel experiences on their website, they’re getting you to come back to their site and This can be done by asking customers to leave reviews – TripAdvisor being a prominent example in my mind, as the review process reminds you that you started your vacation research on TripAdvisor.

At it best, writing a review is like journaling for the customer – asking them to reflect on and recall the experience they had. This strengthens the positive memories, and makes the more recallable in the future. The branding with your company in the review writing prompt, and the ease of writing the review will strengthen their connection of the positive memory with your brand.

Reinforce Positive Experience Peaks In Follow-up Communications

Disney are of course masters at this – with their PhotoPass service, which encourages visitors to their properties to select photos for purchase from their visit. Visual reminders of positive memories from family trips create even stronger recall abilities.

But it doesn’t have to be just for family vacations. American Cancer Society found that thanking volunteers made them more likely to volunteer again in the future. I recently ran in a race, and the event organizers sent me follow-up information including photos of me running, my time, my rank compared to other runners, etc. All of that information makes it easier for me to remember the run, and more likely to run with them again.

Why couldn't a restaurant send a summary of the dishes ordered? Why can't an airline send me a notification congratulating on me having time back in my day when the flight arrives early? These are the types of communications that make Positive Peaks more "Recallable."

Bring Customers' Memories Back To The Future

Reinforcing a positive memory goes a long way. The memory is the closest you can get to the next interaction with the customer.?It allows customers to better recollect their past experiences with you, and then carry those more salient memories forward to future decision points. The stronger recall helps build anticipation and set expectations for what their next experience with you will be. This is the full loop on display, coming back around to where we start with an experience, building anticipation and setting reasonable expectations.