Pivotal moments: Moments you just are not allowed to screw up!

In product development, we spend considerable amount of resources to get the user experience (UX) right. Our field has evolved into a place where we put our customers in the center of development, we invest in understanding their motivations, needs and pain points, and we develop carefully crafted experiences that are easy to use and deliver joyful experiences to the right users at the right time.

While these efforts are important, and they have helped to make technology accessible to a much wider audience than the technically inclined, the field of UX typically focuses on reducing friction and getting users to the desired outcome. We rarely spend enough time thinking about the experiences for when things go severely wrong. Yet these moments – when customers need us the most – are pivotal: They will decide if customers become loyal or turn away in disbelief and disappointment.

Let me explain this to you in a recent real world example I have experienced. I am a long-time customer of Booking.com. I booked my first hotel with them in 2011, and I have been using their services to book private and business trips ever since. To give you an impression: I have booked 15 hotels, flights and cars in 2023 alone. I love the fact that you have so many travel related offerings in one place, their generous cancellation policies and their decently easy to use product. Despite over a dozen years of being their customer, I am seriously considering deleting my account. What happened?

In my recent holidays in South Korea, I have booked a rental car for about 800 USD on booking.com. When trying to pick up the car, I learned that one needs an international drivers license for South Korea, hence I wasn’t able to get the car (my fault!). Thanks to the incredibly efficient Swiss government services, I was able to get a digital version of that driver’s license within 4 hours (talking about great customer experience: that is awesome!). I went back to the agency, but they denied the car again, stating that their company policy is to only accept the physical version of the license. Being on the other side of the planet, that wasn’t feasible. I went to the agency next door, and they happily rented a car to me, using the digital version of the license.?

I contacted Booking.com, letting them know that the first rental company refused to accept the digital driver's license, but that they had agreed to issue a refund, therefore I asked Booking.com to refund the 800 USD. One day later, I got a response, stating that their ToS clearly says that the driver has to provide all necessary proof that they are allowed to drive, and that if they fail to do so, no refund will be issued. In my case that means: No refund.?

In over 12 years of using Booking.com, I never had to use their customer service. I always naively assumed that in case something goes wrong and given my extensive use of their service (“Genius level 3” they call it), they would be there to help me solve the problem. Getting this answer was beyond disappointing and left me in a state of shock. Can it be that after all these years of being a loyal customer, that is the best they can do? And for the first time, I seriously started considering closing my Booking.com account and stop doing business with them.

This story describes what I call a pivotal moment, a pivotal journey, a moment in a customer-business relationship that you absolutely can’t get wrong, because if you do get it wrong, it will lead to severe damage in the customer relationship. And on the flip side, if you do get it right, it will lead to a significant increase in customer loyalty and trust.

To continue this post in a more positive way, let’s look at a real world example of how to get a pivotal moment right.?

Let’s move 20+ years back in time. I had just finished my Masters degree and started working full time. I had married recently and we just rented a new apartment. Unnecessary to state: I was broke. I had used most of my savings for furniture, my wife was working part-time, we were living paycheck to paycheck.?

One day, my wife accidentally lit a pan in the kitchen, and part of our kitchen burned down. I remember getting the call and arriving at the apartment, the house surrounded by fire trucks. Luckily they were able to extinguish the fire quickly, but our kitchen was black, our apartment was covered in a layer of dust and the air was unbreathable. We slept at a friend's house while trying to figure out how to resolve this mess. Obviously none of us had experienced something like this: How do you even start resolving it?

The next day I get a phone call from our insurance: Die Mobiliar. This company is known for their ads, where they show someone doing something incredibly clumsy and afterwards calling their insurance, starting the sentence with “Liebe Mobiliar…” (Dear Mobiliar…), trying to explain an embarrassing real world situation and Mobiliar being there to help them. So I get this phone call from Massimo, who introduces himself and tells me that he works for Mobiliar, and he was notified about our kitchen. He would like to meet so we can discuss how to handle the situation. I have very vivid memories of what followed - despite it being more than two decades ago. Massimo told us that we won’t be able to use the kitchen while it was repaired and cleaned. During that time, we could go and eat in restaurants, with a budget of 50 USD per meal. All the food in the kitchen should be thrown away. We should go to a grocery store to replace everything, and keep the receipt, because Mobiliar will cover it. We should note how many hours we worked to throw away the kitchen content, because they would compensate us with 25 USD per hour for our labour. The entire apartment needed cleaning, which Mobiliar would organize, we would get a call the same day from a company that would do the cleaning. All electrical devices would be removed, opened and professionally cleaned. If a device was too old, it would be thrown away and we would get the budget to buy a new one (we replaced an old TV with a new one, all paid by Mobiliar). I remember vividly, how my wife and I stared at each other, asking ourselves if we were dreaming.

About one week later, our kitchen was fixed, all food replaced, the apartment shiny and all electrical devices looked like new. We had eaten in restaurants, we had a new TV and we even had more money in our account than before. I remember how I called Massimo: “Listen, can you come by my apartment, let’s check if there are any insurances I am missing”. I canceled all my other insurances and ever since then, Mobiliar is my only insurance provider. When I need something from them, I call Massimo and he fixes it for me. When I needed them the most, Mobiliar was there for me - they delivered a true "Liebe Mobiliar..." experience. Their investment in my pivotal moment paid back 100 fold to them.?

Customer-Business relationships don’t get terminated because you weren’t able to find the perfect hotel in your dream location, or because you weren’t able to find the right filter in the clunky search interface, or because you have seen an annoying ad. Customers have learned to deal with friction and pain points, and even if these experiences are not great, they are not the essence of the service they are looking for. But there are few moments in time that businesses just can’t screw up: Pivotal moments, when your customers need you the most.

Businesses need to realize that they have to invest in getting these moments right. Their support organization has to be properly trained to spot those moments and get them right. A considerable budget needs to be set aside, ensuring the necessary funding to find creative solutions and help to unblock these situations, transforming these pivotal moments into customer loyalty.?

A few tips for businesses on how to handle pivotal moments:

• Be prepared. Have a plan in place for how you will handle pivotal moments. This plan should include clear communication with customers, a willingness to go above and beyond, and a focus on resolving the issue quickly and efficiently.
• Empathize with the customer. Put yourself in the customer's shoes and understand how they are feeling. This will help to communicate with them in a way that is both understanding and helpful.
• Be proactive. Don't wait for the customer to come to you with a problem. If you see that a customer is having a difficult time, reach out to them and offer assistance.
• Go the extra mile. Don't just resolve the customer's issue. Go the extra mile to make sure that they are satisfied with the outcome. This could mean giving them a refund, offering them a service that goes above and beyond, or simply taking the time to listen to their concerns.

Let’s go back to the Booking.com example: Imagine the customer service representative being trained to spot such pivotal moments. Imagine they would have answered, saying that despite the ToS stating that it was my fault, they understand that mistakes can happen, therefore they would provide me a full refund for my car rental. Do you think I would be considering closing my Booking.com account? How many trips do I need to book so Booking.com makes up for these 800 USD? They charge 15% commission per reservation, so after spending 12 '000 USD with them, they would have reached break even. But the customer loyalty they would have created through this pivotal moment: Priceless!