Table-Stakes Touchpoints: Powerful Strategy That Can Define The Success Of Your Business

In the 1980s, Jan Carlzon, the former president of Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), came up with a concept called The Moment of Truth, which he defined as:

Any time a customer comes into contact with a business, they have an opportunity to form an impression.

Carlzon’s definition became the airline’s internal mantra, and all employees were challenged to embrace the concept of managing their Moments of Truth. When he took over SAS, the company was losing $17 million per year and was ranked 14th out of 17 European airlines in punctuality. (Source ) His simple vision of managing passenger interactions with the airline paid off.

Within a year, the airline was No. 1 in punctuality. The company went from losing millions to making millions. In 1983, Air Transport World named SAS Airline of the Year. All of this is because of a simple idea: manage every customer interaction with your business.

I recently interviewed Laura Richard, a principal at Level5 and recognized as the 2023 Woman Leader in Consulting, on Amazing Business Radio. Richard’s concepts on branding and owning the customer experience are brilliant. We talked about Moments of Truth. Her wonderful take on Carlzon’s concept is that there are table-stakes touchpoints. These touchpoints must be managed according to a customer’s expectations. Because they are the major touchpoints experienced by a customer, they may disproportionately impact the brand’s overall experience and customer sentiment. But that doesn’t mean you have to go over the top or above and beyond to make them happy. It means you must give customers what they hope and expect to get when they do business with you.

Shortly after Carlzon’s turnaround of SAS, he wrote the book Moments of Truth . He identified the main touchpoints the passengers experienced. He said that in 1986, approximately 10 million passengers each came into contact with about five SAS employees, and each contact averaged around 15 seconds. If you do the math, that’s 50 million Moments of Truth that were created. Carlzon wrote, “These 50 million Moments of Truth are the moments that ultimately determine whether SAS will succeed or fail as a company. They are the moments when we must prove to our customers that SAS is their best alternative.”

These moments are the table-stakes touchpoints Richard referred to. At SAS, that could be when a customer calls to make a reservation (this was prior to online reservations), checks in at the ticket counter, is greeted at the gate by a gate agent, is taken care of by a flight attendant, etc. These types of interactions are the table-stakes touchpoints that will make or break a business.

In addition to these bigger touchpoints, there could be many smaller and less obvious interactions that must be recognized and managed to, at a minimum, meet a customer’s expectations. For example, an SAS employee may be walking toward a gate, and they smile as they walk by a passenger. While seemingly unimportant and far from being a table-stakes touchpoint, that small gesture is still important to the overall experience. To Carlzon’s point, every interaction is an opportunity to form an impression.

In our customer service workshops, we often do a Moments of Truth exercise in which we identify a client’s major and minor touchpoints. We recognize that what drives those touchpoints are often activities and processes that happen behind the scenes. As we create a detailed journey map for the different experiences customers have with a company, we start to recognize that all departments and employees somehow impact those touchpoints, even if the employees are far removed from the front line and never interact with a customer.

Staying with the airline example, if you check your luggage to a destination, you don’t see the process and the number of employees who ensure your luggage makes it to the destination. All you know is that the luggage showed up when you arrived.

Carlzon’s approach to customer interactions was timely for turning around the airline. It has since proved to be a timeless strategy as well. As Richard eloquently pointed out, you must manage the table-stakes touchpoints that disproportionately influence the customer’s perception. Recognize that the interactions are crafted and managed one moment at a time. When done well, the customer says, “I’ll be back!”

Shep Hyken is a customer service and customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and New York Times bestselling business author.?Learn more about Shep's virtual?training programs and follow #ShepHyken for more customer service and experience insights.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com .

Check out Shep's latest research in his Achieving Customer Amazement Study , Sponsored by RingCentral .