Establishing moments of truth with customers
A single experience can define and shape a customer's relationship with your brand. As you connect customers with your brand and try to create a positive overall experience, how can you recognize these important “moments of truth?”
1. Listen: Customers will tell you about their experience, but you need to be listening. Identify listening posts that will provide you with current insights on what your customers are experiencing and then establish regular processes to monitor these listening posts. There are lots of conversations happening online, especially through social media sites. It is important to make sure you don't bias what you are hearing by only listening online – your listening posts should mirror how and where your customers and customer segments interact with your organization and brand.
2. Map the moments of truth: Map out how and when the moments of truth occur during the customer's lifecycle and at which touch-points. Continue to build the map as you gain more insight into the customer's journey. As you build the map, make it visible throughout your organization. Presenting the journey and specifically the moments of truth from the customer's perspective is a great way to get a broader level of support and buy-in for customer experience initiatives.
3. Take action: Identify one or more moments of truth and develop hypotheses for positively impacting the customer's experience. Identify pilot projects that are limited in scope, potentially starting with a single touch-point, for example, and define how you will measure success. Roll out the pilot and gather feedback. Determine any fine-tuning required and then build out a plan for a wider implementation. By starting with these iterative steps, you can quickly start to build a successful and continuous program to impact the moments of truth for your customers.
Jenny Belser is manager of professional services at Quaero, a CSG company.
