Faithful readers know that our definition of "moments of truth" differs slightly from that of Jan Carlzon who originally coined the term, when he was CEO of Scandinavian Airlines back in 1986.
In his book, Moments of Truth, Carlzon uses this definition: "Anytime a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote, is an opportunity to form an impression."
In our parlance, we use the term "moment of truth" when we engage with business and/or consumer customers in customer experience co-design activities. We ask customers to identify the points in their ideal Customer Scenarios that are the real showstoppers for them--the points in their experience where they'll give up trying. We refer to these as "moments of truth."
Over the 25 years that we have been running customer co-design sessions, we've found that there are clear patterns in what these moments of truth are for different types of scenarios. In fact, skilled customer scenario mapping practitioners can usually (but not always) guess correctly as to what these may be. We can't always guess what metrics the customers will assign to them, however. The metrics vary over time and they vary based on customers' context (is this an emergency or do they have time to make a decision, for example).
I believe that the knowledgebase that we have amassed over the years of these moments of truth and metrics is pretty interesting stuff. We also discovered that focusing our "customer experience test drives" on known moments of truth is a great way to hone in on the areas that will make the biggest difference in your customer experience.
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Good job. Your analysis is really interesting!
Posted by: Isaac | May 13, 2009 at 11:36 PM