Creating Defining Moments for Your Customers
Chip and
Dan Heath explain how to add defining moments to your customer experience.
·
The
Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Simon &
Schuster, 2017
Quick question. Customers rank their
interactions with your company on a scale of 1 (very negative) to 7 (very
positive). Should you invest more resources in improving the experiences of
customers who rank their interactions at a 1, 2, or 3, or those who rank them
at a 4, 5, or 6?
When
brothers Chip and Dan Heath, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of
Business and a senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE Center, respectively,
asked executives how they invest their resources, the executives estimated
that, on average, their companies spend 80 percent of their resources trying to
improve the experiences of their unhappiest customers. Yet, report the Heaths,
in 2016, when Forrester Research tabulated its annual U.S.
Customer Experience Index and modeled the
financial results in 16 industries, it discovered that “there’s nine times more
to gain by elevating positive customers than by eliminating negative ones.”
This
finding supports the main point in The
Power of Moments, the latest in a series of formulaic but
insightful books by the Heaths that seek to illuminate questions with important
business ramifications, such as how to make ideas sticky and how to create
change successfully. The point in this case is that “positive defining moments”
can produce extraordinary effects in both individuals and organizations. The
book explains how such moments are created.
The authors define a defining moment as “a
short experience that is both memorable and meaningful.” Defining moments can
be big, such as when you realize you’ve discovered the work you want to do the
rest of your life, or small, like when the favorite stuffed animal your child
lost on the family’s beach resort vacation shows up at your door with a
scrapbook full of photos chronicling its extended journey. Defining moments can
change your life or make you a lifelong customer.
In studying defining moments, the Heath
brothers find that the positive ones are composed of one or more of four
crucial elements: elevation (they rise above the ordinary), insight (they
rewire our perceptions), pride (they capture us at our best, reflecting
achievements or courageous acts), and connection (they are shared and, in being
shared, they bind us together). The more of the four elements that are present
in a defining moment, the more powerful it is. More important, say the Heaths,
these moments need not be serendipitous; they can be engineered.
Doug Dietz, a designer at General Electric,
did just that. As the Heaths retell the story, Dietz spent two years working on
a new MRI machine. He was proudly observing the machine (“a brick with a hole
in it,” as he described, in an atmosphere that the Heaths call “sterile
bordering on menacing”) being used in a hospital for the first time, when he
saw the terror it produced in a little girl undergoing a scan and the misery
that produced in the girl’s parents. It broke his heart.
But it also inspired Dietz. He switched his
focus from the machine to the patient experience and redesigned the latter. He
created MRI machines and settings that mimicked a jungle adventure, a pirate
island, and a cable car ride. The result: The need to use sedatives to calm
young patients plummeted, as did the time needed to conduct a scan. Better yet,
kids undergoing MRIs were asking their parents to do it again. “For patients, a
moment of agony was transformed into a moment of elevation. Dietz flipped a pit
into a peak,” conclude the Heaths.
Happily, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel
to create a positive defining moment. Witness how Southwest Airline elevates
the deadly serious and boring flight safety announcement with a bit of humor.
“If you should get to use the life vest in a real-life situation, the vest is
yours to keep,” said one flight attendant, whose quip is now inscribed on a
wall in corporate headquarters.
But what’s that worth? When Chip Heath asked
the airline’s analytics team that question, they decided to figure it out. And
it turned out that when customers who travel more than once per year on
Southwest heard a funny flight safety announcement, they traveled an additional
half-flight in the next year. “The analytics group calculated that if Southwest
could double the number of customers hearing a funny flight safety
announcement, the result would be more than $140 million in revenue! That’s
more than the cost of two 737s,” write the Heaths.
The
Heaths are good storytellers and they have mastered the business book format,
which includes a degree of redundancy that is, I guess, necessary to embed
ideas in the brains of busy executives. But the real pay dirt in The
Power of Moments is the authors’ advice for creating positive defining
moments, and that is the core content of the book. In providing this advice,
the Heath brothers have created a terrific addition to the literature of
customer experience — one that speaks to the need to punctuate consistent
service delivery and quality with moments of surprise and delight.
by Theodore Kinni
https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Creating-Defining-Moments-for-Your-Customers?gko=d025f&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20171128&utm_campaign=resp
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