I try not to get too crotchety about the way people carelessly bandy about language, but sometimes I can’t help myself. In particular, there’s a discussion I’ve chosen not to participate in because participants are referring to various brand touchpoints as “moments of truth” – that strikes me as a very sloppy use of language and, more importantly, distracts from the real Moment of Truth on which brands should be focused.
I recall having the very same conniption in a retail management course in which the moment in which a customer regards several different brands on a retailer’s shelf and chooses the one to purchase is called “the moment of truth.” That is a very significant moment in the buying process, and one that merits a great deal of attention – but it’s still not the real moment of truth in the relationship between brand and customer.
To cut to the chase: the Moment of Truth occurs when a customer recognizes that a brand has met or failed to meet his expectations. There is no more significant moment in the relationship between brand and customer, and no other moment in which the most important promise of the brand is tested and assessed. Succeeding in this moment is the most critical factor in determining whether the customer will be satisfied or disappointed, and in the customer deciding to give his loyalty to a brand or try something else next time. There is no other moment that leaves as strong or indelible an impression on the customer.
The only instance in which Moment of Truth should be used in the plural is when a product is used repeatedly: a customer buys a good he uses multiple times or returns to use a service multiple times. Each of those instances involves the same assessment. It seems to me the first Moment of Truth carries a special weight, because it is the first impression – such that if the second Moment is less satisfactory, the customer will give the brand the benefit of the doubt and buy it a third time, and it takes a string of failures (or a single spectacular failure) to change that initial impression. The same is likely true the other way around - i.e., a good second experience mitigates the dissatisfaction of bad first experience - but chances are if the first experience was bad, there likely won't be a second.
The act of taking a product off of a shelf and dropping it in the basket is nowhere near as important as the moment in which expectations are compared to results. The customer can take it right back out, or abandon their cart before purchasing. Or even if the customer does purchase, it doesn’t impact their decision to enter into a relationship with the brand. It’s a prerequisite to the real Moment of Truth for the customer to select an item, buy it, and take it home, but it is not an indicator of the start of an ongoing relationship.
Nor do any of the other so-called “moments of truth” have the level of impact as the real Moment of Truth. Deciding to trust in an advertising claim, deciding to trust in a salesman’s recommendation, deciding the product is worth its price, and other moments that occur along the way are lesser decisions that must be handled well to get to a one-time purchase. And the decision to purchase is itself another checkpoint on the way to using the brand and, at long last, getting to the real Moment of Truth.
The power of the real Moment of Truth can be seen in the way that firms who totally pooch many of the other interactions have fiercely loyal customers. Customers will drive to an inconvenient location, pay a higher price, suffer the offensiveness of rude and arrogant clerks, submit to bizarre store policies, and soldier through an inconvenient sales process if they are convinced (by their own experience or otherwise) that the product will ultimately succeed in the Moment of Truth.
Simply stated – if you get the Moment of Truth right, you can get a lot of other things wrong, and you will still have flocks of loyal customers who will buy from you repeatedly and refer others to you. They will readily admit your flaws, but state that in the end that your brand is “worth it.” I’m not advocating that firms whose products pass the test in the Moment of Truth should slack off in every other regard, but I don’t think it can be denied that they are able to do so, and that many who get that moment right are intentionally inattentive to the other elements of customer experience as unnecessary perks for customers who would have purchased anyway.
I do think that is the chief reason customers abide bad service in other regards. It is likely also the reason that brands that fail in the real Moment of Truth feel compelled to focus so much attention on less significant factors, hoping that they will collectively mitigate the inevitable failure in the real Moment of Truth. I can't count the number of occasions when I've been called in to assist a client who has a serious problem with their product or service and either fails to recognize it or refuses to fix it - but who instead wants me to help make the purchasing process less difficult or address some other minor glitch as if it's the magic bullet. They just don't get it, and will continue to fail until they recognize, acknowledge, and attend to the real problem with their brand.
That also brings to mind the need to be very careful when imitating a service leader: it’s generally very easy to copy product qualities and service practices, but the ones you choose to imitate likely have nothing to do with the reason that their customers are deliriously happy and fiercely loyal. You can dress your cashiers in the same color as the service leader, but that’s not going to make a whit of difference – granted, that’s a silly little example, but copying more important-sounding elements of another brand (the store layout, advertising messages, product features, pricing, and so on) are no less silly and no more likely to lead to success.
It's clear to me I'm beginning to unravel - these are ancillary topics and there are many more to be considered. At the start of it all, and at the heart of it all, is that there is only one Moment of Truth. All the other brand touchpoints are of lesser importance. And the more you focus on things that do not matter as much, the less attention you give to the one moment that is most important – and this is the source of my cantankerousness about tossing around that phrase without much consideration.
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