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Every now and then I read a book that has me vigorously nodding and relentlessly folding down corners (much to the disdain of roughly 50% of the population).
The Power of Moments – which actually came out in 2017 – is one of those. And so in case your ‘to-read’ pile is as high as mine, I thought I’d summarise my corner-folded bits for you.
Part of the premise of the book is that the experiences organisations create will, mostly, be almost identical to those of their competitors – and mostly forgettable
‘The surprise about great service experiences is that they are mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable’
Yep. Your experience will be pretty much the same as everyone else, even more so in regulated industries. But those few crucial moments where can be distinct, those are the moments you can earn customers’ decisions. And these moments often fall into three areas:
- Transitions (the start, the end, and end big change)
- Milestones (big moments in customers’ lives, in the relationship)
- Pits (Problems to solve, emotional lows)
So, how do you go about making these moments extraordinary? I’m going to look at three areas that stood out for me. Peak-End, Pits and Peaks, and Building Conviction through Immersion.
- The Peak-End Rule
The authors remind us that people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length – called ‘duration neglect’. Instead, they rate it on the best or worst moment (the ‘peak’), and the ending. For negative peaks, they serve as a psychic ‘price-tag’ – this is what it could cost me to endure that experience again.
They give a great example of how this can work to elevate the ending of an experience (I’d highly recommend Joe McLoed’s book on this). They tell the story of Hillsdale High School in California, where the annual study of Lord of the Flies is turned into a final, end-of-term trail – ‘The Trial of Human Nature’. A gallery full of peers and family come to watch as students host a mock debate with a real jury, putting human nature on trial, and creating a memorable, set-piece ending to their project.
In fact, as I was writing this, I was reminded of the power of the Peak-End rule when the restaurant Flat Iron gave me a free ice-cream as I left…
- Fill the pits and build the peaks
So to create a great experience, you need to ‘fill the pits and build the peaks’.
Part of filling the pits is acknowledging the baggage, the problems the customer has had already to get to this point. When call agents acknowledged previous issues – According to our system, you’ve already called several times about this – customers rated the experience twice as highly as those where the baggage was ignored, and the perception of the effort they had to invest plummeted by 84%
However, if organisations only fill the pits, they only ever get to the level of being ‘not rubbish’. As the authors say:
Most business leaders don’t get to that second part, focussing only on the first (the pits). It’s as though leaders aspire to create a complaint-free service than an extraordinary one
This matters commercially, because of organisations’ obsession with ‘Detractors.’ Forrester research shows that the happiest people in an industry tend to spend more, so moving a customer from a 4 to a 7 is far more commercially beneficial than moving someone from a 1 to a 4. And there will be far more people in the 4-6 zone than the 1-3 zone. But attention is always grabbed by the lowest scores.
So we need to find ways to design extraordinary experiences, building on the certainty of a pit-free experience. That’s harder to convince people to do, though. It doesn’t loom as large on the spreadsheet. So you need my third reflection.
- Creating the conviction to get into action
To start with, the authors share the brilliant story of Doug Dietz, an industrial designer who spent two years working on a new MRI machine. But on watching a little girl use it for the first time, he realised children were terrified of the machine, by how it looked, how it felt.
He realised it wasn’t the machine that needed attention; it was the experience. So he turned it into a fun ‘Jungle Adventure’ from the moment the children stepped foot in the hallway, full of games and tasks, including decorating the machine as a canoe.
The number of kids needing sedation dropped from 80% to 27%.
They also share the story of Scott Guthrie improving Microsoft’s Azure service.
The customer feedback was clear – the technology was good, but was hard to use. However, this feedback wasn’t landing with leaders. So he gathered his senior managers and software architects together for a day and gave them a challenge: to build an app using Azure.
The team struggled, couldn’t use certain features, couldn’t figure out how to sign up. It was, Guthrie recalled, a complete disaster. The attendees resolved to fix the problems they encountered. By the end of the second day of the offsite, they’d had produced a plan to completely rebuild Azure.
Chip and Dan Heath summarise how to get this conviction in a very similar way to how we work at The Foundation. They say what’s needed is:
- A clear insight
- Compressed in time (the realisation strikes fast)
- Discovered by the audience itself (revealing uncomfortable truths)
Thanks for reading this article, I really hope you enjoyed it. You can subscribe to my monthly newsletter below, find me in picture form on Instagram @johnjsills, or in work mode at The Foundation and LinkedIn.
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