How do we, as customers, decide if we like a brand or not? If it were a math equation, the answer would be to take the average of our overall experience. As it turns out, the decision-making process behind the verdict isn’t straightforward. Behavioral science principles suggest that people form impressions of a service based on the most intense moments of the journey: the moments of truth.
What exactly are customer journey’s moments of truth, and how do you recognize them in your case? Why do you need to identify them in the first place, and how can that knowledge bring you closer to your business goals? Let’s get to the bottom of this, with mapping tips and examples to better understand the concept.
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Moments of truth represent the points in the journey where a key event occurs, and the customer forms an opinion about the brand. In simple words, these are the touchpoints where clients either fall in love with your product or leave. Quality, service, value for money, consistency, and personalization are all pieces of that puzzle.
Have you ever had the most delicious hot dog at a godforsaken gas station? Or, on the contrary, was disappointed by an over-salted dish at a fancy brasserie? Of course, the expectations from the second venue are higher. The point is that product quality often overshadows other aspects like atmosphere, delivery speed, or bad reviews on TripAdvisor. You end up thinking you’d have another hot dog any day, though you’d never return to that brasserie.
Now, let’s imagine you order a pizza delivery from an Italian place. The menu has lots of choices, the pictures are mouth-watering, the callback service is flawless, and the delivery is lightning-speed. The moment of truth arrives when you taste the pizza. At that point, you either fall in love with the restaurant or not.
Or consider the service: even if the pizza is tasty when it comes out of the oven, it’s going to be less delicious when the crust dries off and the cheese cools down. The moment of truth will still happen with the first bite. So if the delivery is 45 minutes late, you probably won’t give the restaurant another chance, while the product itself — the pizza — is not at fault.
As for visualizing the customer journey moments of truth, journey mappers assign those to stages or substages the customer goes through. Although they’re called ‘moments’, it’s not always a single, short episode. It can be a longer process, like the delivery in the Italian restaurant example. Any interaction that can change the customer’s mind, for better or for worse, can potentially be a moment of truth.
All customer journeys have moments of truth, no matter whether they are specifically highlighted on the map. For instance, when a person is feeling strong emotions like rage, terror, or admiration, the experience graph will have a wider range. Peak highs and lows are tell-tale signs of a moment of truth.
Moments of truth greatly influence the overall customer experience, as they hold the power to shape our impression of the brand. Negative moments drive clients off, while positive ones contribute to customer loyalty and brand advocacy.
Positive moments of truth can set your company apart from competitors, creating a first-rate customer experience. And from a business perspective, that means higher customer satisfaction levels, more repeat purchases and referrals, and a potential increase in revenue.
When you make a habit of tracking moments of truth and visualizing (like we did for a cinema visitor journey) those in the journey maps, you can:
In general, moments of truth fall into two major categories:
Let’s review both types in detail, along with ways to encourage the positives and alleviate the negatives.
Moments of glory happen when we exceed customer expectations throughout an interaction where they have difficulties, need help or encouragement, or simply would welcome something ‘extra’. These positive moments can occur at various stages of the journey, though the intensity will vary.
Let’s consider a few examples of moments of glory from diverse business domains:
All moments of glory have one thing in common: a match with customer needs and motivations. What matters to one person might not be as important to another. That’s where creating personas can help, as you will learn more about the triggers the audience responds to.
Moments of pain are the customer’s miserable moments. That’s when the product or service disappoints them, they don’t feel heard, or are left without support in resolving a problem. Similar to moments of glory, moments of pain can occur anywhere along the journey and often make it shorter.
Some examples of moments of pain to better understand the concept:
From your side of things, moments of pain can indicate a gap in customer experience. Sometimes the service itself is good, though there is a lack of coordination among departments. A great way to reveal these journey breakdowns is to make a service blueprint and link each moment of pain with a flaw on the organizational level.
Discovering moments of pain in a customer’s journey is not necessarily a bad thing. That information can help smooth out a negative experience and prevent customer churn. Showing empathy and acknowledging the problem exists can be enough to get through a moment of pain.
There is also a 4-point classification proposed by customer experience author Brian Solis. It's based on the chronological order of how moments of truth appear in the customer journey:
This in-depth classification can be taken into account when identifying moments of truth at each stage of a customer journey map.
At this point, you’re probably wondering how to add moments of truth to a journey map at UXPressia. Regardless of your next options, you can use the journey map legend to share the approach with the whole team.
Any text section can mark a moment of glory or a moment of pain. Simply add it to a new or existing section, such as those describing the process or problems. Various text formatting—fonts, colors, icons, or styles—can highlight the ‘moment of truth’ and make it stand out from the rest of the text.
Add a new Channels section:
Mark moments of truth with your own custom channel icons or use the ‘Star’ icon from the default icon set. Delete the empty tiles that do not contain any moments of glory or pain. The end result would look something like this:
Add an Experience section:
There’s room for creativity when working with the graph to highlight moments of pain and moments of glory. One way to do it could be to keep the emotions that the customer is going through while using the text sections where customer quotes usually go to spell out the moments of truth:
Lastly, a dedicated touchpoint section helps display moments of truth on the journey maps, with each touchpoint featuring a visual tag:
Okay, after you add touchpoints to the map itself, you’ll be able to tell apart moments of pain, moments of glory, or simply moments of truth in general:
On the left-side panel, where personas and touchpoints are displayed, you can also filter by touchpoint category:
Moments of truth are the most memorable parts of a customer’s journey. Positive instances are called moments of glory, while negative encounters are moments of pain. To recognize and track them for multiple personas, you’ll need to assess what your customers expect before the experience and what they’re saying, thinking, and feeling during and after it happens.
Considering an end-to-end journey is essential since moments of truth can happen at any stage. Moments of truth significantly impact the overall business image and, consequently, on retention and revenue. Work on eliminating major pain points and replacing those with enough glorious occurrences to retain more customers and turn them into happy brand ambassadors.