Ever since most of us were five (when that ignorant store clerk blew us off and blew off the 10 dollars he didn't know we had to spend), we've been victims of "customer moments of truth" gone bad.
I never heard that term--customer moment of truth--until IBM software chief Steve Mills mentioned it when I last interviewed him. In response to a question about end-to-end integration and demand-to-delivery processing, Mills said, "Every customer contact is a moment of truth for a business."
How many times have you been the victim of a customer moment of truth gone awry? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? How many times have you walked away shaking your head at just how badly some store or company screwed up when you were the customer? Better yet, how many stories have you heard from friends, family, or colleagues about failed customer moments of truth? Now add up the dollars, the loyalty, and the customers lost. Those poor, stupid businesses--some of them long gone and not a moment to soon.
Is your company the next poor, stupid business?
Over the last year, I've heard a lot about that silver bullet they call the customer relationship management (CRM) system. When Mills talks about customer moments of truth, he's thinking about how to solve that problem with such a system, and how to make sure the other systems that need to feed it are in place, too. If you want, he and IBM will come to your place of business and deploy such a system for you. According to Mills, "businesses need to serve their customers quickly and effectively with the right information at that point in time." There's no question that Mills gets it. He'd probably do a pretty good job if you called him.
Is a system the solution?
But I'm not so sure that a system is the solution to every customer moment of truth. And, for those moments that can be solved by a system, are those the right moments to bother solving with a system? And is your system delivering the right information? For example, I recently ordered two cell phones from Nextel. The experience involved many moments of truth, most of which went bad and most of which involved a system. One of Nextel's customer moments of truth happens when a potential customer inquires about the company's services and products. (That's a customer moment of truth for all of us.) I made such an inquiry through Nextel's Web site, which informed me that, if I bought a phone, it would be shipped to me via overnight delivery. The site also told me that I'd get an instant $25 discount off Nextel's regular price of the phone.
So I ordered two phones. Not only didn't they show up the next day (or the day after that), but now that I've had the phones for almost eight weeks, I still haven't seen the discount. (Maybe it will appear on my next credit card statement.) Also, when the phones arrived, neither one of them worked. According to Nextel spokesperson Audrey Schaefer, the shipping system and the phone activation system were out of synch. The shipping system beat the activation system. As a result, the phones showed up too early and were not activated yet. No wonder overnight delivery would have been a bad idea.As it turns out, Nextel does use an overnight delivery service. But Nextel takes a few days to process an order and prepare a phone for shipment. Once shipped, the phone shows up the next day. But, when I ordered the phones, Nextel's site drew more attention to the overnight shipping feature than to the fine print that hinted (but didn't come right out and say) that it could take the company a few days to actually ship a phone.
Here was a whole bunch of customer moments of truth tucked behind one transaction. First, there was the moment I went to Nextel's Web site. Then, there was that moment I called to place my order. Then came the out-of-the-box experience. After that, there was the call to customer service to find out why the phones didn't work, followed by the call back from Nextel's technicians to get them working. Then came another call to customer service after I realized that I had not received the discount. Turns out, the discount isn't applied to the transaction itself. The discount comes separately as a credit to your credit card bill. Not very instantaneous, if you ask me. (And I'm still waiting.)
If a single transaction can result in so many customer moments of truth, you can imagine how many more possibilities there must be for Nextel. The fact that so many of these moments went wrong made me wonder: Does Nextel know exactly when all of those customer moments of truth happen? Do they know the success criteria for each of those moments? And do they know whether the problem can be solved with a system?
Any CRM deployment must begin by identifying when and where each and every customer moment of truth takes place, and by knowing the difference between success and failure. One thing is certain: You don't need a system to figure that out. You just need good old common sense--or a sharp five year old.
Do you know what your customers' moments of truth are? Have you got problems a system can fix? E-mail David or TalkBack below.
