What Are Moments Of Truth In Customer Service?
On the heels of TQM’s moment of fame, Jan Carlzon, who was the CEO of SAS Airlines, quietly published his book Moments of Truth (Ballinger Publishing Company, 1987). It’s an account of how the airline, under Carlzon’s leadership, asked what influenced its passengers’ perceptions of service.
What the airline found was that perceptions of service depended on how customers remembered discrete encounters they had with the airline. These encounters — or moments of truth — can be either memorably positive experiences or memorably negative experiences.
Each kind of encounter plays a critical part in an individual customer’s future purchasing decisions. For example, a two-minute phone conversation can influence a customer’s opinion about the entire enterprise — even more so than a two-hour flight!
The moment-of-truth approach still lives on because its premise can be applied to any business, large or small, and to any medium, such as voice mail, e-mail, and so on. The moment-of-truth method of thinking about customer service still holds up, because no matter what service or product you provide, your customers are, more than ever, making quick judgments based on fleeting contacts.
Even though the quick judgment of your organization by customers may not seem fair, it, nevertheless, is customer logic.
For example: Imagine that a customer receives an e-mail from your company that has no greeting and sports several spelling mistakes. The sloppiness and carelessness of the e-mail, for many customers, can signify that your staff members aren’t professional, your company doesn’t care, and the quality of your product is questionable — and nobody wants that!
Customer perception is reality, and service excellence, to a large degree, is managing your customers’ perceptions and expectations.
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