Winning the mind at decision time

Addressing Fundamental Human Truths at the right moment can turn customers into lifelong fans.

Rapide has launched a research effort to explore a series of marketing concepts from unusual angles. The first such "Thought Bubble" is in progress - here's a taste.

Summary

Two interesting concepts familiar to marketers - "Fundamental Human Truths" and "Moments of Truth" - are rarely used in concert. But putting them together can demonstrate which parts of your customer experience are capable of keeping a customer forever - by turning concepts from psychology into quantifiable opportunities.

FHTs and MOTs

Fundamental Human Truths (FHT’s) are universally accepted ideas like “Dreams are worth chasing” or “I deserve respect as an individual”. Many marketers and psychologists have tried categorising them - most notably Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, which puts conditions for basic survival (food, shelter, warmth) on the bottom and self actualisation (ambition, dreams) at the top.

A Moment of Truth (MOT) is simpler: it's a discrete experience (often quite small) that has a disproportionate effect on the customer's opinion of you. For example, how long the wait for the lift is, or the facial expression of your receptionist.

Your business may have hundreds of MOTs, but how many of them coincide with FHTs? - In other words, which MOTs pack the biggest punch with customer experience? That's what we're researching.

Our 'Thought Bubble' is: Find the MOTs that also speak to FHTs, and you know all the critical touch points of your business. Some examples:

Fred Lee's book "If Disney ran your Hospital" gives the example of a woman who graded her clinical experience very negatively ... because the nurse assigned to her room kept entering without knocking. The patient's major surgical procedure had been completed successfully, yet what mattered most to her was a tiny aspect of staff behaviour.

Why? Because the nurse’s actions (at a Moment of Truth) had bumped up against a Fundamental Human Truth: people have a right to privacy.

A 64-year old woman wanted a spare pushchair for her baby grandson, so her working daughter could drop off the baby for the day without needing to ferry equipment around. The store she visited only sold models that faced the baby forwards, explaining that "This lets the child interact with its surroundings." Big mistake. That MOT was in conflict with another Fundamental Human Truth: Children deserve their family's attention. To the grandmother, this meant a chair with the child facing her.

In the UK, first-class railway passengers were invited to text their impressions of the service to a mobile number in the train carriage. A surprising proportion of the responses were about apparently minor matters: discarded newspapers, noisy people, a broken kettle in the bar car. In other words, the moments of experience that rubbed up against FHTs: comfort, dignity, thirst.

At Moments of Truth like these, customers make big decisions in the blink of an eye. These decisions can reduce their lifetime value to zero ... or raise it to hundreds of thousands of pounds. So if you can easily and quickly spot these decision shaping experiences, and focus on giving a lot more people the most positive outcome imaginable when they experience them, the value-add to your business can be colossal. Because you've pushed the right button at precisely the right moment, gaining immense emotional traction.

Fortunately, there's a way to listen in to those conversations and put the resulting mass of data to use.

The Rapide Sentiment Challenge

At Rapide, we run a Sentiment Challenge for companies wanting to uncover the customer experiences that really matter... and it's already working for companies including Premier Inn, Honda, Audi, Virgin Active and Burger King. The results are an easy to manage and award winning service delivering unparalleled analysis...FAST.

Click here to find out more about how you can take part.

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