In the 1980s, former Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) CEO Jan Carlzon transformed the struggling carrier into a leader by turning customer service into an obsession. In doing so, he coined the phrase TheMoment of Truth to describe the exact point in time a customer made contact with a SAS employee — when SAS had to prove its value in order to keep the customer.
For SAS, Carlzon preached, the collective outcome of these Moments of Truth — 50 million of them per year, he tallied — ultimately determined the success or failure of his company.
Walmart founder Sam Walton put the same phrase into action by instituting the retailer’s famous Ten Foot Rule. Employees who came within 10 feet of customers were expected to greet them to influence The Moment of Truth at the shelf when they decided whether to buy a product.
In 2005, Proctor & Gamble declared The Moment of Truth to be about the customer’s experience with a product:
- seeing it in a store or online,
- buying and
- using it, and
- offering feedback about it.
In 2011, Google (perhaps not surprisingly) proclaimed The Moment of Truth to be when a customer researched a product online before making a purchase.
Fast forward to today. Given the massive disruption in retail over the past decade, if you asked a hundred consumers or retailers to define The Moment of Truth, you’d get just as many answers. That’s because for retailers and brands, The Moment of Truth has passed. It’s been replaced by the sum of the consumer’s connected experiences.
Here’s why: As consumers, the value we once associated with the act of buying a product has diminished. Sure, there are lots of ways to buy products today — online, in stores, using mobile payments and even digital currencies. But in an omnichannel world, every successful transaction is still just a transaction. A non-event, not a memorable experience that creates lasting value. Ironically, it’s often memorable only if something goes wrong.
Today, brands at the vanguard don’t push products. They curate connected customer experiences by leveraging partners to create ecosystems of value for consumers.
Take Airbnb. They’re not just selling rooms, they’re delivering a broader, more satisfying travel experience involving such diverse experiences as violin making in Paris, truffle hunting in Tuscany or driving classic cars in Malibu.
Or consider Ikea’s acquisition of Task Rabbit. It improves the home furnishing experience by taking the frustration of assembling furniture off the table.
For consumers, it’s no longer just about buying a product or service. It’s about anticipating memorable experiences from their favorite brands, regardless of industry. In today’s connected economy, customers are placing more value on their experiences than the products or services they’re consuming. They want experiences that make their lives easier and precisely reflect their preferences, needs and aspirations.
Think about it. Decades ago, a Moment of Truth with a retailer or brand was when a customer in a store interacted with a salesperson or spoke with a customer service rep by phone. With the dawn of the Web and e-commerce, the number of these touch points exploded. Today, the Internet of Things has brought the digital insights of the online world to the physical world. Using machine learning and augmented intelligence, retailers and brands design highly personalized customer journeys spanning the real world and the digital world, which to consumers are one.
For today’s connected consumer, the most recent great experience with a retailer or brand automatically raises the bar for all other competitors going forward. It’s become a virtuous cycle that’s made them feel empowered, always expecting more.
For retailers and brands, this has made connected customer experiences the new competitive battlefield. Instead of pushing products, they must now sell great customer experiences that play out seamlessly across their integrated physical and digital worlds.
Leading born-on-the-Web retailers such as Amazon understand the importance of connected consumer experiences for creating greater value. That’s why industry pundits are so intrigued by the company’s foray into brick-and-mortar stores and its acquisition of the Whole Foods supermarket chain. They’re eager to see what it holds for the connected customer experience.
For retailers and brands, the implications of Connected Consumer Experiences are daunting. How do data-driven marketers reconcile the new Moment of Truth — the sum total of the consumer’s connected experiences?
They have to go well beyond selling products to address broader consumer needs and aspirations like beauty, adventure, health or wellness. They must orchestrate customer experiences that span multiple brands, service providers and commercial ecosystems.
Instead of static product offers, carefully designed connected experiences need to continuously raise the bar, feeding the virtuous cycle of consumer expectations. Imagine if a fitness equipment store went beyond its traditional boundaries to serve its customers — as an example, when a consumer buys a rowing machine, the store offers not just assembly services but also
- fitness apparel,
- nutritional supplements and a
- trial membership at a local rowing club.
Doing this at scale is a tall order. It requires capitalizing on the gold mine of customer data retailers are sitting on and IoT insights from the physical world, including stores. Connecting, analyzing and sharing it in real-time across company silos and with their new partners in value to
- understand,
- anticipate and
- satisfy customer needs.
And most important — continuously detecting and learning new consumer consumption patterns so customer experiences get better and better.
The new marching orders for retailers and brands are clear: they must deliver connected consumer experiences that add up to The Moment of Truth.
Worshiping a Golden Calf on Sunday Morning Is Deceptively Easy
All sin is idolatry because every sin is an exercise in trust of something or someone other than the one true God to satisfy, fulfill, or bless.
.. We must take great care, then, not to assume that even in our religious environments, where we put the Scriptures under so many noses, that it is Jesus the exalted Christ who is being worshiped.
.. Once upon a time, I sat through a little ditty in a church service in which the congregation was led to sing, “I can change the world with these two hands,” and the question struck me like a lightning bolt: “Who exactly am I worshiping right now?”
Likewise, every weekend men and women file into church buildings in order to exult in the rhetorical skill of their preacher, to admire him and think of their church as his church, not Christ’s church.
.. We worship the worship experience; we tithe with expectation of return from heaven’s slot machine; we dress to impress
.. We see in Exodus 32:5 that even the worshipers of the golden calf ascribed their worship to the covenant Lord Yahweh.
.. Tim Keller elaborates: “So Luther says that even after you are converted by the gospel your heart will go back to operating on other principles unless you deliberately, repeatedly set it to gospel-mode.”
.. The proclamation of the good news of Jesus and the extolling of his eternal excellencies is always an interruption, always a disruption.
I’m a White Man. Hear Me Out.
he argued, had hurt the Democratic Party. He maintained that too intense a focus on each minority group’s discrete persecution comes at the expense of a larger, unifying vision.
.. But what too many took issue with was, well, his identity. “White men: stop telling me about my experiences!” someone later scrawled on a poster that was put up to advertise a talk, “Identity Is Not Politics,” that he gave at Wellesley College.
.. he asserts that “classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one ‘epistemology,’ black women have another. So what remains to be said?”
.. But she worries that awareness disclaimers and privilege apologies have ferried us to a silly, self-involved realm of oppression Olympics. They promote the idea that people occupying different rungs of privilege or victimization can’t possibly grasp life elsewhere on the ladder... what people in a given victim group sometimes seem to be saying is: “You must understand my experience, and you can’t understand my experience.”“They argue both, so people shrug their shoulders and walk away,” he said... But I question the wisdom of turning categories into credentials when it comes to politics and public debate. I reject the assumptions — otherwise known as prejudices — that certain life circumstances prohibit sensitivity and sound judgment while other conditions guarantee them. That appraises the packaging more than it does the content. It ignores the complexity of people. It’s reductive... At the beginning of this column I shared the sorts of personal details that register most strongly with those Americans who tuck each of us into some hierarchy of blessedness and affliction. So you know some important things about me, but not the most important ones: how I responded to the random challenges on my path, who I met along the way, what I learned from them, the degree of curiosity I mustered and the values that I honed as a result.
A Fountain Fullness of Love
Bonaventure taught that there are three books from which we learn wisdom: The Book of Creation, The Book of Jesus and Scripture, and The Book of Experience. He also taught that there are three pairs of eyes. The first pair sees all things as a fingerprint or footprint of God (vestigia Dei), which evokes foundational respect and teachability. The second pair of eyes is the hard work of honest self-knowledge—awareness of how you are processing your reality moment by moment. This is necessary to keep your own lens clean and open, and it is the work of your entire lifetime. The third pair is the eyes of contemplation, which allow you to see things in their essence and in their core meaning. Only then can you receive the transmitted image of God on your soul.
.. Bonaventure says we must begin “at the bottom, presenting to ourselves the whole material world as a mirror through which we may pass over to God, the Supreme [Artisan].”
.. Everything comes from God, exemplifies God, and then returns to God. Bonaventure says that sums up all his teaching.