It's all about Moment of Truth
You are browsing on your favourite food aggregator app. You have selected the restaurant, added your favourite cuisine to the cart and have proceeded to the checkout screen. As you are prepared to make the payment, a message gets flashed on the screen, "Your location is currently unserviceable." All your excitement comes crashing down.
The question is, who is to be blamed? The restaurant or the food aggregator app or the delivery person?
What has been loosely described in the above instance is the user flow of ordering food through an app. The need is to take a step back and understand the journey of ordering food more holistically.
The journey begins with a 'trigger'. The urge to have food or gathering of friends/family to celebrate an occasion, etc.
The next stage is 'choice'. What kind of food (cuisine) to order and from which place (restaurant) to order from
The next stage is 'discover'. Do you call up the restaurant or you look it up on the food aggregator app.
The final stage is 'transact'. This is the stage where you actually place the order for food. This is what has been described in the above example.
From a food aggregator's point of view, the key question is - How does it establish a presence (awareness) in the users' mind? This is where a large chunk of the ad dollars are deployed by companies and rightly so. You can't be a helpful brand if you are not present in the moments they need you the most.
"80 percent of success is just showing up"
- Woody Allen
The Moment of Truth
Let's zoom back into the food ordering instance. Each activity/step on the app is a micro-moment in itself, as there is an interplay of physical and digital touch-points all along. The touch-points which have the potential to impact customer experience are described as the 'moment of truth.'
A moment of truth is simply any interaction during which a customer may form an impression of your brand or product. This impression may be either positive or negative.
In an increasingly crowded and commoditised market, brands can only differentiate themselves on the basis of service. If you see the history of successful brands and products, very often you will find the incumbents' weakness often becomes the challenger brands' USP.
Let's look at the case of Uber. Before Uber came into this world, hailing a cab or a rickshaw was an inconvenient experience and I am sure everyone has their share of experiences. Uber picked up this problem and built an entire business around it. Its proposition was simple, through its mobile app one could hail a cab at the click of a button. It also provided the estimated fare and time of arrival, which provided a great deal of convenience to the customers. The problem was never the availability of the vehicles, but it was the sheer inconvenience which created an opening for a challenger brand.
The Interplay of Micro-Moments and Customer Experience
In recent research which our team at Turian Labs undertook in the financial services domain - identifying the 'moment of truth' was a key ask. The study revolved around understanding the need for financial planning and the role of digital interventions.
During one of the user interactions, the discussion moved towards the usage of digital apps for managing finances. The user used an expense tracker which automatically picked up the transactions (income/expenses) based on the text messages. He was quite happy with the convenience of tracking the finances, but there was a moment in time which pushed the user to curtail the use of the app. When probed about the reason, the user articulated the difficulty in manually entering expenses done in ‘cash’ on the app — as the app only picked up information from the text messages and not beyond.
As you can see, the moment of truth can occur at any stage in the journey and at a later date as well. So, it is imperative to visualise the macro journey along with the micro-moments which help in defining the overall Customer Experience.
What's your moment of truth? Would love to hear your stories as well.
Until next time.
~ Sajid
(Sajid leads the Research & Strategy at Turian Labs.)