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Insights · Touchpoint strategy

How to find the moments that matter most in a customer journey

By BREME · Updated

In short

The moments that matter most are the few points in a journey where the customer's feelings run highest, where a promise is made or tested, and where the experience ends. People remember those moments and judge the whole relationship by them. To find them, map the full journey from real research, look for sharp rises and drops in emotion, high stakes and handovers, then choose no more than five to build your strategy around.

Who this is for: CX leads, operations managers, practice managers and executives in membership bodies, multi-site clinics, professional services firms and growing e-commerce or subscription brands who need to decide where to focus improvement work.

Not every touchpoint deserves the same attention

Once an organisation maps a journey properly, it usually finds forty or fifty touchpoints. Every one of them has a team that thinks theirs is important. If you try to improve them all at once, the effort spreads thin and nothing changes enough for the customer to notice.

The opposite mistake is just as common. Teams measure each touchpoint on its own, see good scores everywhere, and conclude the experience is fine. In their 2013 Harvard Business Review article, The Truth About Customer Experience, Alex Rawson, Ewan Duncan and Conor Jones argued that focusing narrowly on touchpoints can make customers look happier than they really are, and that the bigger picture is the customer's end-to-end journey.

So the job is not to rank touchpoints by how busy they are or how much they cost to run. It is to find the handful of moments that shape how the customer remembers the whole journey, and to be very good at those.

Why a few moments carry the memory

Customers do not keep a running average of every interaction. Nielsen Norman Group explains the peak-end rule, a cognitive bias that affects how people remember past events. Our memories centre on the most intense moments of an experience and on how it ends.

The rule comes from a 1993 study by Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Fredrickson. Participants held a hand in cold water. Most later chose to repeat the longer trial, which had more total discomfort, because it ended with a short spell of slightly warmer water. Nielsen Norman Group also notes that negative moments weigh heavily, and that people tend to remember negative experiences more vividly.

For a CX team, the implication is direct. A journey can be smooth for weeks, then one confusing bill or one unanswered complaint becomes the story the customer tells. And a long, ordinary process can be remembered well if the last step is handled with care.

Start with the full map, built from evidence

You cannot pick the moments that matter from inside a meeting room. Staff will choose the moments they own, the moments that generate internal work, or the moments that leadership hears about. Those are not always the moments customers care about.

The NSW Government's digital service toolkit says to base a journey map on evidence from real user research and not to rely on assumptions. It also suggests keeping each map to one goal so it can focus on the parts of the journey that matter most. Nielsen Norman Group puts what the user is doing, thinking and feeling at the heart of the map, with emotional data coming from qualitative research.

In practice, the inputs we use to find the moments that matter are:

  • Conversations with customers, including people who left or nearly left, asking them to tell the story of their journey in their own order.
  • Complaints, emails and call notes from the past few months, read for repeated words and the stage they cluster around.
  • Frontline staff, who can usually name the three points where customers get upset without looking anything up.
  • Behaviour data you already hold: where people drop out, call back, ask the same question twice or go quiet.
  • Walking the journey yourself, start to finish, as a new customer would.

Five signs a moment matters

With the map on the wall, we work through it stage by stage and look for five signals. A moment that shows two or more of them is a strong candidate.

  • A sharp rise or drop in emotion. Draw the emotion line across the map. The steep parts matter more than the flat parts.
  • A promise made or tested. The moment you tell a customer what will happen, and the moment they find out whether it did.
  • High stakes for the customer. Money, health, time off work, their reputation with their own boss or family. Customers are less forgiving when something important to them is on the line.
  • A handover. Any point where the customer passes between teams, systems or people, especially when they are already anxious.
  • An ending. The last step of a stage, a project, a membership year or a complaint. Endings are where memories set.

The usual suspects

Every organisation is different, which is why the research matters. But the same kinds of moments are worth checking first in any journey where several teams touch the customer.

The first week after joining is one. Expectations are high, the customer has just made a decision and is looking for proof it was the right one, and responsibility is often passing from the people who sold to the people who deliver.

The first bill or renewal notice is another. It is the moment a promise about value meets a number, and it is frequently sent by a system nobody in the customer team looks at.

The first time something goes wrong is often the biggest of all. How an organisation handles a delay, an error or a complaint tells the customer more than any amount of smooth service before it. Nielsen Norman Group's advice for errors and outages is to explain the problem, give a reasonable estimate for resolution and never blame the user. That holds well beyond websites.

And the ending: a project closing, a membership lapsing, a client leaving. Most organisations put little effort here because the revenue has already happened. The peak-end rule suggests it is exactly where the lasting impression forms.

Choose no more than five

Once the candidates are marked, the room will have more than five. Narrowing down is the real strategic decision, and it should be made deliberately rather than by whoever argues longest.

We ask three questions of each candidate. How much does this moment shape whether customers stay, return or recommend us? How far is today's experience from what customers expect at this point? And can we realistically change it in the next six to twelve months, given who owns it and what systems sit behind it?

Moments that score high on the first two and are possible on the third go on the shortlist. Moments that matter enormously but cannot be changed yet go on a separate list, with a note about what would need to happen first. Write both lists down. The second one is often the business case for a bigger piece of work.

Nielsen Norman Group points out that insights and ownership are critical elements of a map that are often overlooked. So for each of the final five, name an owner. If nobody owns a moment that matters, that gap is the first finding.

Turn the moments into strategy

Choosing the moments is only useful if it changes what the organisation does. For each moment on the shortlist, we write a short brief that a team can act on:

  • What the customer needs to feel at this point, in their words, taken from the research.
  • What happens today, including the steps behind the scenes that the customer never sees.
  • What good would look like, described as an experience rather than a process change.
  • Who owns it, and which other teams have to be involved.
  • How we will know it improved: a measure tied to that moment, such as repeat contacts, drop-out at that step or what customers say about it.

Keep checking that you picked the right ones

The moments that matter can shift. A new product, a new system or a change in who your customers are can move the peaks. The NSW toolkit advises updating your understanding as new research becomes available, and that applies here.

We suggest revisiting the shortlist at least once a year, and sooner if complaints start clustering somewhere new. Keep listening to frontline staff in particular. They usually notice a new pain point months before it shows up in a report.

Sources

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