If you can't fix anything else about your customer's experience, make sure the end of it is as positive as you can make it. Because... when we evaluate our memory of an experience, we are biased towards remembering the end, and the peak (either positive or negative).
I found this out because I've been reading a lot about the work of Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winning Psychologist, who studies cognitive illusions. These are not like the visual illusions you may have seen. Cognitive illusions are mistakes of judgement, not perception. Kahneman studies illusions to understand the wiring, as it were, of our decision-making processes.
Kahneman and his colleagues studied a number of situations, such as painful medical procedures, which were evaluated by patients as less unpleasant if the end of the procedure was less unpleasant than the preceeding part.
For a more everyday example, consider children's dentists, who often give a treat out at the end of a visit -- they figured out a successful strategy to manage the memory of the event.
In a few days, I'll be headed to Algonquin Park for a week of canoeing and listening to loons. I wish it were going to be two weeks. But I can take comfort in knowing that my evaluation of the holiday will be heavily influenced by the peak event (good or bad) and the end of the trip. Duration of the trip, according to Kahneman, doesn't count for that much.
There are some other things Dr. Kahneman has figured out that we are going to plop down on the desk and poke around here over the next few posts, but this one is huge, don't you think?
So here are a few questions to think about:
- What are you doing to ensure that the end of an interaction is as positive as possible? Are you wrapping things up in pretty tissue and sticking a gold seal on them? Are you telling your customer what a wise choice they have made?
- If we could meter your customers from beginning to middle to end of their experience, would there be a nice peak somewhere ... a positive peak?
- When you are handling complaints, are you making sure to offset that negative peak with something more positive?
We've become rather sloppy in the management end of the business community; we aren't doing a great job of extracting and using the best learning from academic research, instead relying on personal intuition and traditional management practices. It's time we marketers and managers grew up, and started getting a little help from the behavioral sciences, instead of thinking we learned it all in Psychology 101.