The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  The Magic Castle leaders play offense. They don’t try to make everything perfect. (The lobby is vaguely reminiscent of an auto service shop waiting area.) But they nail the moments that stay with you. General Manager Darren Ross is always encouraging employees to go for the moments that make a customer’s jaw drop. In one case, a couple came back to the hotel one night, raving to a staffer about a cocktail they’d had at a local bar. The next day, after they returned to their room from sightseeing, they were astonished by the gift that was waiting for them. The staffer had tracked down the cocktail recipe from the bar and bought all the ingredients so they could make their own. That’s what playing offense looks like.

  (See the endnotes for one exception to this logic. Research suggests that when customers contact you because they’ve had problems with your product or service, you should focus on defense—that is, you should focus on efficiency and not try to “delight” them.)

  “Studies have consistently shown that reliability, dependability, and competence meet customer expectations,” said service expert Leonard Berry, a professor at Texas A&M University. “To exceed customer expectations and create a memorable experience, you need the behavioral and interpersonal parts of the service. You need the element of pleasant surprise. And that comes when human beings interact.” Here’s the surprise, though: Most service executives are ignoring the research about meeting versus exceeding expectations.

  The customer experience researchers at Forrester, a leading research and advisory firm, conduct an annual survey of more than 120,000 customers about their most recent experience with companies from a wide range of industries: banks, hotels, automakers, PC manufacturers, and more. One question in a recent survey—“The US Customer Experience Index (CX Index), 2016”—asked how the customers felt about that experience. They rated their emotions on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 reflected a very bad feeling and 7 a very good one.

  If you were a service executive, what would you do with the results of this survey question? You probably wouldn’t focus on the 7s; they love you, they’re happy. But given that everyone else—from the 1s to the 6s—has room for improvement, who gets the attention? Would you try to fix problems for the 1s, the people you’ve made miserable? Or would you try to delight the 6s to nudge them up to a 7? In an ideal world, you’d do everything at once—finding ways to vault everyone up to a 7. In our world, though, you face trade-offs of time and attention. So which customers would you focus on?

  Let’s simplify the decision a bit. Say you had to choose between two plans. Plan A would magically eliminate all your unhappy customers (the 1s, 2s, and 3s), boosting them up to a 4:

  And Plan B would instantly vault all your neutral-to-positive customers up to a 7:

  Which would you choose?

  We’ve presented this scenario to dozens of executives who focus on the consumer experience, including leaders from well-regarded brands such as Porsche, Disney, Vanguard, Southwest Airlines, and Intuit, and asked them which plan better described the way their company allocated its time and resources. They estimated, on average, that their companies spent 80% of their resources trying to improve the experience of seriously unhappy customers.

  That seems reasonable at first glance—they’re trying to eliminate the worst customer problems. But as a strategic investment, it’s madness.

  Here’s why. Forrester’s researchers have built models of the financial value of a customer. They know from survey responses, for instance, that an airline customer who gives a 7 (very positive) rating will spend about $2,200 on air travel over the next year. A customer giving a 4 rating, on the other hand, will spend only $800. The equivalent figures for the package shipping industry are $57 and $24.

  In other words, the happiest people in any industry tend to spend more, so moving a 4 to a 7 generates more additional spending than moving a 1 to a 4. Furthermore, there are dramatically more people in the “feeling positive” 4–6 zone than in the “feeling negative” 1–3 zone. So, with Plan B, you’re creating more financial value per person and reaching more people at the same time.

  As a result, choosing between Plan A and Plan B is not a close call. Here’s the astonishing finding from the Forrester data: If you Elevate the Positives (Plan B), you’ll earn about 9 times more revenue than if you Eliminate the Negatives (Plan A). (8.8 times, to be precise.) Yet most executives are pursuing Plan A. (See the footnote for more on the methodology and an anticipated quibble.)II

  How can leaders prioritize so poorly when so much money is at stake? The truth is that we should empathize with them, because we all make the same mistake in different areas of life. Research has shown, again and again, that we tend to obsess about problems and negative information. Sports fans think more about the games their teams lost than those they won. In our diaries we spend more time reflecting on the bad things that happened than the good. Negative feedback packs a heavier punch than positive; we obsess about 1 negative comment in a collection of 10 supportive ones. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania summarized dozens of studies that pitted negative information against positive. Their conclusion was right in the title of the paper: “Bad Is Stronger than Good.”

  So, when it comes to the way service executives think, it’s not surprising that bad is stronger than good. Their attention is naturally drawn to the customers who had the worst experiences. But in indulging that instinct, they miss an enormous opportunity.

  To be clear, we’re not recommending that leaders abandon their efforts to fix big problems. Rather, they should reallocate their attention. There’s nine times more to gain by elevating positive customers than by eliminating negative ones.

  And that process of elevation—of moving customers to 7—is not about filling pits or paving potholes. To create fans, you need the remarkable, and that requires peaks. Peaks don’t emerge naturally. They must be built.III

  3.

  How do you build peaks? You create a positive moment with elements of elevation, insight, pride, and/or connection. We’ll explore those final three elements later, but for now, let’s focus on elevation. To elevate a moment, do three things: First, boost sensory appeal. Second, raise the stakes. Third, break the script. (Breaking the script means to violate expectations about an experience—the next chapter is devoted to the concept.) Moments of elevation need not have all three elements but most have at least two.

  Boosting sensory appeal is about “turning up the volume” on reality. Things look better or taste better or sound better or feel better than they usually do. Weddings have flowers and food and music and dancing. (And they need not be superexpensive—see the footnote for more.IV) The Popsicle Hotline offers sweet treats delivered on silver trays by white-gloved waiters. The Trial of Human Nature is conducted in a real courtroom.

  It’s amazing how many times people actually wear different clothes to peak events: graduation robes and wedding dresses and home-team colors. At Hillsdale High, the lawyers wore suits and the witnesses came in costume. A peak means something special is happening; it should look different.

  To raise the stakes is to add an element of productive pressure: a competition, a game, a performance, a deadline, a public commitment. Consider the pregame jitters at a basketball game, or the sweaty-hands thrill of taking the stage at Signing Day, or the pressure of the oral defense at Hillsdale High’s Senior Exhibition. Remember how the teacher Susan Bedford said that, in designing the Trial, she and Greg Jouriles were deliberately trying to “up the ante” for their students. They made their students conduct the Trial in front of a jury that included the principal and varsity quarterback. That’s pressure.

  One simple diagnostic to gauge whether you’ve transcended the ordinary is if people feel the need to pull out their cameras. If they take pictures, it must be a special occasion. (Not counting the selfie addict, who thinks his face is a special occasion.) Our instinct to capture a moment says: I want to remember this. That’s a moment of elevation.

  What lessens a moment
are the opposite instincts: diminishing the sensory appeal or lowering the stakes. Imagine the things an unenlightened boss might say:

  • Why yes, serving Popsicles to guests is a delightful idea, but honestly it’s just not practical to staff a “hotline” all day, so why don’t we store them in a self-serve freezer near the ice machine?

  • Is it really necessary to render a verdict in the Trial of Human Nature? Shouldn’t both sides come out feeling like winners?

  • Yes, Signing Day is a terrific tradition, but we have so many students! What if we just printed their college choices in a program, so we can make time for an inspirational graduation speaker?

  Beware the soul-sucking force of “reasonableness.” Otherwise you risk deflating your peaks. Speed bumps are reasonable. Mount Everest is not reasonable.

  At this point, our guess is that you like the idea of introducing more peaks in your life or work. You get it. But you may be vastly underestimating the difficulty of making it happen. The concept is simple but the execution is hard.

  One reason it’s hard is that it’s usually no one’s job to create a peak. Jouriles and Bedford were required to teach English and history. They were required to grade their students’ essays and exams. But the Trial was purely optional, and to make it happen, they had to surmount countless annoying logistical and political hurdles. (Consider just one: Imagine what it would take to arrange school buses to haul students across town at a nonstandard time to a real courtroom, especially when there is no line item in the budget for such an expedition.) It would have been so easy for reasonableness to come creeping in.

  As another example: Remember John Deere’s First Day Experience? The program is a no-brainer, right? You may have imagined that it’s been rolled out worldwide.

  It hasn’t. Implementation has been spotty. Lani Lorenz Fry’s team, which created the experience, is part of an internal branding group. Her group designed the experience but it didn’t control the rollout. That was left to individual John Deere offices across Asia. While in some places, such as India and Beijing, the experience has been adopted enthusiastically, in others it has been ignored altogether. Why? It’s no one’s job, and it’s a hassle, and there’s always something happening that seems more urgent.

  This same dynamic is what makes it so hard to create peaks in our personal lives as well. Imagine that you and a good friend have always dreamed of seeing the northern lights. It is a “bucket list” thing for both of you. You’ve even pinpointed a specific place in Yukon, Canada, that would be the perfect spot to see them. What if you called that friend right now and tried to make the trip happen?

  You probably have a sense of what would follow: First, three weeks of phone tag. Then initial enthusiasm (“we should totally do that!”) followed by a return to normal life. Concerns about getting time off from work. Difficulty aligning calendars. What about the kids’ school schedules? Money issues. Guilt about excluding partners—should they come? Sure. Okay, now there are four calendars to align and new babysitting issues.

  The conclusion: “Maybe we’ll try again next year?”

  We’re not trying to pop your balloon. Rather, we want to build your determination: It’s going to be way harder than you think to create peaks. But once you’ve done it, you’re going to consider every ounce of effort worth it. You will have created your own defining moments.

  4.

  Eugene O’Kelly devotes his moving memoir, Chasing Daylight, to making sense of an extraordinary statement that begins the book: “I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live.”

  In the last week of May 2005, O’Kelly’s doctors told him that he suffered from the rare cancer glioblastoma multiforme. Three malignant tumors, the size of golf balls, had grown in his brain, and there was no cure. At the time, O’Kelly was 53 years old, the CEO of KPMG, the $4 billion, 20,000-employee accounting firm. He had a wife, Corinne, and two daughters. His younger daughter, Gina, 14, was still in school awaiting the summer break. Gina would likely go back to school in the fall without a father.

  “All the plans that Corinne and I had made for our future had to be junked,” he said. “The quicker I scrapped plans for a life that no longer existed, the better. I needed to come up with new goals. Fast.” On June 8, two weeks after the diagnosis, he stepped down as the leader of KPMG. Then he did what came naturally: He made a plan. “What can I say? I was an accountant not only by trade, but manner, as well. . . . [I] did not know how to do anything unplanned—dying included.”

  One night at his dining room table, he drew five concentric circles. It was a map of his relationships. His family was in the center circle, and in the outer ring were more distant relationships, such as business partners. He resolved to unwind his relationships—to “beautifully resolve” them—and to work systematically from the outer circle toward the middle. He reasoned that as his disease progressed, he’d want more uninterrupted time with the people who were closest, especially his family.

  He kept the first unwindings simple—a phone call or an email exchange sharing memories or mutual appreciations. He was careful not to let the conversations grow too sad or morbid; he wanted them to be special.

  The third and fourth circles were composed of closer friends and colleagues, and he met with them in person. O’Kelly wanted their encounters to be full of “pleasure and pleasures.” Sometimes they shared an exquisite meal. Other times, they met in a beautiful place: sitting at a park bench by the water or strolling through Central Park (boosting sensory appeal in an atmosphere of heightened stakes). In these unwindings, O’Kelly and his friends swapped stories and talked about life. He expressed gratitude for their friendship.

  He came to think of these peaks as Perfect Moments, and his mission, as he saw it, was to create as many of them as he could in his dwindling time.

  As the summer went on, he began to spend more time with his closest friends and family. He had moved to the center circle. He said goodbye to his sisters, Rose and Linda, and then, in August, he and Corinne and Gina went to stay at their second home, in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. By then O’Kelly had endured a regimen of radiation intended to shrink his tumors and earn him a few more weeks of life. He was very weak.

  In late August, his mother and brother flew to Tahoe for the weekend. It would be their final unwinding visit. On Sunday, which was a beautiful day, they took a boat out onto the lake.

  O’Kelly wrote, “After we were out there a while, I took my mother’s hand and walked her to the front of the boat to talk, just the two of us. I told her I was in a good place. I told her I would see her in heaven. A person of deep faith, she was comfortable with that. . . . It was a perfect day. I felt complete. Spent but complete.”

  The evening after his mother and brother left, Corinne lay in his arms on the couch. She sensed that he was starting to go and commented on his “absence.” He said, “You’re going to have to take over now. I’ve done all I can do.”

  About two weeks later, on September 10, 2005, O’Kelly died of a pulmonary embolism.

  What O’Kelly realized, in the shadow of his final days, was the extraordinary power of a moment. He wrote:

  I experienced more Perfect Moments and Perfect Days in two weeks than I had in the last five years, or than I probably would have in the next five years, had my life continued the way it was going before my diagnosis. Look at your own calendar. Do you see Perfect Days ahead? Or could they be hidden and you have to find a way to unlock them? If I told you to aim to create 30 Perfect Days, could you? How long would it take? Thirty days? Six months? Ten years? Never? I felt like I was living a week in a day, a month in a week, a year in a month.

  Now, take a second look at the beginning of O’Kelly’s memoir, especially those final two words: “I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live.”

  That opportunity to live was why he felt blessed. Shouldn’t we share his zeal for moments that matter? We may have more time to live than he did, but should that be a reason to put them off?<
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  This is the great trap of life: One day rolls into the next, and a year goes by, and we still haven’t had that conversation we always meant to have. Still haven’t created that peak moment for our students. Still haven’t seen the northern lights. We walk a flatland that could have been a mountain range.

  It’s not easy to snap out of this tendency. It took a terminal illness for Gene O’Kelly to do it.

  What would it take to motivate you to create a Perfect Moment?

  * * *

  I. We should note that Jouriles and Bedford were both extremely generous in sharing credit with others—both of them credited a supportive principal and school environment, and both cited a long list of intellectual influences on their work. It was our decision to keep the story focused on them for simplicity’s sake.

  II. (1) Methodology: This data was drawn from an analysis of 16 industries: airlines, automotive manufacturers, auto and home insurance, retail banks, direct banks, car rental, credit cards, health insurance, hotels, PC manufacturers, parcel shipping/delivery, traditional retail, online only retail, Internet service providers, TV service providers, and wireless providers. Although there were differences across the industries, of course, the fundamental pattern we’re citing was consistent. (2) The anticipated quibble. You might be thinking, “What about the negative word of mouth that might be spread by your unsatisfied customers if you don’t spend your time focusing on them?” Forrester measured that effect and found that customers discouraging others from the brand was incredibly rare. The negative word-of-mouth effect was so minimal, in fact, that they eventually eliminated it from the model.

  III. We should add that, as we got to know Forrester’s team, we realized we shared a similar perspective, and we’ve begun to explore a consulting partnership with them that would help companies deliver better customer experiences. At press time, the partnership was not formalized, but we’re intrigued by the idea of helping clients build peaks.