You know you've had an experience because you remember it.
Our Experiencing Self lives in our present.
We experience hundreds of things daily. Our first coffee, catching the bus, arriving at work, having a conversation with a customer, or reading a great book before bed - this is our Experiencing Self. We live in the present, processing inputs and information from the life around us in a continuous series of what I like to call ‘moments’. ‘Moments’ don’t leave behind a memory trace once we've had them. Kahneman calculated that the psychological presence of an experience lasts about three seconds.
Our Remembering Self writes the story of our life.
It's our Remembering Self that writes the story of our lives. There's no such thing as a remembered moment - an experience - that doesn’t have emotion attached to it, because emotion triggers long-term memory.
How do you know if something was an experience?
You recalled it, that’s how.
Think back to a random day two weeks ago - if you can easily recall any moments from that day it’s because it was an experience. An emotion formed the memory.
That’s how the human brain works. (If you want the science on it, click here for an explanation of the limbic system).
Customers can't remember every transaction with us (which is probably just as well) as the brain wouldn't cope.
Nor do they want to remember them.
And we only want them to remember positive experiences. The ones that generate engagement.
A long wait to speak to a support agent or a late home delivery triggers customers to recall them negatively.
Emotional connections don’t need a series of well-executed interactions because they tap into the same neural networks in the same way as the relationships we have with other humans. This creates a longer-lasting, more resilient relationship that allows for the occasional mistake and can evolve.
We’re in the business of designing memories. Because memories are created by feelings. Feelings are emotions. It's the emotion that creates engagement.
And the whole purpose of everything we do is: To. Drive. Engagement. Long term.
Customers interact across the continuum of a journey. It starts as a consumer becoming a prospect as they first touch the brand, progress into interacting with it (with a conversation, a retail visit, a website hit, and so on), progresses to buy, and as a customer uses, fix problems and renew.
It’s a series of interactions overlaying a series of transactions. Marketing, sales, retail, call centre, billing, or other types of interactions, or paying, collecting.
The first layer of cx
The signing of a contract isn't usually an experience (unless, say, it’s your new house, so the process is probably emotional, and deeply remembered).
A contract signing is a straightforward interaction, something to get done as simply as possible. Getting a purchase delivered to your door is an interaction.
Calling a call centre and getting answered in good time is an interaction.
Being simple, consistent, or fast (caution here: ‘fast’ is relative and changes with context) is important – it builds consumer trust - but otherwise, these are interactions.
And interactions are table stakes. They’re not usually critical to a customer’s experience unless done badly.
Consistency creates loyalty and relies on your technology and process stack. We experience a brand like a mosaic, made of many individual touch points and when faced with a big choice, say to leave or stay with a brand and the consumer already has a disjointed and confusing impression of the brand, loyalty is already eroded and vulnerable.
Yet, consistency seems to be an afterthought for many brands.
Consistency is needed on many levels, including the surface, where visual consistency also matters. Apple’s product design is a terrific example of maintaining a consistent experience across a range of products. Apple creates common visual and functional patterns across its many different devices, which lets people easily migrate between them and helps keep them loyal to the brand.
This is the first layer of experience design. We mustn’t minimise the importance of these tasks or jobs. They're vital; they need to be frictionless, work, and work consistently.
Functional activity can also be invested with emotional potential. Look at how Apple transformed the functional activity of opening a box. If it can be made meaningfully different and of value to the customer - then it can become emotional.
And we must be aware that when the function goes wrong, what should be hygienic can quickly turn into a moment of pain and stress.
Getting a mobile signal is a basic hygiene factor - but if the signal fails when I most need it, I get emotional!
This is the design layer of ‘customer experience’ that creates trust – a crucial enabler of engagement, as you can’t have long-term engagement without it. Trust breaks if promises are not kept, or when poor service is inexcusable. And, paradoxically, trust can be enhanced when a broken experience is remedied in an honest, proactive, empathetic way.
But when everyone, and every brand, delivers frictionless and trust well enough, you really don’t want these interactions to be the sum of all remembered experiences with your brand.
These types of interactions won’t define you. It’s the stuff that you have to get out of the way before allowing the customer to achieve their goal.
They only define you as a brand when you get it wrong.
The job of the person managing interactions in, say, the service centre, field delivery, or billing, is to be frictionless and consistent in allowing the customer to achieve the goal and create an interaction on or better than expectations, that delivers on the promise.
Yet being involved with you in an interaction, and trusting you with that interaction doesn’t mean they are engaged with you.
This idea is important. Engagement reflects the psychological and motivational state of the customer. Without this state of motivation, you have either a simple service interaction experience, which is fine or a negative interaction experience. Which isn’t.
The second layer of cx
But the end goal isn't just one, or even a series, of experiences.
Because what we experience doesn't equal what we remember.
What matters are the experiences customers remember with emotion.
This is the second type of CX layer, and it’s the critical interaction for memory. This is the experience layer that we design for.
We design for something remembered.
Memories tend to be multi-sensory, self-referential, and part of our autobiographical history, shaped by the part of our brain that notices things co-occurring and that ties them together. It's the result of repetition and reinforcement. (That's why when you are building a brand you should repeat your brand promise over and over).
It is the psychological and motivational state created through a good experience, and these experiences resonate differently for different people.
What resonates with me may not resonate for you, or vice-versa. Experiences are not universal to all of us. Whatever it is, the experience is recalled because it means something psychologically or motivationally. So, we design experiences to trigger an emotion to be stored in long-term memory.
Engagement continues over time
But still, on its own, it’s not enough. We want engagement, not just emotional memory, and a critical element of engagement is that it must continue over time.
Pick your own best definition of engagement - there are several similar alternatives if you look; mine is the emotional and cognitive attachment the consumer creates with a brand.
Whatever definition you use, the concept is the same – an attachment that enables emotion and sentiment to affect the outcome of a choice, one that overcomes rationality. Attachment is at the core of any, and all, strong relationships, going much deeper than attitude and, with consumers, reflects how they feel - positively or negatively - about a brand.
Duration is critical because a one-off experience rarely drives engagement (loyalty). They must repeat or refresh to stay top of mind. So, you must design experiences that engage in duration but stay consistent with the brand promise.
But here’s the key; consumers don’t choose between experiences. They choose between the memory of those experiences. When we think about the future, we don't think of our future usually as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories, which is what brings customers back.
You aren’t designing experiences, you’re designing engagement. Ergo: you are a consumer engagement person, orchestrating the service integration layer; speed (but not necessarily always), ease, consistency (trust) with no friction; and the experience layer (into memory through emotion, and not time-limited, to drive engagement) and making them work together.
Surprise. Engagement is just like a human relationship, a series of interactions, over time, that defines how we feel about each other, the depth of our connection, and our level of commitment to each other. In business jargon, that’s a value equation, with the consumer and brand both getting equally out of the relationship.
As with any relationship, the connection between a consumer and a brand evolves, based on many factors. Emotional responses, rational considerations, and shared values come into play at some point in the relationship’s growth, often overlapping and intermingling. While individual consumers (and brands) vary in infinite ways, the broad cycle of how a consumer enters a relationship with a brand and how that relationship deepens (or ends) appears remarkably consistent across industries and consumer types.
When consumers first approach engagement with brands, rational considerations tend to dominate - think of price, promotions, or loyalty programs. These influences also often trigger the end of a brand relationship – failing to deliver on the emotional connection of promise it has built, a big price hike, or consistently poor service. Nearly 3/4th's of customers who leave while using or receiving service on a product leave for rational reasons such as prices, faulty products or wrong orders. Under 1/5th cited emotional reasons for leaving a brand, such as feeling rudely spoken to by an employee or unfairly treated in a dispute.
Factors that drive emotional responses, however, are critical to almost everything that lies between the beginning and end of a consumer’s relationship with a brand.
Emotions inspire and frame the depth of brand loyalty as well as advocacy. As the duration of a consumer’s relationship and exposure to a brand increases, emotional attachment takes over, and rational needs fall away. Most brand-loyal consumers use emotional language when speaking of their favourite brands—words like love, happiness, and adore.
We rarely can optimise our processes well enough in the hope of achieving long-term engagement or brand relevancy.
How to understand an experience
great explainer, thanks.