{"id":21578,"date":"2019-05-31T13:27:08","date_gmt":"2019-05-31T17:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/?p=21578"},"modified":"2019-08-23T05:47:31","modified_gmt":"2019-08-23T09:47:31","slug":"why-customer-memories-are-more-important-to-your-customer-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/why-customer-memories-are-more-important-to-your-customer-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Customer Memories are More Important To Your CX"},"content":{"rendered":"

I enjoy fishing. When I need a new lure, I go to Discount Tackle on First Street in Bradenton, Florida. When I go in, we have a chat and a laugh. However, my great experience is not why I return and drive past six or seven other bait and tackle shops to get to it. Economists say the reason I go back to Discount Tackle is that I\u00a0remember\u00a0<\/em>it was a great experience.<\/p>\n

We discussed the importance of memory for a Customer Experience<\/a> and the influences on how we remember things in our latest podcast. We don’t choose between experiences; we choose between the memories of experiences. That is why helping your customers have a wonderful memory of your experience is essential.<\/p>\n

Our memories are imperfect, and our brains favor certain types of information when making memories. Therefore, it\u2019s not necessarily the case that a good experience translates into an equally good memory or vice versa. You can remember things as being better or worse than they are.<\/p>\n

Therefore, you must understand how memories work. If you don\u2019t, you may be managing the wrong metrics in your Customer Experience.<\/p>\n

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How Memory Works<\/strong><\/p>\n

A significant reason Discount Tackle gets my business is the\u00a0Peak-End Rule.<\/a>\u00a0Nobel-Prize Winning Economist and Professor Daniel Kahneman along with Barbara Frederickson theorized that what people remember most about an experience is the moment when they felt the most intense emotion and how they felt at the end.<\/p>\n

From a Customer Experience design perspective, you should know where the peak emotion occurs during your customer journey and how the experience ends. Also, you should ensure customers feel at these moments the emotion that delivers value for your organization.<\/p>\n

The Peak-End Rule applies specifically to evaluative memory, which is a retrospective evaluation. In other words, you had an experience, and you’re looking back on it. The Peak-End Rule is how you decide whether an experience was good or bad. Research suggests that if you measure people’s reactions to an experience second by second, like with a dial they can turn to indicate how they feel, then throw the peak and end emotion into a model, it is predictive of how people will evaluate the experience.<\/p>\n

However, that’s not the only way of evaluating and thinking about an experience. Episodic memory or self-referential memory, is autobiographical. In this type of memory, it\u2019s not whether or not you liked it or if it was good or bad, it\u2019s what you remember about the past experiences.<\/p>\n

For example, when I am talking about Discount Tackle, I remember that the store has what I need and could help me find it if I couldn\u2019t find it myself. Also, I recall laughing and joking with the people who work there, other fishermen, like myself, bonding over our shared interest in catching fish on the open sea. These details are from different experiences, but together, they create my memory of the shop.<\/p>\n

It is like a fishing net. Episodic memory is a bunch of individual bits of data that are all tied together in a network like a fishing net. It helps if you picture the data points as being the knots in the net and then the network between them is all of the rope strands connecting the knots.<\/p>\n

When you remember something, it does not happen in isolation. Instead, that idea is pulled up to the surface, along with everything that’s closely connected to it.<\/p>\n

To illustrate what I mean, imagine you have a fishing net on the floor, and you pick up one knot and pull it up two feet. That knot you are holding in your fingertips is the highest point, but the other knots that are connected to it are up in the air, too, dangling below it.<\/p>\n

In academia, this concept is called spreading activation. You’re initiating some central idea (the knot in your fingertips), and then there’s this activation that spreads out from that central idea (the knots that are dangling below it connected by the ropes).<\/p>\n

The data points in your customers fishing nets vary. To give you some examples, they could be:<\/p>\n