How Customers Want to Find and Purchase Your Products/Services

Identifying and Measuring the Key Moments of Truth in "Select & Buy" Customer Scenario^® Patterns

April 5, 2021

Although each customer’s context is different, there are common priorities—patterns in their moments off truth—that emerge in standard customer scenarios, such as finding and buying products. By recognizing and understanding these scenario patterns, you can measure how well you are meeting these customer priorities to ensure your customer’s, and your, success.

NETTING IT OUT

Although each customer situation is different, there are patterns to customer scenarios that focus on the same type of outcome—for example, selecting and buying a new product or service. In most “select & buy” scenarios, the customer typically has four key things that she wants:

It’s easy to find and get what I want
I have enough information to make me feel good about my selection
I can get it when I need it
It’s easy to order

We call these the customer’s “Moments of Truth”—aka “showstoppers”—if you don’t address these issues crisply, you risk losing your customer forever.

Your Customer’s Ideal Process

A customer scenario is a set of tasks that a particular group (segment) of customers is happy to do in order to accomplish their desired outcome(s).

Once you recognize the common moments of truth, you can identify the types of customer metrics and operational metrics that measure how successful you are at meeting your customers’ ultimate goals for doing business with you. Then you can focus your co-design activities on how to differentiate the experience, products, and services you offer to help customers reach those goals.

Identifying the metrics allows you to recognize:

How the customer will be “grading” you
How you grade yourself in helping the customer be successful
How you can identify and measure business opportunities that can result from providing a great customer experience

A TYPICAL “SELECT & BUY” CUSTOMER SCENARIO

Similar for Products and Services, B2B and B2C

Whether you are choosing products and services for yourself or for your business, you want the process to be easy—easy to make the right choice, easy to justify that choice, and easy to actually buy that choice. You want the process to go so smoothly that there are no bad memories when you ultimately use your products or services.

Moments of Truth in Select & Buy

Before we can use any product or service, we have to decide what to buy and actually order it. Therefore, the select & buy scenario is probably the most common scenario for all customers. Although there are always variations on a theme (based on specific customer type, specific service or product line, industry, and context), there are four key moments of truth that are part of every select & buy scenario, as shown in Illustration 1 (note that moments of truth are expressed in the negative—what stops you in your tracks):

Moments of Truth in Select & Buy Scenarios

1. In select & buy scenarios, whether for products or services, or B2B or B2C, there are four key moments of truth.

It isn’t easy to find and get what I want.

I don’t have enough information to make me feel good about my selection.
I can’t get it when I need it.
It isn’t easy to order/buy.

CONDITIONS OF SATISFACTION FOR MOMENTS OF TRUTH.Although these moments of truth are virtually universal in this type of scenario, sometimes they are expressed in a slightly different way depending on the Conditions of Satisfaction for the customer. Conditions of satisfaction are things that have to happen in my specific context and scenario to make me happy; sometimes they are expressed as emotions (how I feel about what’s happening). In a select and buy scenario, there are a couple of conditions of satisfaction, which, although they aren’t universal, often emerge…(more)