Welcome to the CEMMethod® Guide
Let’s be honest. Customers today aren’t comparing you to your direct competitor anymore. They’re comparing you to the best experience they’ve had anywhere. That smooth Amazon checkout. That Uber ride where you didn’t have to touch your wallet. That one app that just… worked.
And here’s the kicker: if your organisation doesn’t deliver experiences like that—simple, seamless, maybe even a little magical—your customers will quietly drift away. No big announcement. Just gone.
That’s where the CEMMethod® comes in.
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-0wTo1fQ33-cemmethod-guide
It’s not another “tick-the-box” toolkit or fluffy set of slogans. It’s a practical way to rewire how you think about customers, design your work, and measure success. It’s Outside-In thinking, put into action. The kind that helps you hit what we call the Triple Crown: grow revenue, reduce costs, and massively improve service. (Yes, you really can have all three—no trade-offs required.)
This guide isn’t about theory. It’s about helping you view your business from the perspective of your customers. Which, if we’re honest, is usually very different from how leaders inside the business see it. We’ll unpack the principles, steps, and real-world applications of the CEMMethod—whether in banking, insurance, government, retail, or any other industry where customer experience determines the winners and losers.
So… grab a coffee. Keep an open mind. And maybe prepare to unlearn a few things you thought you knew. Because once you start seeing your world through an Outside-In lens, you won’t be able to go back.
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-0wTo1fQ33-cemmethod-guide
Businesses must actively engineer and continuously innovate their customer experiences to drive success.
Steve has also published many articles and conference keynotes (see the MOT primer below) reviewing the continued evolution of this fascinating concept.
Join us at a coaching session and become qualified in Customer Centric and Process Transformation https://www.bpgroup.org or visit https://www.stevetowers.com
Outside-In CX Definitions
What is a Moment of Truth?
A Moment of Truth is any interaction with the customer within the Customer Experience, first discussed in my 1993 book ‘Business Process Reengineering – A Senior Executive’s Guide‘
Moments of Truth are the cause of all work.
This understanding underpins the CEMMethod, first launched in 2006 and now in version 15. It is the idea that all work an organisation undertakes is, at a fundamental level, caused by Moments of Truth. In principle, everything a company does can and should be linked to a Moment of Truth.
Managing Moments of Truth
Enlightened ‘Outside-In’ organisations actively embrace Moment of Truth Management as an essential strategic and operational necessity to deliver engineered Customer Experiences. How so?
a. Designing for Moments of Truth – The Design-Implementation Gap
Early efforts were geared towards designing optimal Moments of Truth; however, simply mapping customer journeys has never been enough. It is one thing to agree on what a future state customer journey should be; it is entirely another to implement it. This Design-Implementation gap is precisely what kills the majority of Customer Experience initiatives.
b. Implementing optimised Moments of Truth
Successful deployment of innovated Moments of Truth is key to delivering optimal Customer Experiences. The most practical immediate results focus on a rapid rollout across a key experience, using the success of that rollout to validate the smooth rollout across the organisation. Establishing ownership, accountability, metrics, controls and improvement paths are part of this discipline.
c. Operationalising Moments of Truth
Once Moments of Truth have been designed, innovated and implemented into recrafted customer experiences, they need to be actively managed ‘in the moment’ and shared. Every Moment of Truth should feed to a corporate dashboard, with real-time data showing the performance of that MOT and its associated experiences. If things go wrong, the owner should be able to ‘course correct’ and real-time monitor the customer experience delivery.
Imagine a world without customer satisfaction surveys, no need for Net Promoter Scores, no focus groups, and no mystery shopping because you will know how 100% of interactions are performing 100% of the time.
Control and Action combined
The C-suite and leaders will now have a clear line of sight into every corner of the organisation and across the enterprise landscape, in real-time. One version of the data truth (and not all those departmental/divisional versions of reality).
The need for retrospective action evaporates. Immediate and laser-focused control can be maintained, delivering simultaneously enhanced service, lower costs, higher revenues, improved compliance and uber motivated employees.
MOT primer…
Steve Towers
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetowers/
Richard Normann – creator of the Moments of Truth concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Normann
Jan Carlzon – author of ‘Moments of Truth’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Carlzon
Moments of Truth 2025 (VIDEO)
https://youtu.be/3mzz_LdgmFY
That Kodak Moment of Truth
https://www.processexcellencenetwork.com/innovation/columns/4-lessons-from-the-kodak-moment-of-truth
Mitch Belsley – Get Scientific about Managing Moments of Truth
http://customerthink.com/get-scientific-about-managing-moments-of-truth/
Accreditation & Certification in CX and Process
https://www.bpgroup.org