Moments of Truth structure

The roles in and around Moments of Truth Management – Guest article, Doug Bell

To turn an organization into a Successful Customer Outcome-producing machine, adopt a simple governance structure that is easy to deploy and operate:

Doug Bell, CEO The Experience Manager, Colorado

The Experience Manager leads the experience team for a specific customer experience. They are the central figure for:

  • Setting the vision for a successful customer outcome (SCO)
  • Measuring and reporting SCO production
  • Identifying the moments of truth

Moment of Truth Managers lead the design of specific moments of truth.
They are the central figures for:

  • Setting the vision for a Successful Moment of Truth outcome (SMOTO)
  • Measuring and reporting SMOTO production
  • Illustrating how to produce the SMOTO

Experience Producers either directly produce moments of truth for customers or support others who do. They are central figures for:

  • Producing SMOTO’s & SCO’s
  • Innovating to help improve outcome production

How to deploy & operate in existing structures

Select a customer and decide who will lead in The Experience Manager role

Create the Moment of Truth Management framework

  • Set a vision for a successful customer outcome.
  • Identify the moments of truth and a successful outcome for each.
  • Define metrics that measure SCO & SMOTO production.
  • Assign a Moment of Truth Manager for each moment of truth

Design each moment of truth

  • Illustrate the organization’s plan for producing each SMOTO.

Innovate

  • Share the MOT framework & designs with all Experience Producers
  • Give the Experience Producers a direct channel for sharing ideas to improve outcome production

Evolve

  • Report SCO & SMOTO production performance
  • Evolve the MOT framework & designs to improve SCO & SMOTO production

Additional Resources

James Dodkins (aka CX Rockstar) Video on Moments of Truth: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6543961416389410816

TEM – How to Manage MOTs: www.theexperiencemanager.com 

Moments of Truth 2019: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/moments-truth-v2019-steve-towers-ceo-cppc-acxc/

What are Moments of Truth?

Since the days of Richard Normann, the guy who invented the business term ‘Moments of Truth’ and Jan Carlzon’s book in 1989, the business world has interpreted Moments of Truth in several ways.

Jan Carlzon’s 1989 book ‘Moments of Truth’ socialised Richard Normann’s concept.

I have also published many articles and conference keynotes (see the MOT primer below) reviewing the continued evolution of this interesting concept.

Definitions

My interpretation and application of Moments of Truth revolve around three themes:

a. What is a Moment of Truth?

A Moment of Truth is any interaction with the customer within the Customer Experience – first discussed in my 1994 book ‘Business Process Reengineering – A Senior Executives Guide’

b. Moments of Truth are the cause of all work.

First discussed back in 2009 the idea that all work an organization 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.

We harness and make real this design principle using the Customer Performance Landscape. Connecting the dots from everything to the Cause of all work – The Moment of Truth.

c. The Moment of Truth for any organization is…

At a practical level organizations need to chunk down their approach to fixing and innovating Moments of Truth. CEO of Denver based SAAS company ‘Parallel’

Doug Bell, CEO The Experience Manager

Doug Bell says “A Moment of Truth is an interaction that contributes to the production of a successful customer outcome. It either does or it doesn’t. To ensure outside in, you need to look through the Successful Customer Outcome lens.”

Managing Moments of Truth

Enlightened ‘Outside-In’ organizations 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 around designing optimal Moments of Truth, however, simply mapping customer journeys has never been enough. It is one thing agreeing on what a future state customer journey should be, it is entirely another implementing it. This Design-Implementation gap is precisely what kills the majority of Customer Experience initiatives.

b. Implementing optimized Moments of Truth

Successful deployment of innovated Moments of Truth is key to delivering optimal Customer Experiences. The most practical immediate results are focused on rapid roll out across a key experience and using the success of that to validate rolling out smoothly across the organization. Establishing ownership, accountability, metrics, controls and improvement paths are part of this discipline.

c. Operationalizing 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 organization and across the enterprise landscape 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.

What’s next?

In my next piece I will demonstrate how this can be done immediately. If you can’t wait for that ping me and let’s talk the how, now



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 ‘Moments of Truth’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Carlzon

Doug Bell – CEO of The Experience Manager
‘The Moments of Truth Management System’
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhbell/

Moments of Truth 2009
https://www.slideshare.net/stowers/moments-of-truth-perth2009

That Kodak Moment of Truth
https://www.processexcellencenetwork.com/innovation/columns/4-lessons-from-the-kodak-moment-of-truth

** Just published **
Mitch Belsley 2019 – Get Scientific about Managing Moments of Truth
http://customerthink.com/get-scientific-about-managing-moments-of-truth/