The Customer Experience and Human Memory

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My 10-year-old daughter told me recently, apropos to amusement parks:
“I like rides that you don’t like until they’re over.”

The human memory is highly unreliable: Just think of the multitude of wrongful convictions based on mistaken eyewitness identifications. More to the point for service providers, it’s incomplete and selective.  Rather than being able to retrieve an entire experience from memory, our customers tend to retain just a mental snapshot taken during a single moment of the experience.  In my daughter’s case, that snapshot is taken after the amusement park ride ends, and brings back a sense of bravery, of getting through to the other side.

This phenomenon offers hope to customer service providers: If things go wrong for a customer initially, do a grand job of getting to the other side of that challenge and you may create a positive memory that literally supplants the initial unpleasantness.

Keynote Speaker Customer Service Speaker Micah Solomon From Micah Solomon – author, keynote speaker, consultant on customer service excellence, sales, branding, and transforming company cultures in our socially connected world.
 
See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at https://micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”

(With thanks to @geert_martens )

 

2 thoughts on “The Customer Experience and Human Memory”

  1. Michel

    Hi Micah,

    Great post. Short and sweet. Something I learned from @zappos, “customers may not remember what you said or did but they will remember how you made them feel” aligns itselfs with “service recovery.” More often than not that “feeling” outweighs the prior hostility that may have been caused..

    Thanks.

    @michelfalcon

  2. John43

    Hello Mr.Micah,

    “I like rides that you don’t like until they’re over.” I just read it. It’s helpful. Defining a customer’s mentality is hardly seen. You did an excellent job. It is really important to create positive memory to our customers. Even in my stock market coaching i recommend my students to follow your guides. I love the style, Keep it up.

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