What are ‘micromoments’? In any customer journey, there are countless small efforts. These include efforts from the company serving the customer and effort from the customer themself.
After all, the customer journey is really the journey of a relationship. The customer might be buying a product, but they’re also engaging with the business in a thousand small ways.
Think of the simple act of buying something through a digital channel: The customer must seek out the business somehow. The customer must start by making the effort to find where to buy.
The customer must ensure it’s the right product. The business should be putting in some effort to provide ways to explore these questions and communicate that it’s in stock, ready to ship, and so on.
The customer must then trust the entire process enough to make a payment. If the customer wants to use a specific payment option and it isn’t offered, that could be enough to prompt the customer to abandon the process.
And while it’s tempting to create big moments for every big thing along the way, the customer journey itself is full of small, almost forgettable ones.
Those forgettable moments are sometimes designed to be forgotten; however, some are just waiting for a little attention. Those moments can serve an amazing purpose in your customer experience goals.
I call these ‘micromoments’. These are the moments that are easily overlooked but have the potential to build trust with your customers. They also have the power to erode trust along the way.
Do you know your customer experience micromoments? Most business owners don’t; however, they are what lead to the most amazing customer journeys. It’s worth taking a look at your customer’s journey to identify what is working, what’s not, and what is most likely being overlooked.
Because they’re small, micro moments are easy to overlook or neglect. They can also be easy to dismiss for the same reason.
But these moments have a big impact — so keep an open mind about how they, when transformed into positive steps along the journey, build a more trusted relationship with your customers.
When working with clients on their own micro-moments, we’ll create lists of potential points of neglect along their journey. These are moments that are “fine” or sometimes what I call “meh moments.”
They are the places where it doesn’t feel worth it to invest in making things better because “it’s fine the way it is”, or “we don’t get complaints”, or “it’s how everyone in our industry does it.” Those are all excuses! They aren’t acceptable reasons to neglect the moment and the customer.
Once these are identified, they are noticed. These moments need to go from being neglected to being noticed in your customer’s journey. Consider the following examples.
The ‘Whatever’ Welcome: In many customer journeys, the emphasis is on attracting the customer to join. There are huge investments in marketing, wooing people into becoming customers.
Then, once the customer makes the purchase and responds to the call, much of the attention dies away. They don’t feel welcomed - they feel sold to. This happens in business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to business (B2B) contexts, usually because the organisation's priorities shift toward operational delivery rather than acknowledging, thanking, and guiding the customer.
Punitive Payments: In an ideal world, payment is so easy that the customer doesn’t notice it, except for knowing what they paid and when.
With that said, far too often this moment is full of punitive language and obstacles the customer is forced to jump through.
In B2C, this can happen when the customer must set up an account in ways that don’t reflect their time. It can show up when the payment options the customer prefers aren’t available to them, and they don’t see that until the payment page.
This moment, while the one most organisations and customers want to think about the least, is such a ripe opportunity to show gratitude and make things just a bit easier for the customer.
Drifting Customer Moments: What are the moments of neglect that prompt a customer to be open to shopping around?
Business leaders often don’t know what these moments are. They say things like “that customer left us because we increased our prices.” But that customer may have been threatening to leave for a long time, but possibly not in so many words.
The grass is often greener, at least for a little while. Identifying these moments is a way to provide more than expected at each point of the journey, not just the obvious ones.
Why are micro moments so important? For all these reasons, customer experience is important to your organisation.
Investing in micro moments means showing up for customers in positive, surprising ways. That means keeping customers happier, which leads them to spend more with your brand. Not only that, but these moments can drive positive word-of-mouth marketing and increased referrals.
For such a small thing, micro moments can pay off in big ways.
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