The Massive Importance of Memory in a Customer’s Experience

Customer loyalty is a function of customers’ memories. That is to say, customers don’t choose your experience over another; customers choose the memory of your experience over another. Therefore, we feel it is vital that you ensure your customers have an excellent memory of your Customer Experience.

This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the massive importance of memory for a Customer Experience and how our brain influences what we remember about them.

The human memory is imperfect. Our brains hold onto specific types of information when forming memories and let other information go. So, good experiences might not always turn into equally good memories, and vice versa. We could remember things better or worse than they were.

Understanding how memories work is essential to building customer loyalty. If you don’t understand how the brain forms memories, you could end up creating the wrong memories about your Customer Experience.

To understand how memories work, you must first know the Peak-End Rule. The Peak-End Rule says that what people remember about an experience is how they felt at the moment when emotion was the strongest and how they felt when the experience was over. 

When it comes to Customer Experience design, an organization must be clear where the peak emotion occurs during the customer interaction, as well as how the customer feels at the end. These emotions can make or break your chances for customers to form Customer Loyalty.

To create the memories you want, you need to evoke the customer emotions that you want. To do that, we suggest you start with these three key questions:

• What's the experience that you're trying to deliver? You need to define what that is so that everyone on the team is working toward the same goal.
• What emotions are you trying to evoke? These feelings are your target for the peak of the experience and how it ends to ensure that your customers remember the right things about your brand.
• How will you deliver these emotions consistently? We suggest walking the experience as if you were a customer yourself so you can see when and where you are evoking emotions you want, and, perhaps more importantly, where you aren’t. 

Listen to the podcast in its entirety to learn more about The Massive Importance of Memory on Your Customer’s Experience.

 

The Intuitive Customer podcasts are designed to explain the psychological concepts behind customer behavior.

If you would like to find out from one of our CX consultants how you can implement the concepts we discussed in your organization’s marketing to improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.

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