This is part two of a two-part blog series concerning moments of truth in your customer journeys. Read part one to learn more about the five moment of truth types.

Today, customers expect brands to provide them with memorable and satisfying experiences that understand and meet their needs. This is done by not only providing a great product or service, but by creating a journey that answers their questions and helps them in the ways they require along the way to purchasing that product or service.

Take, for example, a customer’s entire stay at a hotel, which includes the moment he or she visits a hotel’s website to learn more about accommodations to the moment the customer checks out and leave. This entire journey encompasses a large amount of touch points, such as confirming a booking, how comfortable their bed is, how easy it is to find the hotel’s gym and even how simple the television’s remote control is to use. However, these different aspects do not have an equal impact on how much a customer will enjoy his or her experience with the hotel. Those that have the largest impact are seen as the moments of truth.

Determining the moments of truth within your customer journey will help you create effective improvement strategies that meet the vital needs of your target audience. The following methods will help you more accurately determine these moments, which can be difficult to find without a proven plan. Having created a detailed customer journey map prior to searching for moments of truth will help you to have a complete overview that prevents accidentally ignoring crucial moments.

Learn more about how to create a successful journey map by reading “Why Your Customer Journey Map Doesn’t Match Reality.”

How to Find Moments of Truth

There are three ways to find moments of truth within your customer journey map. Together, they can help you determine what touchpoints are having the greatest impact on your customers in order to make crucial improvements to your overall customer experience.

1. Data Analytics

It’s important to base your moments of truth strategy on measurable data in order to make real, discernable improvements to your customer experiences. A large portion of the modern customer journey takes place online and, as such, can create detailed data for companies to review. In doing so, a company can see the many ways in which a customer moves from first researching a product or service to their first interaction with the brand and eventually to their purchase of an item, so long as the journey is successful.

As detailed by Conduit Hub, analytics can point out areas where customer churn is the highest, which can be seen through bounce rates, failure to complete transactions and other signs of consumers ending their journey before they complete a purchase. Beyond the points where customers leave the journey, analytics can also show the last stage before a customer completes a purchase. This will show what moment has convinced them to buy a product or service.

2. Intuition

If you have been immersed in understanding the customer journey for long enough and truly trying to get inside the minds of your target audience, you will likely be able to intuit some of the most crucial touchpoints in the journey. While the use of measurable data in the previous point will help back up your intuition, trusting your gut when it comes to moments of truth can help eliminate wasted time and get to effective improvements faster.

As you map out your customer journey in as much detail as possible, you will likely find that some touchpoints would be far harder to improve than others. While it may seem daunting, these difficult areas to improve may signal which aspects are real moments of truth and may be in the most need of improvement. As discussed in the book “Solve for the Customer,” intuition can be further strengthened by modeling the moments of truth that have been found. Companies should recreate and test out these moments for themselves in order to see just how well the process goes.

3. Survey Validation

However you determine your moments of truth, it is important that you validate your findings as much as possible. One of the best ways to find validation is to survey your customer base, helping to get their insights into the journeys they have taken and receiving a new perspective that can both validate your results and also shed light on other moments that you may not have found on your own.

Through the use of customer surveys, you can determine the moments that had the greatest impact on your target audience, both in positive and negative ways. In order to prevent skewing the results in ways that validate your findings, focus on creating questions that do not lead to only the answers you want. Instead, attempt to create unbiased results. In doing so, your survey can truly strengthen your findings and may even show where you misinterpreted data or why there may be a disconnect between your journey mapping strategies and the perceptions of your customers. In particular, surveys can highlight what may be the Second Moment of Truth, as shown by Lexis Nexis.

4. Focus on the Customer

In addition to determining what your moments of truth are, companies will need to decide which areas deserve your immediate focus and attention in order to make the most positive impact for your company. When making a decision, companies should focus on touchpoints customers cannot control in order to most effectively address moments of truth, such as how quickly an order is processed or how items are laid out in a store.

This approach to moments of truth can result in a customer centricity strategy, which is a manner of doing business with your customers in a way that provides a positive experience during their length of engagement in order to drive repeat business, customer loyalty and profits. Doing so is in service of providing "customer-first" experiences.