What is a Key Moment in a Journey Map?

What are Key Moments?

Moments occur throughout a journey map as the customers navigate the customer experience. While all moments are essential, they aren’t all equally important. The most crucial customer moments are called ‘key moments’ or ‘moments of truth.’

An easy example of a key moment is from the Starbucks experience. Ah, that first sip makes it all worthwhile, right? (More on that later.)

Key moments sit at the top of each stage in a journey map. They tell the audience to listen and pay attention because they must be aware of this critical information or suffer the wrath of a churning customer.

A Key Moment’s Role in Understanding the Customer's Perspective

Each day, customers interact with numerous businesses across America. In those interactions, customers jump from moment to moment as they navigate the customer experience.

A key moment is like spotlighting a particular step in the customer journey. I want to call attention to it because the customer has indicated that this moment means a lot to them. From the customers’ perspective, if a business doesn’t meet their needs at that moment, they’ll be left with a negative impression of the company and may stop patronizing it altogether.

If you want insight into how your customers think, feel, and move through your customer experience, then building an inventory of each customer segment’s key moments will go a long way in helping you understand the customers’ unmet needs and pain points.

Why are Key Moments Important?

Key moments are important because they tell a business which interactions are most important to its customers. An added benefit of knowing them is that a company can align its teams to these moments.

Alignment is difficult in the best of times, but rallying around key moments that personify and humanize the customer is much easier when teams can relate to a face and a story. Internal agreement on what constitutes the customer experience and what the customer deems necessary is priceless. If you can achieve internal alignment on the customer's needs, you’ll win the war on customer churn and retain your customers.

When the product, go-to-market (GTM), and general business teams (think ops, etc.) are all aligned, they can ask themselves, “What is the status of our key moments?” Key moments will fall into one of these categories:

• Satisfactory: This rating signifies that the customer's expectations were met during this key moment and you delivered a smooth, seamless experience.
• Failing: A "failing" rating signifies that this key moment fell short of meeting customer expectations due to possible complexities, poor service, or lack of perceived value. This rating necessitates immediate improvement.
• Missing: This rating implies a gap in the customer journey in which a specific service or feature was expected to facilitate the key moment but wasn’t found.

Once you’ve assigned the proper status to your key moments, it should help you improve the failing ones. For instance, if a key moment is missing, you’ll want to conduct rapid research to figure out if this is an area in which you should invest.

When Do Key Moments Occur?

Moments occur throughout the customer experience. Every stage of the journey map includes customer moments.

For example, when I drive to Starbucks to buy a coffee, I experience many moments. Here are a few of them:

1. I drive to a Starbucks store to order a drink from the drive-through. I expect it to be empty so I can order my drink in less than five minutes.
2. I order a drink in the drive-through and expect the barista to record my drink details accurately.
3. I wait in line at the drive-through with 20 other vehicles.
4. I wait at the window for my drink, even though I already waited over five minutes in the drive-through line.
5. I take that first sip of my London Fog. Starbucks made it perfectly. (Oh yeah . . . so good . . . I forget about all the other moments.)

Moments one through four are essential, but moment five is the key moment in the Starbucks customer journey map’s purchase stage.

Where are Key Moments Observed?

Customer moments are observed within company channels and touchpoints. Not familiar with those words? Let’s define them:

• A channel is a fancy way of saying, “I’m trying to sell to a customer in as many ways as possible.” For example, if you want to shop at Home Depot, you can visit their store, website, app, or call them via phone.
• A touchpoint is an interactive moment with a business extension. It could be a parking lot, employee, checkout, email message, or phone call. It's important to remember that touchpoints occur within channels.

Different Types of Key Moments

Moments and key moments come in many different forms. Here are some examples:

A "Wow" Key Moment

• Your wife gives birth to a healthy baby. The hospital staff made the entire birth process seamless. You and your wife feel good about picking this specific hospital and its staff.

A Pain Point Key Moment

• You want to wire money from your bank to someone else, and they charge you $25 for this privilege. You have no choice but to do it because it’s the only way to pay this person.

A Decision-Making Key Moment

• You've asked a contractor to give you a quote on your kitchen renovation project, and you review the quote. It's a $150,000 remodel. Another contractor came in at $135,000, but you’re not sure about his work quality.

The Importance of Storytelling

A quick note about my experience and background: I'm an ex-startup founder and ex-oil & gas consultant who transitioned into the tech industry to become a seasoned principal designer and strategist. With a deep-rooted passion for radically improving customer experiences, I've made my mark in businesses ranging from tech giants like Oracle to retail leaders like Lowe's.

I've honed my ability (through many lessons) to identify unmet customer needs, drive loyalty, and identify profitable business opportunities. In the process, I've deepened my UX design understanding and acquired a keen sense of business CX (customer experience) strategies that enable profitable innovation.

However, before improving a customer’s experience, I had to learn to become an expert in journey mapping. I quickly realized that many articles and books talked about journey mapping, but they didn’t provide me with a detailed approach to executing the process successfully. This realization proved to be especially accurate for complex customer experiences and markets.

Over time, I noticed a disconnect—why weren't other teams finding these journey maps as valuable as the product teams did? The realization dawned on me that my journey maps, while technically sound, didn’t tell a compelling story. They weren't highlighting the key moments other teams could relate to and rally around.

I’d learned a powerful lesson. I had to tell the story right because people relate to each other through stories. I had all this customer data in the journey map, but I needed to focus on the key moments. The key moments humanized the customers, made them come alive, and manifested their presence in a boardroom meeting.

Designers and CX Professionals

Journey mapping has become a highly sought-after skill, as a good journey map can help a business discover and address customer needs before a customer churns and disappears into thin air.

If you’re a designer reading this article, I’m hoping to bring your awareness to how important key moments are and why you should focus so much of your energy on figuring them out.

If you’re a business professional and not a product team member, my aim is to share the key moments concept with you. Key moments are journey map elements you should ask about when looking at your organization’s journey maps.

Summary

The power of storytelling is that it connects people and forms a shared view of an event or experience. A good journey map will prominently display key moments at the top of each stage and broadcast customers’ views and opinions to the entire business.

Tell the customer's story through their eyes by letting the key moments guide you through their experience. A journey map is only as good as the story you can tell your audience.

Let me know in the comments if you’re utilizing key moments to "tell the story right."

Written by Leo Vroegindewey, B2B CX Consultant

Get in touch to improve your customer experience and increase sales. Let's talk about how I can help your business grow. Email me.

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