CX Matters is the Hello Customer podcast about what makes customers stay. In this first episode, Horst Remes, managing partner at Onestone and a keynote speaker on customer strategy, explains why three well-intentioned customer experience ideas lead companies in the wrong direction, and what to do instead.
Drawing on Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule, the episode covers why a restaurant that makes you wait can be more credible than one that doesn't, how promising a one-hour fix earned top scores from the very customers whose problem took longer, and why good service cannot be left to attitude.
What you will take away
- Customers judge an experience by the memory it leaves, and under Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule that memory is shaped by the strongest moment and the ending.
- No company can be excellent at everything, so it is better off designing one smart moment of excellence that customers will remember.
- A weaker step, such as waiting for freshly prepared food, can make a company's promise more credible.
- An IT provider that promised to fix email outages within an hour was right 98% of the time, and most of the 2% it called ahead of time still rated it 9 or 10 on keeping promises.
- Customer memory management means asking, while an experience is being designed, what it will leave behind in the customer's mind.
- Good service depends on processes the organisation designs, because a good attitude cannot rescue a process customers cannot understand.
Jump to a moment
Horst RemesCustomer strategy expert, OnestoneManaging partner at Onestone and keynote speaker on customer strategy. Trained as an engineer, he has spent twenty years on customer-centric operations, and is known for his keynote on the myths of customer experience.
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Bram De VosCEO, Hello CustomerYour host of CX Matters, the webinar and podcast series powered by Hello Customer, where every episode looks at one idea: the way you treat your customers shapes the way your business grows.
LinkedInThree CX myths that sound right
Which well-intentioned customer experience ideas send companies in the wrong direction?
Some of the most repeated ideas in customer experience sound right and lead companies astray. This episode takes three of them apart: that you have to be excellent at everything, that you should never make a promise you cannot keep, and that good service is a matter of attitude.
| Myth | What happens in practice | Example from the episode |
|---|---|---|
| You have to be excellent at everything | Customers remember the strongest moment and the ending, so one well-designed peak is what stays with them | A restaurant where a short wait makes fresh food credible |
| Never make a promise you cannot keep | Without a promise, customers are left with uncertainty where they wanted peace of mind | An IT provider that promised a one-hour fix and was right 98% of the time |
| Good service is a matter of attitude | Service depends on processes the organisation designs | A willing agent stuck with a process nobody can explain still sends the customer away unhappy |
The thread that connects them comes from psychology. What customers keep from an experience is a memory of it, and that memory can be designed.
Design experiences like a start-up
How do you design an experience when you cannot predict how customers will react?
Experiences cannot always be designed from a meeting room. A useful starting point is a simple scene: two customers meet at an event and talk about your company. What would you like them to say? If a third person joins and asks why they should work with you, what story should they hear? The answer becomes the design brief, because people need an experience in order to have a story to tell.
Most companies then run a proof of concept or a pilot: if it works they continue, and if it doesn't they stop. A start-up approach works better. A small start-up installed inside the company keeps pivoting until the experience works as intended, and never stops at the first failed test.
What customers remember: the peak-end rule
Is customer experience about the experience, or about the memory of it?
Once an experience is over, it is gone. What stays with people is how they recall it, and that memory shapes their attitude and their behaviour in the future. Daniel Kahneman's research showed that the memory of an experience can differ sharply from the experience itself.
According to the peak-end rule, people judge an experience mostly by its most intense moment and by how it ends. An average experience with one strong high point is remembered as much better than it was. That gives companies a practical lever: design the peak, and stop trying to be perfect everywhere.
Myth 1: you have to be excellent at everything
Do you have to be excellent at everything?
No company is excellent at everything, and the ones that try fail in places they cannot predict. One time it is delivery, the next time it is billing, and the customer never gets a consistent experience. A company that designs its processes to be excellent at one smart point gives customers something to remember.
A weaker part of the journey can even help, as long as it explains what you are good at. A top restaurant that serves fresh food can only start cleaning the vegetables once you have ordered, so you wait longer. That wait makes the promise of fresh food more credible. Nobody believes a restaurant with 50 dishes on the menu serves everything fresh, while a short menu and a short wait are easy to explain and easy to believe. The point is to let the weaker step tell the story of your strength, never to make customers suffer for its own sake.
Myth 2: never make a promise you cannot keep
Is it really OK to make a promise you cannot keep?
Most people are raised never to make a promise they cannot keep. In customer service, the result is that staff stop making promises at all, because they are rarely the ones who keep them. A service agent taking a call about a technical problem does not repair the equipment and does not know when the technician will get to it, so the agent promises nothing.
That leaves the customer with uncertainty, while what a customer wants most when they call is peace of mind.
The underrated value of peace of mind
The monetary value of peace of mind is one of the most underestimated things in business.
Horst RemesCustomer strategy expert, OnestoneWhat is peace of mind worth to a customer?
People pay for peace of mind every day: insurance is bought peace of mind. Faced with two roofers, most people pass on the cheap one who looks shabby and pay a bit more for the one who looks more decent. Doctors wear white coats for a reason: the coat says you can trust this person.
A company that never dares to promise anything takes that peace of mind away and leaves customers with the awkward feeling of not knowing what happens next.
Promise one hour, then manage the 2%
If we don't dare to say anything, we frustrate 100% of our customers.
Horst RemesCustomer strategy expert, OnestoneWhat happens when you promise to fix a problem within the hour?
When a small business's email goes down, the first thing it wants to know is when it will be back. One IT company that hosts email servers for small businesses never gave a time. The answer was always "we'll see what we can do and get back to you as soon as we know something." The whole client organisation then waited for that call, under stress, and people remember stressful moments well. The provider was implanting a memory of uncertainty: the peak-end rule turned into an abyss-end rule.
The data told a different story. Within the hour, 98% of those outages were solved. So the provider could promise a fix within the hour and be right for 98% of customers. For the other 2%, it monitored which issues were more complex and called those customers before they noticed: the problem is more complicated than expected, we cannot say yet when it will be fixed, and we will call you back within two hours with an update. That second promise is easy to keep.
When only those 2% were asked, on a scale from 0 to 10, whether the company keeps its promises, most answered 9 or 10. They remembered someone caring enough to call before they found out. Saying nothing frustrates 100% of customers. A clear promise reassures 98% of them straight away.
Customer memory management
If perception matters more than what happened, what should companies manage?
The perception of an experience is not exactly what happened, and companies can steer it. Designing a process so that customers come away with a good feeling about what happened is psychological engineering. Stated bluntly, "you don't have to keep all your promises" makes people run away screaming. Explained properly, it shows that human nature is far more subtle than companies tend to assume.
There is a difference between the real experience, the perception of it and how people eventually remember it. The memory is what drives behaviour. That is why it pays to talk less about customer experience management and more about customer memory management. The phrase forces a useful step forward: while designing an experience, ask what it will leave behind in the customer's mind.
Myth 3: good service is a matter of attitude
You can do terrible things to customers with the most perfect attitude, if the process just cannot be explained.
Horst RemesCustomer strategy expert, OnestoneIs good customer service a question of attitude?
Many business leaders who believe in customer centricity say their main problem is their people: good service is a matter of attitude, so maybe they should hire for attitude rather than skills. It is a common misunderstanding. A bad attitude almost always produces bad service, which is what most viral videos of terrible service show. The opposite does not hold.
A willing, helpful agent stuck with a cumbersome or inexplicable process still sends the customer away unhappy. Treating service as a matter of attitude asks employees to compensate for bad processes, which keeps them in permanent stress mode. The responsibility belongs with the organisation.
Why everyone rates their own team an 8
Why do people in the same team disagree about what customer-centric means?
Ask a sales team, a CX team or a technical team to rate their own customer centricity from 0 to 10, and the average comes out around 8. Ask the same people to rate everyone else in their team, and the average drops to about 6. The population is identical and only the question changed, so one of the two measurements is broken. It is a workplace version of the Lake Wobegon effect, where everyone believes they are above average.
The gap appears because everybody does what they sincerely believe is most customer-centric, and their colleagues do something different. Each sees the other as less customer-centric. Customers then tell different stories depending on who they dealt with: "If you work with Bob, it's fantastic." Consistency has to be installed by the organisation.
Where to start: what should two customers say about you?
What is the first step for a leadership team that wants to act on this?
The first step does not have to be complicated. Answer one question: two customers meet at an event, see your advertisement and talk about you, because they both work with you. What do you want them to say?
The answer needs to be concrete. "We want them to say we are proactive" is not enough, because everybody agrees with "proactive" and everybody means something different by it. For a telecom company, proactive could mean calling customers about a problem before their modem goes down. Once the definition is that concrete, people know what to do. The same goes for promises. "I will answer you the day after tomorrow" is clearer than "as soon as possible": it gives the customer peace of mind, and it prevents the follow-up call a few hours later.
AI, the great equaliser
How will AI change what sets companies apart?
AI is a great equaliser. A basic level of service will soon be easy for everybody, and technology is easy to reverse engineer: with enough budget, any company can buy the same platforms as its competitors. Operational excellence is still a big differentiator today, and AI will make it easier to reach.
What stays hard to copy is an experience designed around what customers should see and feel, built into processes and into the way people work. The value disciplines of Treacy and Wiersema still apply: operational excellence, product leadership and customer intimacy. Customer experience is one strategy among three, and a company with a product nobody can match, or with the lowest price, can succeed without it. For everyone else, the challenge will be to stay human and to keep people creative, without settling for the averages and the speed AI delivers.
This article is an edited summary of the conversation. For every word, watch the full episode in the video above, or click a section title to jump to that moment.
Questions this episode answers
What is customer memory management?
Customer memory management is the idea that companies should design what customers remember, as well as what they experience. Under Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule, people judge an experience mostly by its strongest moment and its end, so one well-designed peak lifts the memory of an otherwise average experience.
Should a company promise a resolution time it cannot always meet?
Yes, if it manages the exceptions. An IT provider that solved 98% of email outages within an hour promised one hour and called the remaining 2% before they noticed. Most of those customers still rated the company 9 or 10 on keeping its promises.
Is good customer service a matter of attitude?
A bad attitude almost always leads to bad service, but a good attitude cannot fix a process customers cannot understand. Consistent processes and a shared definition of what customer-centric means are the organisation's responsibility.
Why can a wait improve the customer experience?
A weaker step can make a promise credible. A restaurant that starts preparing fresh vegetables only after you order makes you wait, and the wait shows the food is fresh.
What is the peak-end rule?
The peak-end rule, from Daniel Kahneman's research, says people judge an experience mainly by its most intense moment and by how it ends. The average of all the other moments counts for much less.