In a recent interview with Zoey Chen, assistant professor of Marketing at the University of Miami School of Business and co-author of the Return Trip Effect. Colin Shaw derived these seven steps to create a memorable experience for your customers.
- Decide what type of memory you want people to have about your experience. Different strategies enhance the different types of memory, so you need to know your memory strategy. Is it most important to you that your customers remember their overall evaluation of the experience or to remember specific parts that they could share with others?
- Strive to make experiences unique. People remember the first time they do something so well, but not the third or fourth time. Are you doing things to try to make each experience unique for your return customers so that they will continue to remember it positively?
- Consider the post-experience. The communication with the consumer tends to be seeking complaints or feedback on how well you did. Given that we know after someone has already encoded an experience, additional information could become integrated with that. What other information are you providing customers, and is it in line with your goal? Many opportunities exist to experiment with communication channels and message strategies to help customers remember things better or foster brand loyalty.
- Remember that endings are essential. Too many organizations do not plan the conclusion of the experience to evoke feelings like happy and satisfied, and then build in a way to reinforce them with customers.
- Balance building excitement with maintaining proper expectations. If you build up the experience to the point you can’t deliver on the promise, you will sabotage your successful outcome by disappointing customers and not meeting their expectations.
- Design an experience that reinforces positive memories. As we have said many times, people do not choose to return you based on the Customer Experience you provided. They return based on the experience they remember you provided.
- Be deliberate. Plan what you are going to do after thinking it through comprehensively. Have conversations with your organization and your customers to help guide the plan or do research to understand what customers want and would create the best possible memory of the experience.
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How to Enhance Your Customer’s Memory of Their Experience. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-enhance-your-customers-memory-experience-colin-shaw