
Arriving in your seat on the plane and retrieving your bags upon arrival are two other examples of key moments of truth. In the airline travel journey there are a good handful of key MOTs. Look for these smaller achievements, and you’ll also probably find the moments of truth. Most customer journeys involve little achievements along the way to fulfilling some greater need. Another way to look at this is in terms of “jobs to be done”. To identify the most important MOTs, start by mapping the customer journey and evaluating the accumulation of customer effort along the way, searching for those points when the effort crescendos into an outcome. Journeys can have multiple moments of truth. The interactions at the check in counter take just an instant, but it’s so much more than that to the customer. If, on the other hand, the check in agent scowls at the customer and informs them they’ve been bounced because the flight was oversold, it would set a horrible tone for their trip.


Scandinavian airlines moments of truth upgrade#
If the customer is greeted at check in with a friendly smile and a complementary upgrade because they are a frequent flier, they’ll be floating on cloud 9 all the way to their final destination. All this time, expectations and emotions are mounting. From booking tickets to packing bags, customers typically invest a lot of time, energy and money in their trip before they even get to the airport. There are so many steps that lead up to the day of travel. Within the airline example, the check-in counter experience is a quintessential crucial moment of truth. We can even think of them as a sort of “tipping point” for the journey. MOTs have a significant impact on customer sentiment or satisfaction. These crucial moments happen when a customer has invested a lot of time, energy, money or emotion in a particular outcome, and that outcome is about to come to fruition. Within this broad definition there are especially crucial moments of truth along the journey. He spoke of these as “any time a customer comes into contact with a business, however remote, they have an opportunity to form an impression.” This concept was coined by Jan Carlzon, the former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines.

(Check out Episode 16 for an overview of what touchpoints really are!) The good news is that the concept of the Moment of Truth is one that has been around for a while and has a pretty clearly documented meaning. I hear it used to describe all sort of things, often incorrectly. Just like the term “touchpoint”, “Moment of Truth” (MOT) is another one of the super popular CX buzzwords.
