The Customer Interaction Cycle: The Moments of Truth in CRM

Abstract

The heart of customer relationship management (CRM) is “customer focus” with the mandate to make customers believe that this organization is “for you, by you, with you”. To make this mandate credible or believable to customers, the organization must ensure positive experiences that consistently meet or exceed customers’ expectations.  A customer always wants to get a positive “Customer Driven Value” (CDV). Customer focus goes beyond it: it ensures more positive value than what the customer expects. Customer focus should be managed by the “moments of truth”. A moment of truth can be defined as an episode when a customer meets an aspect of the organization and, based on that contact, forms a professed judgment about the quality of the products, behaviors, processes, etc. of that organization. Thus, it is important to manage customer focus with care and without any failure. In the literature on customer relationship management (CRM) some cycles are found: CRM Cycle, CRM Lifecycle, Customer Lifecycle, and Customer Journey Cycle, etc. But these cycles do not talk about the moments of the truth of customer relationship management. This article presents a complete customer interaction cycle detailing each episode and strategies to manage it.