Customer Experience Patterns Podcast

Kelly Price

Sam Stern

Thanks to my talented colleague Emily Tolmer for the cover art. Thanks to my friends at Moon Island for the music.

Welcome back to the CX patterns podcast with Sam stern in this loose threads, missing threads mini episode, I'm returning to my conversation with Kelly Price, where we talked about designing experiences for the peak end rule.

Kelly And I talked to a lot about addressing negative experience peaks. And tackling those first. For many of those negative peaks in the experience, the answer as Kelly said is to fix them so that they are smooth and unmemorable, and that's right. And Kelly had some great suggestions for how to do this. But I also wanted to note that some of these peak moments are avoidable. So you don't have to redesign them. You don't have to fix them. You don't have to obsess over them. You can just avoid them altogether. For example. Heavy equipment manufacturers think  caterpillar, John Deere, and similar. They now have sensors on their equipment that collect data and can help predict when key parts will wear out or break. I'm sure there are other examples of this in other industries, too. This is just One I'm familiar with. Anyway, the goal is to use the sensors, to provide forewarning of needed parts, maintenance, or replacement, and to do that proactively. This avoids equipment downtime for the farmer, the construction company, or whomever owns the equipment and completely sidesteps that negative peak of a broken piece of equipment. So imagine that they could have fixed the repair experience. But instead they're avoiding the repair experience. So it's now not only not a negative peak. That you're lessening the severity of, or smoothing out. It's one that you've avoided altogether. And a repair experience like in this example is not only a negative peak for the customer. It's also usually expensive and consuming a lot of resources for the manufacturer. So I wanted to  share this example because sometimes the answer to a negative peak is not to fix the moment or , that discrete journey, but to make the moment or that journey irrelevant to the overall experience. Second, a loose thread, something we touched on, but didn't quite cover the point I wanted to highlight today. What gets remembered about the experience are the peak moments, either good or bad, and how the experience ends either good or bad. We talked about that, you know, this. And Kelly alluded to this additional point in the episode related to peak and moments in memory. And I didn't pick up on her point as well as I could've. It's not just how good or bad those moments are that make them memorable. It's also about how they stand out from the rest of the experience. Peaks are peakier. That's a word. When they come out of nowhere. To stick with the metaphor for a second. Mountain peak appears taller. When it's surrounded by a flat plane. Then when it's nestled in among other peaks in a mountain range. So now I can come back to Kelly's advice to address negative peaks first. And in many instances, maybe even most instances. Making them as unMemorable as you can, is the right approach. And then the remaining positive peaks will look even better by comparison. They stand out more. That's it for now. I'll be back with a full episode next week, Kelly Price and I in a second conversation this time talking about design research, another good one with Kelly. Talk to you soon.

​