Pivotal Moments System™

To achieve customer success, organizational teams must align product, platforms, and marketing teams on aligned requirements and roadmaps. This is how we orchestrate.

What is happening, why it matters.

Businesses today have been going through several years of transformation. While progress has been made, so many are still coming up short on customer satisfaction compared to ROI. Too often great efforts are achieved in products, platforms, and support mechanisms.

What is happening? Barriers remain.

They are often from friction points and obstacles that prevent customers, front-line teams, and supporting product/platform teams from achieving success. To customers and businesses, these may be perceived barriers (think status quo) while others are real constraints. When these are identified and solved for without ignorance business growth with clarity in business performance elevates.

What can an organization do? Align on their goals.

Success depends on overcoming key barriers collectively in what matters most: customer moments of discrete decisions on a brand. Although not an easy task, business teams with the proper mindset and frameworks can collectively plan on customer journeys for success. They can evaluate gaps in their brand experiences influencing their decisions. The goal is to solve frictionless experiences while also intentionally creating moments of proper friction for brand adoption.

This is why I began developing my trademarked Pivotal Moments™ system in 2017.

OF FIRMS ASPIRE TO BE A CX LEADER

84%

BELIEVE THEIR EMPLOYEES CAN SUMMARIZE FULL CUSTOMER ARC

16%

COMPANIES DELIVERS GOOD OR GREAT CX

-Forrester Customer Experience CEO Index 2017

1/5

“The barrier to success is not something which exists in the real world; it is composed purely and simply of doubts about ability.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Why do we need a discussion?

Fact: Product and IT budgets rise, while CX budgets struggle.

CX

“Pros haven’t convinced executives to invest in CX…just over half of CX decision-makers project budgets to be flat or slight 1% to 4% in 2024.”

vs. Product

Product and IT/Platform budgets are projected to continue to rise in 2024 between 8-15%.

Four common barriers to customer success

  • Product Conflict

    Customers Do Not Adopt the Value

    One-time or multiple purchases are met with misunderstood value, complicating growth.

    Symptom: Customers do not project their lifestyle values with your organization’s goals.

  • Services Conflict

    Lifestyles Do Not Align to the Brand

    Consumers are missing the value to your services or digital products.

    Symptom: Customers do not effectively utilize a service in intended touchpoints of their journey.

  • Conversion Conflict

    Consumers are Not Becoming Customers

    Consumers are aware of, or respect your brand but for unknown reasons are not buying in.

    Symptom: Customers speak favorably of the brand, yet recursive purchases are impacted.

  • Reach Conflict

    Brand Awareness is Not Extended

    Effective channel marketing is not successful in key markets of loyalty or growth.

    Symptom: Targeted audience messaging is not changing/aligning behavior to brand adoption.

Let’s talk about solving your customer moments.

Available for short-term consulting and educational engagements on my Pivotal Moments™ System.

 

Realities within the barriers

Product/channel team realities: They work in silos solving similar customer problems - while maintaing certain status quo barriers.

Customer realities: They want a brand experience - solved. It doesn’t have to be amazing, just effortless.

The impact of these barriers:

“Fine” has become an accepted metric measured by accepting that…

  • our customers will find a brand that has figured it out.

  • another startup will eventually replace us.

  • our brand to suffer from below-average experiences.

  • we’ll maintain tech debt for our services to remain relevant at a sacrifice to the experience.

  • justify quarterly improvements that sacrifice long-term brand experiences.

You’re not alone in seeking solutions to above fine: These are brands using my Pivotal Moments System™:

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In 2015, this was the moment with Caterpillar that Pivotal Moments™ were born. Harmonizing team discussions with strategy for a single, global SFMC platform.

The solution: A heuristic in consumer decisions™.

Pivotal Moments™ system define customer expectation requirements that activate brand value with revenue outcomes.

 Pivotal Moments™ System | Foundations

Product engagement converges @ business & customer purpose.

Your business goals:

  • Attracting qualified prospects

  • Scaled conversion of new customers

  • Onboarding for satisfaction & behavioral influence

  • Building & sustaining enrollment and engagement

  • Retaining today’s high-value customers

  • Maximizing customer revenue through value exchange

Your customers’ goals:

  • Help me find the best product or service for my needs

  • Make buying and using easy for me

  • Educate, support and inspire me, and reward me for my loyalty

  • What else should I be considering – keep me informed

  • Connect me with others for advice and inspiration

Pivotal Moments™ System | Value

What Pivotal Moments System deliver:

1) Human-Behavioral

  • They define behavior driven communication from shopper affinities with tactical strategy.

  • • Triggers & Signals

    •  Emotions & Barriers

    •  Behaviors/Routines

    •  Customer Goals

    •  Persona Readiness Heuristic

    •  Shopping affinities

    •  Demographic Insights

    •  Psychographic purchasing insights

2| Business-Actionable

  • They clarify customer requirements planning, personalization and channel messaging.

  • •  Channel Dependencies

    •  Formats and Attributes

    •  Timing/Cadence and paths

    •  Personalization affinities

    •  Activation use cases

    •  KPI Metrics and Readiness

    •  Key messaging priority

    •  Transactional spending

3) Brand-Measurable

  • Lastly, they define waypoints to measure CX for product-optimized business R.O.I. performance.

  • •  Performance Metrics

    •  Channel Destinations

    •  CTAs and Pre-Send Prep

    •  Learning Plans & Testing

    •  Metric Frameworks

    •  Roadmap improvements

The deliverables: A heuristic in brand activation planning™.

By defining requirements on moment-by-moment consumer decisions, teams collectively coordinate solutions.

 Pivotal Moments™ System | Hueristics

How it works: analyzing customer data into intelligence to anticipate and respond to behavioral decisions.

Heuristic P.M.™ definitions:

  1. Behavioral: from shopping behaviors, routines, needs and family/friend influencers

  2. Personalized: Psychographic Product affinity (Shopper affinity w/ content attributes)

  3. Conditional CX: Experiences required of products or necessary avoidance

  4. Trust: Trust relationships for purchase and use, connected to engagement data

  5. Sentiment: of positive and negative brand messaging that drive actions

Strategic outcomes:

  1. Customer Persona Definitions triggers, routines and outcomes for messaging

  2. Activation strategy for CTAs, key messaging and omnichannel planning

  3. User pathways that define CTAs on channel planning and success metrics

  4. Campaign matrix connects current campaign performance within moment recommendations

  5. KPI Performance frameworks to measure KPIs with customer engagement

  6. Customer Profiling for data attributes, content tagging and next-best-action

  7. Requirements for product and channel orchestration

  8. Roadmaps in optimizing moments with personalization development

Metric Driven Heuristics for Requirements & Outcomes

  • 1| Conduct CX, product research

    Begin with understanding your customers joy and pain points with both your products as well as their daily routines. Understand what behaviors and motivators move them.

  • 2| Define CX & EX journeys

    To be a customer-centric organization, you must lead with your customers and employees who support them. Take the researcher and begin to map their behaviors with how employees currently support them. Identify where there may be gaps including preferred channels such as chatbots.

  • 3| Connect business goals w/ CX

    After you have evaluated your various customer goals, map the business product and services to their journey. How do they serve them? Where are the deficits? Identify where you are stronger and weaker using actual data. Consider scoring such as NPS or CLV toward these gaps.

  • 4| Develop a Service Blueprint

    Go several levels deeper in the journey with identified “swim lanes” of various business considerations and processes that you follow. Identify where impacts to the experience creates resistance in a negative - or positive way.

  • 5| Connect measurable KPIs

    Business goals can be challenging to measure progress without progress. What gets measured, gets managed. My work connects business outcome targets to journeys to touchpoints with measurable metrics. This allows teams to better implement roadmaps by adding dozens of right fit metrics.

  • 6| Identify Barriers to Success

    Barriers begin to emerge as you identify key, “pivotal moments” that link your customer’s needs with the brand. Identify problems and perceived barriers. Ask why employees respond the way they do in culture, policy. Identify communication tactics for a resolution.

  • 7| Readiness change mgmt.

    Run heuristics from my vetted evaluations on organizational readiness in CX, EX, customer data maturity and employee KPI engagement. Include Persona and team OKR readiness that are connected to business goals.

  • 8| Develop, prioritize a Roadmap

    Once these barriers are identified with proposed resolutions, begin to assess feasible outcomes with long-term implementation. Consider employee training, policies, and procedures in addition to technical or digital updates.

  • 9| Define prioritized req./PRDs

    What you gain are greater contextual requirements for your customers that are written to their pivotal moments of success. With greater impact, we also add weighted value between personas to understand personalization and channel preferences.

Pivotal Moments™ System | Value

Is it another consultancy model impossible to apply?

Pivotal Moments™ is not a deliverable. It is a system of business heuristics with applicable outcomes on your current business strategy.

Find out more about how to better ‘productize’ your services and digital products. Case studies and guided steps are available.

Let’s talk about solving your customer moments with success.

Available for short-term consulting and educational engagements on my Pivotal Moments™ System.

 

“49% of consumers have left a brand in the past year due to poor customer experience.”

Emplifi