This is probably my undergraduate degree in Biology coming out, but I was thinking the other day about Customer Experiences in a slightly different way…what is their “half-life.”
A “half-life” is, in simple non-scientific terms, the time it takes for half of something to go away. In customer experience terms, think of it this way…the time it takes for half of the experience you deliver to a customer to be forgotten. The higher the number, the longer it takes for your customer to forget about your experiences and the lower number means they forget about them almost immediately.
A key component to an “Experience half-life” is just how incredible, remarkable, and awesome it was to begin with and was it “memorable?” A great experience has virtually no half-life…meaning it was great, but forgettable.
There are only two types of experiences that create a higher half-life…those that rock the customers world and they simply say, “WOW, that was unexpected and incredible,” or “WOW, that really sucked.” Both of these have long half-lives in the customers mind. You can see how half-lives are created in the diagram below.
I would assume we all want the first one, the one that is unexpected and incredible rather than the one that sucked. If so, then how do we get this experience to have the highest half-life possible? The answer is through Word-of-Mouth. When someone has this kind of incredible and memorable experience, they usually can’t wait to tell others…their friends and contacts. It is human nature to share something that causes you joy or extreme happiness…like a memorable experience.
By sharing this with others through word-of-mouth, the experience lives, gets talked about, gets shared even more than it did initially. If someone tells you about it, and it was truly awesome, you want to tell others because it is so positive, possibly unusual, and memorable. It probably had components that were unexpected in it as well which is always fun for people to tell others about. This all gives it a much longer half-life and it lives on much longer.
Even if someone has an awesome experience but doesn’t tell anyone else about, it has a much shorter half-life. It lives in your mind possibly for a while, but not as long as if it was being talked about by your friends and colleagues.
So our goal is to create a combination of an AWESOME CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE combined with massive WORD-OF-MOUTH and this creates a memorable and shareable event. This is the ultimate goal for businesses today. How do you stack up in both these categories? It might just answer a lot of questions for you when you truly assess the half-life of your customer experiences and of your company’s interactions with your customers.
