Over the next few weeks, we’ll dive deep into customer moments, and look at how they can help reignite your audiences and help you develop new ones.
What Exactly Are Customer Moments?
A customer moment is a “wow” moment for your customer that makes them feel special - and appreciated. It is the difference between a simple customer experience and a memorable customer experience. This might be better with an example.
Do you remember a time when a company or an interaction with a company delighted you? A time when you went, “wow, that was so nice”! I remember a simple one - a birthday card from a company I deal with semi-regularly. Along with the birthday card was a 60% discount. I loved getting an actual card in the post - and the discount was significant enough to make me take notice. I still remember that - almost a year later.
Psychologists believe that, when we think of the experiences we’ve had, we don’t think of them in play-by-play or minute-by-minute terms. We focus instead on a few particular moments—the peaks, the pits and the transitions. If we leave aside the pits and transitions for a moment, the four elements that define positive moments are elevation, insight, pride, and connection.
And this is the key element in creating customer moments, we want to create positive customer moments whenever we can.
The session at TPC really resonated with me on a purely practical level. Delivering on customer moments means you are creating true ambassadors for your arts organisation. Alongside creating champions of your organisation (and making them feel extra special), it also gives you a chance to better understand your customers - usually your best ones.
Let’s be honest. The arts and culture industry isn’t like typical retail. Patrons want to come to your shows, performances, events, installations, openings, etc. They want to be entertained, moved, educated - they want to experience and feel something. You are already over a pretty big hurdle - customers want to hear from you. That means that little extras have pretty big impact.
Using data, you can better understand your core customers and support their experiences with added touches to create stand out memories.
We all have been to a restaurant where the moment was extra special maybe it was a free dessert or maybe your favourite cafe remembered your name. Each of these small, memorable moments build to real emotion and connection.
Over the coming weeks we will show you how to bring customer moments into your marketing strategy and develop real connections with your audiences. Each blog will dive deeper into customer moments and teach you how to:
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Use data to segment your audience and build your customer personas.
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Outline your customer journey; from research to ticket purchase to post-event - we’ll look at the opportunities at each stage.
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Put data, personas and the customer journey together to better understand your customers and create lasting and memorable customer moments.
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Learn from practical examples so you can see how they will apply to your arts organisation.
We’ve never been big on buzzwords or fad marketing. While the idea of creating customer moments in a coordinated way might be new, making customers feel special is not. I really think customer moments is a great way for arts organisations to really make data work hard and help create arts ambassadors - that draw in new audiences.
