Our latest Far Reads Book Club pick was “ The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact” by Dan and Chip Heath. Here’s our recap.
Who Selected It
Kelly Kimmich
Why We Selected It
Reviewing, evaluating, and iterating on our client experience is one of our 2019 initiatives. We wanted a book that would fuel discussions around client service, and the Power of Moments was recommended to Kelly by a LinkedIn connection.
Empathy and client experience can seem like buzzwords, so it was important to us to find a book that talks about it in a way that’s relatable. This book fit that bill well, plus, it’s an easy read that lends itself well to group discussions.
What It’s About
The book summary says it best: “In this book, we explore why certain brief experiences can jolt us and elevate us and change us—and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work.”
The memorable moments in our lives seem to be random or driven by luck. But when we look at what makes a memorable moment—elevation, insight, pride, and connection—we learn that we can actually create these impactful experiences for those
around us.
We can also apply the principles in the Power of Moments to the systems we build, making sure we continue to step back and focus on the users’ perspective. What would surprise and delight them? How can we make the software we build enjoyable for
people to use?
Lessons Learned
We don’t remember most moments in our lives, and that’s okay. If everything were exciting and memorable all the time, we’d lose our opportunities to be delighted. Even when it comes to experiences with businesses, meeting expectations
is the threshold—it doesn’t have to be over-the-top outstanding all the time as long as it’s not over-the-top bad all the time either. The power is in the few memorable experiences you cultivate for your customers on top of meeting
their day-to-day expectations. The moments that blow them away. You can can actually design and create moments that add to people’s lives instead of just leaving it up to luck.
To create these moments, they need to be tailored to each person. All memorable moments aren’t created equal. One person’s “wow” moment is another person’s “meh.” Doing this requires listening to, remembering,
and acting upon what those around you say about themselves in creative ways.
One of the best ways to see opportunities for powerful moments is to experience your business from the other side. What’s it like to be one of your customers? If you can, go through your customer journey as if you were a customer and identify areas
of improvement and potential powerful moments.
Something else that really resonated with the entire team was the concept of tripping over the truth. As professional service providers, clients rely on us to make recommendations and provide advice. Sometimes, though, clients need to discover things
on their own, which the book calls “tripping over the truth.” We can help clients trip over the truth with powerful moments that shift their thinking.
Our Favorite Quote
“Beware the soul-sucking force of reasonableness.”
Organizations are built to be reasonable—to focus on being streamlined and standardized—sometimes at the cost of the extraordinary. And we all need the occasional reminder to step outside our box and do something despite its unreasonableness.
How We’re Applying What We Learned
The Power of Moments was a good mix of theoretical and practical. It helped us frame how we think and talk about our customer experience.
Once you celebrate the launch of a software system, it’s easy to forget to acknowledge big achievements. As a result of reading this book, we’re dedicated to helping clients commemorate milestones in their systems. We’ll pay attention
to landmarks hit throughout their journey with us (they’ll be unique to each client) and acknowledge and celebrate them together.
We’ve already taken a look at our customer journey and identified a few places we could improve the experience. As a result, we’re working on creating tools and resources that will help improve how clients receive certain information about
their system.
We’re also going to continue to focus on building personal relationships with clients. This comes pretty natural to us, but it’s so important that we want to continue to make a conscious effort in this area.
And last but certainly not least, we’re going to apply the principles in the book to our team’s journey as well to help make their Far Reach experience extra special.
We haven’t picked our next book yet, but you can look for a recap of whatever it may be in a few months. Until then, stay curious, friends!