From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans

CHAPTER 7

Create Peaks and Avoid Valleys

No matter how hard you try to improve your organization’s customer experience, the reality is that your customers won’t remember much of it.

That’s because our brains aren’t wired like a video camera, recording every second of every experience. Rather, what we remember are a series of snapshots. And those snapshots aren’t taken at random. The camera shutter opens to capture the peaks and the valleys in the experience—the really high points and the really low points. Most everything else, all the parts of the experience that are just “meh,” fade into the background and disappear from our memory.

This insight about the inner workings of our memory was first explored in 1993 by the renowned behavioral ...