Don’t you remember your fondest memories? Your memories are great reservoirs of your ideas and behavior. Customer memories are great ways to drive customer loyalty and are crucial to customer experience. Your customers need to keep receiving great experiences to develop great memories. A bunch of good positive experiences makes it easy to choose a good memory. Your customers must remember good memories to enhance their overall business view.

However, memories are different for different people. While the CSM might remember a certain issue as challenging, it could be a cakewalk for the customer. A good customer experience story may not be the best memory. CSMs need to understand how memories work.

How do Customer Memories work?

This works through the peak-end rule. The peak-end rule is a cognitive bias that impacts how people remember past events. Intense positive or negative moments (the “peaks”) and the final moments of an experience (the “end”) are heavily weighted in our mental calculus. Source

People associate an emotion with an experience and vice versa. If a customer feels elated, it means they have a positive experience. If a customer feels bad about a company, it has something to do with their experience at the firm. This peak of emotions is what dictates memories and moments. You need to engage the customer properly to give rise to good memories. Customers also have episodic memories, a bunch of memories related to the event.

The best way to connect with your customers is by invoking positive vibes and memories, or making them laugh. Some examples of how customers can form good memories-

• When they had a positive experience with issue resolution
• When they saw their name or the company name in a news story for the right reasons
• A great offer from the company
• A message or social post from the company that made the customer laugh
• Influencer brands mention when they trust the influencer

The core reflections in customer memory are whether the brand exists in the customer’s mind. If yes, what are the image and reflection? Is that image going to help increase revenue, drive value, increase net promoter score, and grow steadily?

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How to Manage Customer Memories?

Positive customer memories can be influential in increasing customer experience. You need to know how important customer memories are for them and how to enable growth with them. Here are some ways to manage customer memories.

Understand how Customer’s memories are made

Customers’ memories are made when they associate the strength of the emotion with an experience or event. This emotion creates memories that can be understood. You need to track how customers’ emotions work and how strong one’s impact customers like never before. The peak-action formula holds true. The peak is the intense emotion you feel for an experience. The action needs to be improved to meet with the experience customers want.

Find the driving emotions

Try to figure out what these emotions behind memories are. You need to know which emotion drives the memory. This includes fear, happiness, delight, impact on business, and more. When deciding on the importance of memories, you need to know how the intention and experience work. This will impact your business and recommendations. You must reduce friction and find the right emotion and the resulting memory.

For example, a customer may find a simple resolution to be a happy memory. But the team knows how they put that in place and the collaboration required.

Another example, Instagram Reels may be popular and loved by all. But many users troll with their reels attaching negative memories with them.

Know what can damage this emotion

Now that you know the contributing emotions – find out what can damage them. Is it the lack of response? Is it a one-time lucky scenario? Will there be a problem later? Is the customer over-expecting from the company? Find out the core problems and assess them accordingly. Know what you want to remember and use that to your advantage. Identify strong positive emotions and do that again.

For example, you might have offered a wonderful experience for a B2B SaaS company keeping their unique situation in mind. remember the unique situation, and connect with their product and emotion whenever you talk to them.

Choose what you want your customer to remember

You can always choose what the customer should remember. For example- If the customer had a great onboarding, you could make sense of that and use it. If the onboarding was bad, you need to divert their attention to product adoption and usage while improving customer onboarding. Similarly, know what works and try to put that out. Help customers discover great memories and enhance customer experience.

Reinforce the memory by providing an awesome experience

Memories can be reinforced when they are repeated and reinforced. This will help increase consistency and build a brand image. You can reduce bad experiences by replicating positive experiences. Didn’t we all memorize the alphabet by reading it repeatedly? That is how memory works. Figure out what is it that customers want to see. What are the emotions that make them stay? How will you deliver these experiences and emotions consistently? Make a note of that and deliver accordingly. Notice how you can improve and offer the same value.

Bottom Line

By driving customer experience with customer memory, CSMs can improve growth. It is easier to improve customer experience when you know what is working. This will help you recall and understand the brand experience and intention better. You can also create enhanced brand messaging and influence customer opinion positively.

WRITTEN BYStanley Deepak

Stanley Deepak is an accomplished sales and marketing professional with 15+ years of experience. He loves tech products and book reading. He writes on philosophy and culture on LinkedIn.

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