SAS's legendary CEO Jan Carlzon said his company was 're-created' millions of times a year. We look at moments of truth and the service-profit chain.
Scandinavian airline SAS's CEO Jan Carlzon, in his 1987 book "Moments of Truth," defined customer experience with a framework still referenced today: a company doesn't exist in its big advertising campaigns — it's recreated in every brief interaction a customer has with an employee, the 15 seconds at a check-in counter. According to Carlzon, SAS was recreated millions of times a year, each time in one of these few-second "moments of truth."
A "moment of truth" is any touchpoint where a customer forms an impression of a company — a phone call, an invoice, a website, a delayed delivery. Carlzon's real insight was that most of these moments sit in the hands of frontline employees who deal directly with customers — moments senior management never even sees. That's why improving customer experience doesn't start with a new slogan; it starts with giving frontline employees the authority to make decisions.
The "service-profit chain" model, defined in 1994 by Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger of Harvard Business School, shows where customer experience actually begins: satisfied employees → higher service value → satisfied customers → customer loyalty → profitability. The first link in that chain is often overlooked — but according to the model, the most effective way to improve customer experience is to improve employee experience first.
Customer service is a reactive function that kicks in when something goes wrong. Customer experience is far broader: it's the sum of every touchpoint a customer has with your brand — the website, the sales process, the invoice, the delivery, the support. A great customer service team can compensate for a poorly designed customer experience, but it can't fix it.
The first step to improving customer experience in an organization isn't fixing the biggest complaint — it's mapping every moment a customer encounters you, big or small, from start to finish, at least once.
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