A Moment of Truth (MOT) occurs when a customer comes in contact with your company and experiences your level of quality. A positive MOT with a customer takes you closer to the promised land of satisfied customers, high Share of Inputs and repeat business. A negative MOT creates dissatisfied customers who look elsewhere to get their needs met.

A customer experiences many Moments of Truth during the process of doing business with you. Strung together, these MOT create a Cycle of Service along which you and your customers interact. AgKnowlogy's analysis of the sales and customer behavior among hundreds of retailers and more than 200,000 growers strongly suggests that the percent of available business that growers give a retailer is related to how positively they view the retailer's product and service offerings. Think of your share of a customer's business as a report card that is strongly influenced by his perception of the quality of your product and service offer. I believe that understanding this concept of Share of Inputs (SOI) being a report card from customers is one of the most important things for retailers to come to grips with. If SOI with a customer is low, there is work to be done at better understanding his real needs and developing solutions to satisfy those needs. Thinking about MOT in our business helps us focus attention on areas that customers are evaluating in terms of how well we satisfy their needs.

It is convenient to break Moments of Truth into the following critical contacts:

• Initial contact
• Problem solving
• First use
• Ongoing support
• Further purchases
• Recommendation to others

Let's consider a simplified Cycle of Service for a spring custom-applied herbicide program. The cycle for a spring 2004 application likely starts with a review of 2003 results and initial planning for the next year. The “events” going clockwise are a possible sequence of Moments of Truth in which your customer will experience the quality of your staff, in terms of knowledge, timeliness, accuracy, follow-up and a dozen other things that affect his decision to remain a customer.

Many retailers believe they have all the business they want from a particular customer. While this is a convenient rationalization to explain why they don't have all a customer's business, in reality the retailer has all the business a customer is prepared to give him. It's a big difference!

I want to stress two points that I guarantee can increase your sales, customer loyalty and profits. 1) Most retailers don't have an ongoing fact-based process to measure what percent of a high potential customer's business they have. Without ongoing customer profiling it's very difficult to gauge how close you are to capturing most of your customer's business. 2) Most retailers don't have tools in place to quantify their customer experience within a Cycle of Service. Failure to understand how your customer's MOT impact loyalty means you are shooting in the dark when it comes to attempting to improve your service and product offer. How would you decide what to focus on without the key facts that would guide your decisions? Hope is not a strategy, and working hard is not a business plan.

Some points along a Cycle of Service are more vital than others and, consequently, the quality a customer experiences at those points will impact on SOI and loyalty more heavily than others. It is important to note that even though the same Cycle of Service operates for most of your customers, they all react individually to the cycle. What will drive one customer away is not a big deal to another. One customer would defect if you misapplied his herbicide, while another understands that everyone makes mistakes. But this last customer absolutely expects you to call him on his farm every quarter.

I highly recommend you begin developing the Cycle of Service your customers experience. Start by mapping out a rough cycle as I drew it above. Write down all the events through which your customers come in contact with your company and experience your quality. Then begin to routinely ask your high potential customers what matters most to them, and how you are meeting their needs on these key points. I promise this will increase your sales, customer loyalty and profits. If you need any help getting started, I would be happy to lend an ear or a hand.

Bill Keogh is the owner of AgKnowlogy Inc., a company that helps retailers use customer information to improve their business results. If you have a success story to share or an idea for a future column, e-mail him at info@agknowlogy.com, phone 905/868-9953 or visit www.agknowlogy.com.

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