CX Moments: How to Win Customers Through Micro-Moments

The customer journey is the totality of interactions an individual has with a brand or product. Within the customer journey are a multitude of customer experience (CX) touchpoints that are fertile opportunities for meaningful consumer engagement. Winning customers requires strategic attention dedicated to micro-moments. 

What are micro-moments?

Micro-moments are fragmented snippets of time throughout the day when we instinctively glance online. These short interactions, often referred to as the “I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, I-want-to-buy” moments, typically occur on a smartphone, and often when we have time to kill. Additionally, micro-moments can be instances when customers quickly pop online even though they do not have a lot of time or attention to dedicate to browsing, contemplating, and finalizing a purchase. 

Micro-moments can take many forms and occur many times throughout the day. The types of micro-moments that consumers experience include curiosity, discovery, purchase, research, and more. During these intent-rich micro-moments of the customer journey, expectations are elevated, preferences are shaped, and decisions are made.

Micro-moments pose a unique opportunity for customer experience professionals because they are fodder for our ‘fast reacting’ cognitive biases that come into play when interpreting search results and making buying decisions. Leveraging the cognitive biases within the human brain can nudge the customer toward a mutually beneficial outcome for the individual and the organization they’.  In our content-saturated world, Micro-moments are time-boxed opportunities where those nudges are most important.

Why Micro-Moments are Important

Micro-moments are important facets of the customer journey. Traditional marketing strategies linearly funnel buyers through carefully crafted awareness, engagement, transaction, and retention stages. However, with the ubiquitous and immersive reliance on smartphones for almost every aspect of daily life, the consumer journey has been fractionalized into numerous, highly potent micro-moments of engagement opportunities. 

Activating these micro-moments can support consumers’ desires for immediate and effortless gratification. Because consumers are accustomed to acting intuitively and instinctively, the quality, relevancy, timing, and appeal of marketing is important. Businesses and brands need to harness the power embedded in the multitude of micro-moments to meet the needs of consumers. Each micro-moment is a critical opportunity for brands to influence a consumer’s preferences and purchases. 

How to Win Micro-Moments

To win micro-moments, businesses must generate content that is simultaneously attentive to human cognitive preferences and also friendly to the search engine results page (SERP). Content must be available, accessible, and appealing to the consumer. Skillfully fulfilling these priorities requires a solid understanding of the behavioral economics at play within the customer experience. In this optimized marketing strategy, choice architecture is a critical component and is useful for nudging the micro-moment viewer towards a mutually pleasing and beneficial outcome. 

As humans, the dominant, reflexive portion of our brains strives to simplify our lives by relying upon our cognitive biases (e.g., rules of thumb and life-lessons) to interpret information and make decisions. Cognitive biases operate subconsciously to rapidly process information.  Marketing can complement and cater to these natural inclinations that are further enhanced and reinforced by continual and unlimited connectivity through our smartphones. Content needs to deliver value and viewers need to be able to consume the content quickly and effectively. Winning micro-moments requires a thoughtfully organized context in which consumers can effortlessly make discoveries, easily make decisions, experience affirming satisfaction from their engagements and purchases, and repeat those behaviors again and again. 

As time-sensitive, context-specific marketing opportunities, micro-moment product encounters must highlight key cognitive biases to guide the purchase decisions. To optimize marketing and enhance CX, it is important to project a clear brand identity, and position your product to show how your product or service can address those biases. In fact, social media platforms, applications, and websites are excellent channels for strategic nudges that prompt mutually satisfying behaviors during precious micro-moments. 

The Ultimate Solution

This detailed, insight-driven approach requires more than just traditional CX tools. To win customers through micro-moments, businesses need supercharged, comprehensive CX strategies that provide genuine, value-based exchanges. The ultimate CX strategies involve partnering with an innovative firm that offers a hands-on effort to leverage the benefits of transformation-enabling technologies and complete process redesign. Customer-lead service delivery includes curated customer experience capabilities such as process-based CX journey delivery, psychographic persona design, complex service structure, CX governance design, and service channel and E2E CX testing strategies. These features are integral to Accelare’s Purpose-Driven Customer Experience approach. 

For over 20 years, Accelare has been a trusted partner for transformation-focused business consultations that guide clients from digital strategy to execution, so that breakthrough ideas become brilliant experiences. Accelare is committed to changing the world of work by leading organizations through digital business model transformation. Their patented strategy-to-execution methodology ensures people, processes, and technology can elegantly align. To elevate your CX strategies to win customers through micro-moments, contact Accelare today!