By Allwell Nwankwo

Moment of Truth. That expression is already a cliché in customer service-speak. Customer service trainers, most times, use the expression without bothering to explain it to their audience. I first encountered that expression some time in 1998. My trainer kept using the expression without giving any information about its origin, although we, the trainees, understood it to mean the point at which a customer encounters the service of an organisation – face-to-face, by email or even by phone. I kept wondering the origin of the expression.

Years later, I realised the expression was first used in the service management context by the Swedish management scholar, Richard Normann, who borrowed it from the sport of bull-fighting. In that morbid sport, “the moment of truth” is the point at which the bull-fighter comes face-to-face with the bull. In Nigerian political parlance, it is a “do-or-die moment” because the matador either kills the bull or gets killed by the bull. The expression was popularised by the former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS), Jan Carlzon, with his top-selling book, Moments of Truth, published in the late 1980s. Many people will see this expression as a gory way of describing an encounter with customers. Is it really so?

When you realise that each encounter with a customer is a moment that can make or mar a relationship, you’ll probably see Normann’s point. Interestingly, like the bull-fighter, the customer-facing employee is usually on their own when relating to a customer. At this critical moment, the employee’s great attitude, training, empowerment, experience, initiative – or lack of all these – are usually on display for the customer to see. At this point, this single employee holds the ace on the fortunes of the company. At this moment, this employee can help the company keep or churn customers. At the moment of truth, even the CEO of the company isn’t as powerful as this employee facing the customer because that single employee is the embodiment of the brand.

All the great marketing communications, coupled with fantastic physical facilities, will come to nought if that single employee fails to impress the customer. For a nation of football lovers, perhaps the best way to capture the moment of truth is to compare it to the last and (usually) decisive shot of a tense penalty shoot-out at the end of a pulsating 120-minute football game. Will your last player score? Or will he miss and let the other team carry the day?

It’s amazing that many corporate leaders around here don’t get it. No matter how much you spend on the look of your corporate office and creative advertising, it is the actual customer contact with your people – by person, email, phone – that will make all the difference.

It beats my imagination how organisations will spend fortunes to attract customers only to hire lowly-paid, poorly motivated, ill-trained, ill-equipped, rude employees to attend to those customers. A case in point usually comes to mind whenever I ponder this matter. Years back, someone decided to build a good hotel in Ibadan. The rooms were well-appointed and the halls good for events. Unfortunately the hotel staff looked scruffy, dirty, unhelpful and clueless. They could not say “yes” to anything without getting clearance from their supervisor. Talk about emasculation! Those people had no idea what they were hired to do. They wasted so many moments of truth. Today, that hotel is less than a shadow of what it used to be.

If you want your business to survive long-term, I suggest you hire employees with great attitude, train them very well, motivate them, empower them and appreciate them. They will turn your moments of truth into moments of difference!