Established model
Moments of truth
Jan Carlzon · 1987
A company is judged in the brief encounters between a customer and a member of staff, and nowhere else.
Its place in the frameworkOmni Core›Customer Journey Mapping
What it does
Written from the turnaround of an airline, it argued that the impression of a company is created in millions of small interactions, none of which a manager attends. The management conclusion follows directly: authority has to sit with the person in the encounter, because the encounter is over long before anyone can be asked.
- Reach for it when
- When mapping a journey and deciding which points deserve real investment, and when frontline staff have responsibility without authority.
- Where it stops
- It comes from a high-contact service in the 1980s. Where most encounters are with software rather than people, the moments still exist but the conclusion about authority has to be rebuilt.
Jan Carlzon, Moments of Truth, Ballinger, 1987.
Why it sits at Customer Journey Mapping
The whole relationship as the customer experiences it — including the parts after the purchase, where most of it happens and least of it is designed.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- Mapping the journeyService-design practice on journey mapping and service blueprints, which pair the customer’s experience with the internal activity behind it.
- Moments that matterThe peak-end rule from behavioural research on remembered experience, and the moments-of-truth framing in service management.
- Channel handoversService-blueprint analysis of line-of-visibility crossings, and the coordination failures they expose.
- RedesignService redesign practice, and the finding that journey improvements usually require organisational rather than interface change.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Customer Journey Mapping lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Market CoreThe journey to purchase is mapped there; this object begins where that one ends.
- Business CoreMost journey failures are process failures, and the process belongs to whoever runs it.
- Brand CoreThe promise is kept or broken here, at the touchpoints rather than in the wording.
- Data CoreJourney measurement requires instrumentation designed for it rather than assembled afterwards.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Customer Journey Mapping too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- The service blueprintMap what the customer experiences and everything behind the counter that has to happen for it, on the same diagram.
Elsewhere in Omni Core
- The customer satisfaction index
- Net Promoter Score
- The Customer Effort Score
- SERVQUAL and the gaps model
- Service recovery
- Nielsen’s usability heuristics
- The double diamond
- The Fogg Behaviour Model
- RFM analysis
- Collaborative filtering
- Behavioural and attitudinal loyalty
- The service–profit chain
- Showrooming and webrooming
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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