Pivotal Moments System™

To achieve engaging customer KPIs and business growth, organizational product, platform, and marketing teams must align requirements on each experience. Tactical playbooks from prioritized, heuristic analysis for proven outcomes.

What is happening, why it matters.

Businesses today are facing several years of “digital transformations.” While progress has been made, CEOs are asking “where is the ROI?” while customer satisfaction is falls short of these goals. Complexity has ensued between products, platforms, and support mechanisms with unintended tech and design debt.

What is happening? Barriers remain.

Teams often struggle to solve customer friction points from lack of awareness or obstacles that prevent supporting teams from achieving CX success. Barriers (perceived or real) between customers and businesses are not evident from a lack of documentation. Research shows business performance significantly elevates when you properly identify and document CX clarity.

What can an organization do? Align on their goals.

Success depends on overcoming key barriers collectively in what matters most: customer moments of discrete decisions on a brand. Teams with proper “why” mindset with evaluative framework can collectively plan on customer journeys for success. They are empowered to evaluate brand experiences gaps to improve decision confidence.

This is why I began developing my trademarked Pivotal Moments™ system in 2015.

OF FIRMS ASPIRE TO BE A CX LEADER

84%

OF CEOs BELIEVE THEIR EMPLOYEES CAN SUMMARIZE FULL CUSTOMER ARC

16%

COMPANIES DELIVERS GOOD OR GREAT CX

-Forrester Customer Experience CEO Index 2017

1/5

“The barrier to success is not something which exists in the real world; it is composed purely and simply of doubts about ability.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Why do we need a solution? Impacts on CX barriers.

Product/channel team realities:

Working in silos: delivering disjointed channel updates while accepting status quo barriers.

Product and IT/Platform budgets are projected to continue to rise in 2024 between 8-15%.

Forrester’s State Of CX Teams Survey, 2023

Customer realities:

Just want a solid experience - solved. It doesn’t need to be amazing - just effortless satisfaction.

“Pros haven’t convinced executives to invest in CX…just over half of CX decision-makers project budgets to be flat or slight 1% to 4% in 2024.”

The impact: ‘Status quo’ has become accepted decisions impacting business growth with risks, including:

  1. Maintaining tech debt at a sacrifice to the experience.

  2. Our brand suffers from below-average experiences, worsening our ROAS (advertising).

  3. Our customers will soon find a brand that has figured it out.

  4. Meanwhile, reporting quarterly increments that sacrifice long-term experiences.

  5. Statisticlly speaking, startups can and will likely replace some of the journey with agile solutions.

“Invest in cross-functional alignment to deliver connected experiences. Strong alignment leads to better outcomes: Organizations whose marketing, digital, and CX teams are highly aligned report 1.6x faster revenue growth than peers and 1.4x better customer engagement. …hire an outside partner to assist and train your team if necessary.”

— CX Leaders: Here’s How To Allocate Your 2025 Budget To Reverse CX Declines And Boost Quality; Forrester; August 2024

Four common barriers to customer success

  • Product Conflict

    Customers Do Not Adopt the Value

    One-time or multiple purchases are met with misunderstood value, complicating growth.

    Symptom: Customers do not project their lifestyle values with your organization’s goals.

  • Services Conflict

    Lifestyles Do Not Align to the Brand

    Consumers are missing the value to your services or digital products.

    Symptom: Customers do not effectively utilize a service in intended touchpoints of their journey.

  • Conversion Conflict

    Consumers are Not Becoming Customers

    Consumers are aware of, or respect your brand but for unknown reasons are not buying in.

    Symptom: Customers speak favorably of the brand, yet recursive purchases are impacted.

  • Reach Conflict

    Brand Awareness is Not Extended

    Effective channel marketing is not successful in key markets of loyalty or growth.

    Symptom: Targeted audience messaging is not changing/aligning behavior to brand adoption.

Brands leveraging my Pivotal Moments System™:

Marriott Itnl.png
Stellantis.png
United Airlines.png
Caterpillar.png
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Northeastern.png
Amway.png
Samsung.png
Vanguard.png
ADP.png
Prudential.png

2015 moment with Caterpillar’s leadership that Pivotal Moments™ were born. Harmonizing team discussions into tactical strategy for a single, global SFMC platform.

“It’s not that employees or leadership don’t deeply care about customers, it’s that they commonly lack action plans for them.”

- Josh Nard

Let’s talk about solving your customer moments.

Available for short-term leadership consulting engagements on my Pivotal Moments™ System.

 

The solution: A heuristic in consumer decisions™.

Pivotal Moments™ system define customer expectation requirements that activate brand value with revenue outcomes.

Podcast short: Pivotal Moments™ Introduction

Generated by NotebookLM, I created a podcast short on my Pivotal Moments frameworks creates greater customer engagement for brands by defining empathy-led moments for businesses to identify and measure.

 Pivotal Moments™ System | Foundations

Product engagement converges @ business & customer purpose.

Your business goals:

  • Attracting qualified prospects

  • Writing measurable requirements

  • Scale impact for new customers

  • Brand satisfaction & behavioral influence

  • Building and sustaining engagement

  • Retaining, optimizing high-value customers

  • Maximizing customer revenue through value exchange

Your customers’ goals:

  • Help me find the best product or service for my needs

  • Make buying and using easy for me

  • Educate, support and inspire me, and reward me for my loyalty

  • What else should I be considering – keep me informed

  • Connect me with others for advice and inspiration

Pivotal Moments™ System | Value

What Pivotal Moments System deliver:

1) Human-Behavioral

  • They define behavior driven communication from shopper affinities with tactical strategy.

  • • Triggers & Signals

    •  Emotions & Barriers

    •  Behaviors/Routines

    •  Customer Goals

    •  Persona Readiness Heuristic

    •  Shopping affinities

    •  Demographic Insights

    •  Psychographic purchasing insights

2| Business-Actionable

  • They clarify customer requirements planning, personalization and channel messaging.

  • •  Channel Dependencies

    •  Formats and Attributes

    •  Timing/Cadence and paths

    •  Personalization affinities

    •  Activation use cases

    •  KPI Metrics and Readiness

    •  Key messaging priority

    •  Transactional spending

3) Brand-Measurable

  • Lastly, they define waypoints to measure CX for product-optimized business R.O.I. performance.

  • •  Performance Metrics

    •  Channel Destinations

    •  CTAs and Pre-Send Prep

    •  Learning Plans & Testing

    •  Metric Frameworks

    •  Roadmap improvements

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

— Mike Tyson

Shortcomings in business strategy commonly fall within team awareness on execution. Having a playbook on customer realities is how successful companies win.

Pivotal Moment playbooks: A heuristic in brand activation planning™.

By defining requirements in momentary consumer decisions, teams collectively coordinate solutions.

 Pivotal Moments™ System | Hueristic playbooks

How it works: analyzing customer data into intelligence to anticipate and respond to behavioral decisions.

Heuristic P.M.™ definitions:

  1. Pivotal Behaviors™ from shopper traits and engagement patterns

  2. Pivotal Maturity™ team readiness of product, marketing and tech

  3. Pivotal Barriers™ experiences required or avoided in a gap analysis

  4. Pivotal KPIs™ framework connecting business goals with touchpoint analysis

  5. Pivotal Narrative™ for executive-level insight storytelling with dev. epics

  6. Pivotal Personalized™ from psychographic shopper, product attributes

  7. Pivotal Prioritization™ scores team readiness with priorities

  8. Pivotal Conditional CX™ Experiences/pathing product/channel success KPIs

  9. Pivotal Sentiment™* in positive and negative brand messaging

  10. Pivotal Trust™* from trust, engagement and churn

  11. Pivotal Prompts™* to optimze richer data analysis into moments

Strategic outcomes:

  1. Customer Persona Definitions triggers and routines

  2. Customer Data Profiling for next-best-action attributes in content tagging

  3. Activation Strategy for omnichannel key messaging

  4. User Pathways CTAs on channel planning KPIs

  5. CX User Stories / requirements across channel, product activation

  6. Campaign matrix connects current campaign performance within moment recommendations

  7. KPI Performance frameworks to measure CX engagement

  8. Roadmaps optimizing personalization development

Approach: Heuristic/metric measured, tactical playbooks on outcomes

  • 1| Conduct CX, product research

    Begin with understanding your customers joy and pain points with both your products as well as their daily routines. Understand what behaviors and motivators move them.

  • 2| Define CX & EX journeys

    To be a customer-centric organization, you must lead with your customers and employees who support them. Take the researcher and begin to map their behaviors with how employees currently support them. Identify where there may be gaps including preferred channels such as chatbots.

  • 3| Connect business goals w/ CX

    After you have evaluated your various customer goals, map the business product and services to their journey. How do they serve them? Where are the deficits? Identify where you are stronger and weaker using actual data. Consider scoring such as NPS or CLV toward these gaps.

  • 4| Develop a Service Blueprint

    Go several levels deeper in the journey with identified “swim lanes” of various business considerations and processes that you follow. Identify where impacts to the experience creates resistance in a negative - or positive way.

  • 5| Connect measurable KPIs

    Business goals can be challenging to measure progress without progress. What gets measured, gets managed. My work connects business outcome targets to journeys to touchpoints with measurable metrics. This allows teams to better implement roadmaps by adding dozens of right fit metrics.

  • 6| Identify Barriers to Success

    Barriers begin to emerge as you identify key, “pivotal moments” that link your customer’s needs with the brand. Identify problems and perceived barriers. Ask why employees respond the way they do in culture, policy. Identify communication tactics for a resolution.

  • 7| Readiness change mgmt.

    Run heuristics from my vetted evaluations on organizational readiness in CX, EX, customer data maturity and employee KPI engagement. Include Persona and team OKR readiness that are connected to business goals.

  • 8| Develop, prioritize a Roadmap

    Once these barriers are identified with proposed resolutions, begin to assess feasible outcomes with long-term implementation. Consider employee training, policies, and procedures in addition to technical or digital updates.

  • 9| Define prioritized req./PRDs

    What you gain are greater contextual requirements for your customers that are written to their pivotal moments of success. With greater impact, we also add weighted value between personas to understand personalization and channel preferences.

“The strongest rope is only as strong as being secure at both ends. This system ties leadership goals with measured team execution.”

- Josh Nard

Pivotal Moments™ System | Value

Not another consultant/agency. It gives your teams agency in joint decisions.

Pivotal Moments™ is not another deliverable telling you what to do, it empowers teams with what impacts your customer’s decisions with a framework to prioritize and align better decisions:

Business heuristics playbooks ‘what’ with tactical ‘why’ actions to activate your business strategies.

Tony Fadell: Team’s mission & ‘why’ impacts (see 1:09:25)

“If you have a great story, and you know the ‘why,’ then you can communicate it (to teams). Then they bring their own thing into it. It becomes emotional for them too. …It’s not just a job, it’s a mission.”

“If you instill that mission and that ‘why’ into a team… you get a 10x.”

Forbes/Forrester August 2024: Invest in cross-functional alignment to deliver connected experiences.

Article: CX Leaders: Here’s How To Allocate Your 2025 Budget To Reverse CX Declines And Boost Quality; Forbes/Forrester August 2024

1.6x faster revenue growth

Reported organizations whose marketing, digital, and CX teams are highly aligned report over their peers.

1.4x better CX engagement

Reported organizations whose marketing, digital, and CX teams are highly aligned report over their peers.

A podcast short: Pivotal Prompts™

Generated by NotebookLM, I created a podcast short on sharing an example of how my prompt engineering framework helps teams become confident in decisions to optimize experiences.

Let’s discuss activating your moments for success.

Available for short-term consulting and educational engagements on my Pivotal Moments™ System.

 

“49% of consumers have left a brand in the past year due to poor customer experience.”

Emplifi