Mooments of Truth

Moo is awesome! Seriously. You might remember that I’ve ordered some Moo Mini Cards and I wrote a small article judging their quality and mentioning how the edges weren’t cut as smoothly? Well, imagine my surprise when I got an E-Mail from Moo apologizing for the quality issues and informing me that they will send me another batch of my Moo Minicards to set it straight. Wow! Impressive customer service. I didn’t even send them anything. I guess they are constantly scanning the interweb for comments on the quality of their products.

This made me Think:
It is great example of an effect called “Moment of Truth” which comes from a short book by the same name. The idea is that in a customers don’t judge the company by the things that go as expected but by the things that don’t. It’s called a Moment of Truth where the customer believes he is able to take look behind the procedures and norms of a company to see their true intention really is about. From a point of view of a company, it seens counter-intuitive to invest money in customers who cause them trouble by complaining, returning products and asking for additional free service. After all, these things don’t create any revenue and you don’t want to reward this kind of behavior. But in fact, it is the smartest thing a company could do because it is exactly here were the reputation of a company comes from. A customer who had a good experience in a Moment of Truth will be emotionally bound to the company. Not only will he buy lots of other products in the future, he will also tell other people about his good experience. A customer who had a bad experience will be EVEN MORE eager to spread the word and might be lost forever.

So here I am and even though I understand the mechanism, I can’t help loving Moo for what they did and seriously recommending you their excellent service. But the beauty of the Moment of Truth is that it will always be a sure way for customers to judge a company. After all, a company has to consciously choose a customer-oriented strategy in oder to improve their Moment of Truth experience. If a company sucks when something goes wrong then there is a good chance that they don’t value the satisfaction of customers very high and that they will suck again when something goes wrong the next time. That’s also what DRM does: it shows that a company is willing to burden their EVERY SINGLE customer with additional, dubious and troublesome software if it might slightly improve their revenue for a short period of time. No wonder most customers will say “fuck you too” (I’ve just seen the Amazon reviews on Spore. Jeez! What a PR disaster!).

So with that out of the way, did they do a good job with their new cards? Well, yes. The cuts on the new cards are generally cleaner. The cleanness of the cut vary from card to card like in the first batch. I took some time to pick the best and worst card from the new batch and compare them with the worst card on the old batch. As you can see, the new cards are better but it seems to me like they generally have a small quality issue with the way they cut their cards. Again, it doesn’t make the product BAD. It appears just in a few cards anyway and the card isn’t ruined by that. It’s just a small quality issue where Moo could improve.

Top: the worst card from the first batch.
Middle: the worst card from the new batch.
Bottom: the best card from the new batch.

But more importantly, seeing how they handle quality problems, I will continue using Moo because now I know that they will act if other problems happen. And in print, other problems will ALWAYS happen.