What Colonoscopies can Teach You about Customer Experience
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jul 05, 2010
In the 1995 paper "Patients' memories of painful medical treatments: real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures", Donald Redelmeiera and Daniel Kahnemanc discovered that a patient's willingness to undergo a future colonoscopy was shaped by their assessment of the pain associated with a prior colonoscopy. They also found that they could manipulate patient perceptions of that experience so that patients recalled less pain.
In their study, the length of the procedure was not a significant factor in assessments of the overall pain. Instead, those assessments were based on remembering peak pain and the pain of the final three minutes of the procedure. Keeping the probe in place but motionless at the end of the procedure was less painful than when the probe was being moved. Even though, from an objective point of view, the experience was now longer and represented greater accumulated pain over the entire duration, patients recalled it as a less painful procedure than patients who simply had had the probe removed. (You didn't want me to be more specific, did you?!)
For purposes of recall, the final perceptions of the experience were important. If you have tedious customer experiences (e.g., long forms that must be completed, time-consuming service processes), try to minimize the peak pain and provide the best final impression that you can. Yes, you can improve perceptions of negative experiences, even when they're a pain in the ass.