The flap of a butterfly’s wings

In the last week or so, a butterfly flapped its wings and directed a typhoon right towards me. In turn I altered my route from the originally planned path and from one alteration to the next, I met a group of three french girls. At night, the town went dark due to the curfew and I had a street food dinner with them surrounded by candle lights and young Vietnamese singing all evening. That's one of theses incredible moments, coming out of nowhere.

Most moments of truth take seconds to happen: meeting someone new, reaching the finish line of a race, giving life just for a few examples.

But some of these moments will have a rather large impact on our lives and yet we cannot predict the size and shape of that impact. All things around us including ourselves are part of a chaotic system.

Customer behaviours are also chaotic and thereby very hard to predict. That's why there is often a big deviation between consumers loyalty indicators and actual retention rates.
Unless you know the actual change (up to date customer and market dynamics) from initial condition (customer and market situation at the time the loyalty indicator was taken) you cannot make accurate predictions.
That's an area where big data shows great potential for the future. If we could put the relevant consumer and market data together to present a dynamic view of the changes from initial condition, we could react within the chaos and change the course of future events. But that's still a few years away, the next generation will have to deal with that...

So what can we do to maximise consumer loyalty in the meantime? I'd say the two main things are 1) to ensure a consistent high quality branded experience across all interaction points and 2) to minimise customer effort in the retention journey.

Stay focused on operations, the devil is in the flap of a butterfly's wings!

That was the thoughts from my bicycle under the rain between Danang and Dong Hoi, central Vietnam


References:
The flap of a butterfly’s wings : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
Chaotic systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic_system


Pictures: floaded bridge, hotel courtyard fallen trees during typhoon, little girl playing in the floaded street, photos: candle light dinner in the street, stone bench moved by the typhoon, me waiting at the boat the cross the river