Show Me Your Towel Animal
OVERVIEW
Customers expect the work to get done.
What they remember are the moments that make the experience feel different.
As capabilities become easier to copy, the real advantage increasingly shifts to how the experience feels. Two organizations can offer comparable products, technology, expertise, and pricing. The difference often shows up in the hundred small decisions surrounding the work: how someone is welcomed, whether friction disappears before they ask, whether a preference is remembered, whether a problem feels owned, or whether somebody takes an extra thirty seconds to make the interaction feel more human.
Show Me Your Towel Animal explores what happens when organizations stop treating customer experience as only a process to manage and start intentionally designing the moments people remember.
The idea is simple:
Doing the work is expected. Creating a moment makes the expected feel exceptional.
Carnival did not reinvent housekeeping when it started creating towel animals. The room still had to be clean. The towels still had to be there. They simply took an ordinary part of the experience and made it memorable.
That is the opportunity.
The small stuff is the big stuff.
INSIDE THIS PERSPECTIVE
You’ll explore:
Why competence is increasingly becoming the price of admission.
Why experience can become a differentiator when products, capabilities, and expertise begin to look similar.
How small, purposely designed moments can create a disproportionately large impact.
Why customer experience is not about making every interaction magical.
How ordinary interactions can become memorable through Notice, Remove, Add, and Delight.
The difference between a process that creates consistency and a moment that creates memory.
How to identify the interactions that make up your customer experience.
How to plot those interactions across Expected → Better → Thoughtful → Awesome.
Why not every interaction needs to move all the way to “Awesome.”
How to identify the one or two moments where extra intention could matter most.
How to Remove friction, Notice what matters, and Add something useful or human.
What separates a nice moment from a signature moment.
How to pressure-test signature moments for relevance, humanity, distinction, simplicity, repeatability, and shareability.
Why the best customer moments become part of what people remember, repeat, and associate with your brand.
START THE CONVERSATION
Every GTG Perspective is designed to spark conversations that create greater clarity, stronger alignment, and meaningful action. The goal is not to convince you to agree. It is to inspire conversations that challenge assumptions, sharpen thinking, and create meaningful change.
Use these questions with your leadership team:
Where in our customer experience are we simply delivering what is expected?
Which interactions currently feel Expected, Better, Thoughtful, or Awesome?
Which one or two customer moments could benefit most from a little more intention?
Where are customers still doing work, chasing information, repeating themselves, or navigating unnecessary friction?
What do our customers tell us that we could do a better job of noticing or remembering?
Where could a small additional touch make an otherwise ordinary interaction feel more human?
Which moments in our experience are customers most likely to remember after the work itself is finished?
Do we have any moments customers might actually photograph, mention, or tell someone else about?
What experiences are dependent on one unusually thoughtful employee rather than something we have intentionally designed?
Which of our best customer moments could become recognizable, repeatable signature moments?
Can those moments scale without becoming scripted or robotic?
If we wanted a customer to say, “You won’t believe what they did…”, what might we do differently?