The peak-end rule: your customers only remember two moments of their journey

Twelve months of relationship without any major hiccup. Onboarding wrapped up on time, responsive support, Business Reviews held every quarter. And yet, when renewal comes round, your contact only talks about one thing: the week the integration failed right in the middle of their launch. Everything else? They barely remember it. It isn't ingratitude; it's simply how memory works. Here's how to make it work for you!

We spend our days optimising averages: onboarding time, time to value, NPS, adoption rate... The problem is that your customers' brains don't do averages. They sort, distort, keep a few moments and throw away the rest.

That's the argument made by Patrice Thiriez, co-founder of Krakn, a consultancy that applies cognitive science to customer experience, in an episode of the French podcast Le Client about how customers perceive and remember their experiences. In his view, customer experience is nothing but perception, and it's often more effective to act on that perception than on operational reality. His examples come from hotels, airports and insurance. But applied to B2B SaaS, they change the way you think about the customer journey.

What your customer experiences isn't what you deliver

You deliver one experience. Your customer lives through another. In between, their brain filters everything through a series of biases: sensory biases, cognitive biases and contextual factors that have nothing to do with you.

Patrice Thiriez cites several. First, context: a tired customer in a hurry doesn't react to a delay the way a relaxed customer does. Second, their relationship with the product category: you can be very particular about one area of spending and far less so about another. Finally, personality traits: according to him, a very conscientious customer will take a vague answer far worse than someone with a more easy-going temperament.

Now apply that to B2B SaaS. A minor bug discovered on a quiet day goes unnoticed. The same bug, discovered by your sponsor the day before their leadership meeting, becomes the incident you'll hear about for the next six months. Same product, same bug, two radically different experiences.

Perception trumps objective reality

The most telling example from the episode is a story reported by the New York Times in 2012. An airport in Houston was swamped with complaints from passengers fed up with waiting at baggage reclaim. The first reflex was to add more baggage handlers. The average wait fell to around eight minutes, in line with industry standards. The complaints, however, didn't budge.

By analysing the journey, the airport worked out the real problem: passengers walked for one minute to reach the carousel, then stood around for seven minutes doing nothing. So it moved the arrival gates further away and sent the luggage to the most distant carousel. Travellers walked six times further, but barely waited at all. The result: complaints all but disappeared.

The total time didn't change. What changed was the perception of time, because active waiting always feels shorter than passive waiting. And the airport avoided heavy logistics investment to save a few minutes.

Be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions, though. This isn't about manipulating your customers; it's simply about recognising that some pain points are better fixed through perception than through operations, and choosing the right lever with your eyes open.

📌 Listen to the full interview (in French) on Marine Deck's website, episode 108: Why your customers leave you (according to cognitive science)

The peak-end rule: memory doesn't do averages

The second layer of bias, and the one that matters most in B2B SaaS, is how the experience is remembered. Patrice Thiriez gives the example of a day at a big theme park. In reality, you spend most of your time walking and queueing, for a handful of genuinely memorable rides. A few weeks later, though, you remember a magical day.

The explanation comes from the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. In 1993, with Barbara Fredrickson and Donald Redelmeier, he showed that participants would rather repeat a longer unpleasant experience if its ending was less painful. He then formalised what's known as the peak-end rule: how we remember an experience depends mainly on its most intense moment and its ending, not on its duration or the average of what we went through.

The most cited experiment was carried out on colonoscopies, at a time when the procedure was often done without general anaesthetic. In a first study, patients rated their pain in real time: their memory of the procedure was explained by the peak of pain and by the ending, much less by its length. In 2003, Redelmeier, Katz and Kahneman went further (if I may say so!) with a randomised trial of more than 600 patients. For half of them, the procedure was extended by a few minutes, with no painful manipulation, so the ending was gentler. These patients went through a longer procedure but remembered it as less unpleasant, and they were even slightly more likely to come back for a follow-up colonoscopy in the following years (Redelmeier, Katz and Kahneman, Pain, 2003).

What this means for a Customer Success team

Look at your dashboards. Average first response time, average CSAT, average adoption rate: almost everything you manage is an average. But your customer won't remember your average; they'll remember your peaks and your endings. Put simply: an SLA met 95% of the time counts for nothing against the one critical ticket left unanswered for three days.

In practice, that doesn't mean averages don't matter at all: a mediocre day-to-day experience eventually produces its own negative peaks. But it does mean your efforts aren't all equal. Some moments in the journey weigh ten times more than others in the decision to renew.

Peaks come from the gap between expectation and experience

Where does an emotional peak come from? Not out of nowhere. For Patrice Thiriez, the peak is produced by the gap between the expected experience and the actual experience. The bigger the gap, positive or negative, the more firmly the moment lodges in memory. A moment that matches expectations, even if well executed, leaves almost no trace.

How expectations shape future perception

To illustrate this, he describes an audit carried out by Krakn on a hotel's customer journey. For each stage, he scores what was expected and what was experienced on a scale from negative to positive.

Two lessons. First, expectations reset at every stage: after a neglected car park, he expected a neglected hotel, which made the renovated reception area all the more striking. Second, the moment he remembered wasn't the worst in absolute terms. It was the restaurant, because that's where he'd been promised the most. A few days later, he summed up his stay like this: an average hotel with an average restaurant, when he'd been sold an average hotel with an excellent restaurant. In short, it was the hotel's reception that created this negative peak. Not the kitchen.

In B2B SaaS, never over-promise

If we draw the parallel with B2B SaaS, the restaurant oversold at reception is the feature promised in the demo, the roll-out timeline announced a little too quickly, the native integration that isn't quite finished... The most violent negative peak in the relationship is often created before the contract is even signed.

That's why the handover between Sales and Customer Success can't just be a matter of passing over a record. The CSM needs to know exactly what was promised, and in what words, so they can either keep the promise or reset it very early on. And on the acquisition side, selling clear value that can be reached quickly is still the best way to start the relationship on the right foot.

According to Patrice Thiriez, looking closely at the expected experience, and particularly at the customer's implicit expectations, is something companies badly underuse. Yet it's what determines where the peaks will form.

A seamless journey or a memorable experience?

If only the peaks and the ending count, it's tempting to deliver a passable experience throughout the journey and pin everything on the ending. According to the specialist, that isn't necessarily a bad idea, provided the rest of the journey meets expectations.

In his view, you shouldn't necessarily try to build the frictionless journey so many companies are chasing, because a perfectly smooth experience leaves no trace in memory. Better a small hiccup well handled than an entirely flat experience.

Remove friction before working on positive emotions

This position runs up against another school of thought. In 2010, Matt Dixon and his colleagues published an article in the Harvard Business Review called "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers", which popularised the Customer Effort Score. Their argument: loyalty depends less on moments of delight than on making things easy.

The two approaches aren't as opposed as they seem. Serious friction is precisely a negative gap between expectation and experience, and therefore a negative peak that lodges in memory. When a major friction point becomes the emotional peak of the journey, it has to be fixed first.

And that's the crux of it. First, remove the frictions that risk becoming negative peaks. Then, deliberately create a few positive peaks. Not the other way round! No end-of-contract gesture can make up for poor onboarding.

A well-handled incident: an opportunity in Customer Success

The idea of a "small hiccup well handled" speaks directly to Customer Success teams. An incident is a negative gap. But how you deal with it creates a second moment, often a more intense one: a CSM who calls before the customer complains, explains what happened and says what will change turns a negative peak into a demonstration of reliability. In practice, it isn't the incident that people remember. It's what you did about it.

End of episode: how do you get it right?

If the ending carries so much weight in memory, you'd expect companies to take particular care over it. Often, it's the opposite. Patrice Thiriez gives the example of checking out of a hotel: the receptionist, absorbed in their screen, mechanically asks whether everything was all right without really looking at the guest. Not to mention the queue just to hand back a key. The guest ends their stay feeling like they no longer exist. And that feeling is what closes the experience.

Rework the ending first

Krakn worked with a hotel group that wanted more positive reviews without changing anything in its hotels. So the team focused its efforts on what was said at check-out. The receptionist takes the time to look at the guest, uses their name, explains that the hotel has just refurbished its rooms and is counting on guests' feedback, then asks whether they'd be happy to receive a link by text message to leave a review.

This simple change increased the number of reviews by almost 50%. The mechanism at work is commitment theory: a customer who has said "yes" then feels bound to keep their word. It's not about making the customer feel sorry for you. Pity isn't a lever; reciprocity is. Doing the customer a selfless favour strengthens one of the dimensions of trust, authenticity, and it then becomes hard for them to disengage from the relationship.

Close the loop, even when all is well

A second example, this time from insurance. After a repair call-out, if there's no word from the customer after a few hours, you can assume all went well. Calling every customer back was too expensive. The solution chosen: a non-personalised but well-crafted voice message noting that the insurer hadn't heard back, concluding that everything was fine and reminding the customer how to get in touch if needed. According to Patrice Thiriez, the message had a real effect on satisfaction, at negligible cost. The lesson is simple: always close the loop, even if everything seems fine. That's what your customers will remember.

End-of-episode moments in B2B SaaS

A SaaS relationship isn't a single experience; it's a series of episodes, each with its own peak and its own ending. Here are the ones that deserve a proper close:

• Resolving a ticket: check that the problem really is solved for the customer.
• The end of onboarding: mark go-live as a milestone in its own right.
• The end of a Business Review: finish on next steps and successes.
• Resolving a major incident: get back to the customer once the storm has passed.
• Renewal: say thank you and look ahead, rather than just sending an invoice.
• Offboarding: make leaving easy rather than difficult, because it's the last memory the customer will have of you. A customer who leaves can come back, and they'll talk about you either way. A well-handled departure is part of the experience.

Where do you start in practice?

Reality or perception?

For every customer pain point, ask yourself whether it needs to be solved operationally or whether it can be solved by acting on perception. For example: you guarantee a two-week roll-out, but only meet that commitment one time in four. Better to announce a month and finish in three weeks: same real timeline, but a positive gap instead of a negative one.

That's not lying; it's working on perception. And in B2B SaaS, there are plenty of opportunities: roll-out timelines, feature release dates, bug resolution times. Every promise you can't keep is a negative peak waiting to happen.

Where should you focus your effort?

Optimising the entire journey is neither realistic nor necessary. The peak-end rule gives you a way to prioritise. Here's a simple way to apply it:

1. Break your lifecycle down into episodes: signature, onboarding, first uses, tickets, incidents, Business Reviews, renewal.
2. For each episode, score what's expected and what's experienced. Expectations come from what was promised during the sale and from the customer's implicit expectations.
3. Spot the biggest negative gaps: these are your negative peaks, to tackle first.
4. Choose two or three moments to create a positive peak: a first concrete result achieved faster than expected, an unexpected gesture, and so on.
5. Take care over the end of each episode, including when everything went well.
6. Reset promises you can't keep before they turn into disappointments.

One last tip: do the exercise with Sales and Product. Gaps between expectation and experience are rarely created by the Customer Success team alone.

Conclusion

Your customers don't judge you on the sum of what you do for them. They judge you on a handful of moments: those where the gap between what they expected and what they experienced was greatest, and how each episode ended. That can be frustrating. But above all it's liberating, because it tells you where to put your energy.

Further reading:

• 8 cognitive biases that hurt your Customer Success team's performance
• SaaS: 5 tips for preparing and maximising your renewals
• Reducing churn with customer feedback
• How do you become the trusted advisor your customers are looking for?
• Customer offboarding: how to handle a customer's departure well in SaaS