“You live close to an atomic plant …”

“… here is a package of Potassium Iodide. Welcome in town and have a nice day.”

Having moved to a new city recently, I was confronted with this slightly awkward end of an otherwise friendly and casual conversation at the city administration. The place that I currently call home is just close enough to an atomic power plant to make you feel uncomfortable from time to time (like when you read about the age of Mühleberg Nuclear Power Plant).¹ The conversation at the city administration was the first time that I heard about my potential radioactive neighborhood and it reminded me of a classic psychological phenomenon that is better known as the recency effect².

One may argue that the very same holds true for any form of customer experience. The way a conversation ends, a retail store is exited or an online booking is placed might have a surpassing effect on the overall customer experience. To what extent does that assumption prove itself true? While it’s important to get the whole customer experience right, should we put special emphasis on the beginning and at the end of the experience?

This post was written in 2010. BKW’s official shutdown notice records that Mühleberg Nuclear Power Plant was commissioned on 6 November 1972 and ceased operations on 20 December 2019.
Bennet B. Murdock Jr. documents the primacy and recency pattern in “The Serial Position Effect of Free Recall”, Journal of Experimental Psychology 64, no. 5 (1962), pp. 482–488.