Your Customers' Time is Precious! Please Don't Waste It!

Just like you and your team, your customers are doing their best to serve their customers, get their kids to and from school, take care of aging relatives and get the stuff done that they need to do...as quickly as they can do it!

Their time is precious...and they will never get it back!

I've recently spent a lot of timing dealing with customer service reps from companies because things haven't gone "as expected". Here's a couple of examples:

• The kitchen faucet that we ordered and had installed less than a year ago broke...

• Money transferred from one bank to another mysteriously didn't make it...and then just as mysteriously, didn't make it back into the original account.

I'd say that my husband and I spent about 5 or 6 hours and about 20 to 30 emails and phone calls dealing with the faucet issue, and even more hours (including two hours spent in person at the bank with the Branch Manager) dealing with the second issue.

Eventually, after a lot of time, persistence and patience, both issues are solved.

But neither my husband, nor I, will ever get back the precious "time of our lives" that it took us to solve those issues. Although most of the customer service reps we spoke with were nice and helpful, there was nothing about any of the time that we spent that was value-added for either the workers we dealt with...or for us.

For work to be value-added, it needs to be "done right the first time". Any type of rework due to errors, omissions or poor quality is "waste." And no company wants to pay their workers for time that is wasted. That's common knowledge.

But what is less often thought of is the cost to customers of their time that is wasted.

In the time it took me and my husband to deal with the issues (including my husband gluing the broken faucet back together himself...as instructed by the faucet company), we could have been doing the things that we do that are important to us and other people. My husband, a college professor, could have been preparing for his classes. I could have been coaching my clients. We also could have been doing the things we love to do: visiting with our kids, making art, writing.

As I get older, and time moves ever more quickly by, I don't want to have any of it wasted. And I'm sure you don't either.

So, please, be cognizant of what you are asking your customers to do (like glue a faucet back together, wait on hold for hours, or go to the bank to talk with someone in person because your customer can't get through to anyone on the phone) that is not what they want to do, and that wastes their time.

Remember that they, like you, only have a certain amount of time here on earth, and that time is precious to them.