Imagine this … you’re running tight on time for a meeting and want to grab a cup of coffee. Do you choose to stop at the café that serves delicious coffee and has the friendliest barista but a long line, or do you use the office machine that serves an acceptable, decent cup in under a minute? If, on that day, time is important and you don’t want to make others wait, the answer is probably the fastest – as in more convenient – choice, not the best coffee or the friendliest service.
If you’ve been following my work, you know I’m a big fan of a convenient customer experience. So much so that I wrote the book The Convenience Revolution. A convenient experience is about eliminating friction, and wasted time is friction. Once time is gone, you can’t get it back. Some customers will choose a faster experience over friendly service or a lower price, such as in the coffee example I shared.
Consider the following findings from our 2024 CX research (sponsored by RingCentral) that illustrate the importance of not wasting your customers’ time:
- 61% of customers think that when they call customer support for a problem or question, companies don’t value their time.
- 60% of customers said they would likely or very likely switch companies because of a poor (slow) response time.
- 43% of customers would spend more money if they knew they would never have to wait on hold for customer support.
- 82% of customers said little or no hold times when calling for customer help or support is important to them.
While these findings focus on customer support, they illustrate how much customers value their time. It doesn’t matter what type of business you’re in or how you waste a customer’s time. Examples of inconvenient, time-wasting activities include waiting on hold for anything, waiting for a response, enduring a long line, not enough staff to help customers in a store, sharing bad information that requires a customer to call back or return to a store, forcing customers to fill out duplicate information on multiple forms and more. I could go on and on.
So, what inconvenient, time-wasting experiences might customers have when they do business with you? It’s worth sitting down with your team to figure out those friction points and do your best to eliminate them. Stop wasting time thinking about it, and go meet with your team to discuss how you can create a more convenient experience that gets customers to say, I’ll be back!
One final comment. I just released a special report on convenience. Click here to download it at no charge.
Shep Hyken is a customer service/CX expert, award-winning keynote speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. Learn more about Shep’s customer service and customer experience keynote speeches and his customer service training workshops at www.Hyken.com. Connect with Shep on LinkedIn.
Shep Hyken
Shepard Presentations, LLC.
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