Here is an excerpt
Excerpt from an upcoming article by Jake Edmiston for i-sigght.com
Excerpt from an upcoming article by Jake Edmiston for i-sigght.com
Fuelled
by market research, customer service departments are desperately trying to
shrink the time it takes to respond to customer complaints. The latest study to
mark a growing demand for prompt customer service found that almost 70 per cent
of respondents expected their complaints to be addressed within 24 hours. Those
figures -- and others like them -- have panicked companies spending more and
more on customer outreach.
On
Social media, 42 per cent expected a response within an hour, according to the
survey conducted by Convince & Convert. And Amazon.com is going even
further, adding a new feature to their tablets that guarantees customer support
within 15 seconds. When Amazon’s “mayday button” way unveiled on Christmas Day
last year, the service surpassed its own expectations with an average response
time of nine seconds.
Near-instant
complaint management has quickly become the norm in the customer service
industry – and questions usually revolve around how to provide
it, not why we need to provide it.
The
Study of Impatience
But
a little-known academic discipline has attempted for decades to explain our
insatiable desire for fast interactions. According to some students of
Chronemics, North Americans have been hard-wired to feel small and inferior when
others force them to wait.
“Somebody
who is waiting, will feel they are of lower status than the person who’s making
them wait,” said Patti Wood, author and non-verbal communication specialist who
has harnessed Chronemics to train customer service agents and call centers.
“Research
shows that waiting time is the single most important factor in customer
satisfaction,” says Wood, who uses a cross-section of finding from psychology,
sociology and anthropology to explain the need for prompt complaint resolution.
The
theory traces back to 20th century anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who dubbed
most Western cultures as “monochronic” – meaning they view time as a linear
“road or ribbon extending forward into the future and back into time.” It’s
difficult to think of time any other way, but Hall says other cultures are
“polychronic,” so they don’t structure their daily activities around a concept
of time as much as they do around personal interactions. In those cultures,
which Hall claims are found in the Middle East and Latin America, missing
scheduled appointments isn't often taken seriously.
In
the North American model, however, time is almost always segmented into
appointments, which has led to it becoming a commodity. We speak of time “as
being saved, spent, wasted, lost,” Hall writes in his 1983 book Beyond
Culture.
“Important
things are taken up first and allotted the most time; unimportant things are
left to last.”
The
Black Hole Effect
In
a customer service context, forcing people in monochronic cultures to wait for
a problem to be resolved is equivalent to “stealing from them,” Patti Wood said
in a recent interview with i-Sight.
“You
feel like they’ve come into your house and taken something from you that you
won’t ever be able to get back,” said Wood, author of SNAP Making
the Most of First Impressions and Body Language “You’re subservient to
them.”
When
a customer is waiting on hold, the tendency to resent the company is made worse
by what Wood calls the "black hole effect" -- where time
"wasted" is amplified because "you're in isolation."
"You
are in a vulnerable position. You don’t know the end result, you don’t know the
person and you’re stuck," she said.
