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Your Customer’s Time is More Valuable Than Your Own

Your time is very important, but to the customer their time is more important than yours.  By simply adjusting your mindset in a very basic way, you can improve each and every interaction that you have with a client or customer. A basic problem in business is that each of us places too much value on our own time. We are in a hurry, have a million tasks to do, and want to try and increase our own productivity. However, the person that suffers when you hold on to this mindset is the customer. By adjusting your thinking and placing more value on the customer’s time than your own, you will be astounded at how your levels of customer service improve across the board. What’s more, this simple thought adjustment could be useful for people ranging from the CEO of a major organization to a front-line retail employee.

There are several different ways that your customers can lose time when dealing with your organization. Any measures you can take to trim these timelines increase the perceived levels of service that you offer. In addition to the actual saved time this kind of measure gives back to your customer, it also gives them a great perception of your company that can lead to sustained business over the long term.

One big way to shave away the time your customers have to spend dealing with your company is to eliminate their hold time. Make sure that all phone calls are answered within two rings to avoid wasting customer time. You can do this by either having a large enough reception team on staff at all hours of the day, or by utilizing an answering service to answer overflow calls when your main lines may be busy.

 

Reducing the amount of time it takes for information to get to the right person is another valuable tactic. Streamlining the flow of information from department to department by providing people with direct contacts for essential personnel and establishing processes that clearly outline whom to contact in specific situations saves huge amounts of “in-transit” time for essential communications. It also ensures that important customer requests and messages don’t get lost while being shuttled between various departments.

Finally, empowering your employees can save your customers even more time. By giving employees more direct responsibility, you allow them to solve problems while customers are on the phone. This is hugely preferable to having to transfer a caller to another department, or worse yet, having to check with a superior and having someone call the customer back at a later time.

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