Critical Thinking: Where are you on this new customer time paradigm?

I get mad when people waste my time. It’s probably why I have such a beef with cable companies and organizations’ call centers that have long hold times. Wasting someone’s time is also a waste of an opportunity to deliver an excellent customer experience. 

The source of my ire is likely tied to time being our most precious resource by some estimations. Therefore, when you waste it, you are careless with something with a finite supply. Some of us have more than others available—or left as the case may be. 

So, when an organization wastes customers’ time, it can be one of the worst things they could do to increase customer loyalty and customer-driven growth. Would you want to be anxious to return to an experience that wasted yours? Not bloody likely, I say. 

By contrast, saving time is among the most essential things you could do for a customer. People will pay a premium for it, too. 

Regarding time and customers, one of the most essential things you can do is to make it worthwhile. In other words, any time customers give you should return to them as a memory of time well spent. 

The ideas expressed thus far here are not ours. Time progression is a critical area that key opinion leaders in the experience economy are exploring these days. 

In this episode, we host Strategic Horizons’ Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy and co-founder of the concept of Time Progression, to discuss what that means and how it can influence how customers respond to your experience. 

Here are some other critical moments in the discussion:

• 03:22  Colin asks Pine to explain the concept of Time Progression to the listeners who have yet to become familiar with it. 
• 09:49  We discuss organizations doing interesting things with time analysis that companies would be wise to emulate and those that have decided to take up more customer time that companies should not.
• 19:25  Pine explains why healthcare is a transformational experience, so it should do better with patients’ time progression.
• 26:02  We discuss where we think SMART products should go, as Pine wrote in HBR in his article, "Are Your Digital Platforms Wasting Your Customer's Time?"
• 28:53  Pine shares his practical tips for how to improve your performance regarding time progression with customers.

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