Every minute counts with every customer

Time is used for many things. The most common uses of time are defined to measure the duration of an event that has happened, is happening, or will happen. Time is measured by the increments of a clocks seconds, minutes, and hours. There are 360 degrees in an hour. Each hour is split up in 60 parts, each part is 1/60 of a degree and is called a minute. Each minute is split up into 60 parts. Each part being 1/60 of a minute are called seconds.

The issue of time is crucial. The 21st Century with all it technology  has developed a society that operates with a short term mind state. Everybody wants everything, right now. Time is money. The faster a product can be produced, distributed, and delivered the more it is valued. People eat fast food every day or  cook their food in microwave ovens because they don’t have time to cook anymore. The majority of our society spends a lot of time rushing through breakfast, rushing through traffic, rushing to get to these important jobs which they value so much. Typing so fast, at least 120 words per minute and navigating between eight web pages in these days and times, it is no wonder how so many errors are made on a daily basis. When moving so fast, people lose the initiative to listen attentively. In addition to poor listening skills due to irrational organization, many people have gotten into this habit of multi-tasking.  Multi-tasking can be great for temporary fixes and short term goals, however, a lot of times people lose focus on concentration when striving to meet daily quotas while over loading the brain.

An organizations customer service reputation is the direct result of the time its employees take to provide quality assurance. Wikipedia defines quality assurance as a way of preventing mistakes or defects in manufactured products and avoiding problems when delivering solutions or services to customers. Lasting impressions are often made from the first five minutes of an opportunity to deliver. For example, say an individual walks into an Apple retail store and knows exactly what he needs to purchase.  The purchase will be made by credit card, so that means there is a three to five days room for error because that is how long it will take for the payment to process. However, the sales person at the Apple retail store will most likely have that customer in and out of the sales process within ten minutes. First of all, the customer walked into the store knowing exactly what he wanted.  Two the sales person thinks he’s doing the customer a favor by saving the customer time and expediting his checkout. Finally, the sales person wants the customer in and out because the retail store is packed with other customers and quotas are to be met.  After the customer leaves the store a few days later, he realizes that he purchased the wrong item. Technology changes fast these days. What was in last week may have a software upgrade this week, and the sales person did not make any effort to understand the customers’ needs. Hypothetically speaking, if the customer had returned the item the next day, that return process could be an inconvenience on the customer’s time and possibly any moneys surrendered to restocking fees.

Five Star Customer Service is when a customer shows interest in a product or service and is immediately greeted with the feeling of being welcome, appreciated, involved, understood and important. With so much competition these days with brands and marketing and promotions, it is easy for a customer to lose faith in a particular product or service when something slight goes wrong. Customer loyalty seems hard to capture but it’s not exactly rocket science. Training employees to take time with the customer is just as important as giving the employee some time to learn about company products. Maybe every day at the beginning of each shift, management can set aside some time for team building to go over new products, old products, and possible future products. At the end of each shift, debrief to share the good, bad, and ugly experiences of that day as a team and work together to improve situations. You will be surprised how 20-30 minutes a day can make a big difference in how customer service is managed, internally as well as externally. If management cannot always be available to lead the team building and debriefing meetings, assigning customer service captains to lead these meetings sometimes could be a great way to build leadership skills. Taking the time to help build understanding within your employees can impact customer service loyalty. Include these techniques in your time management because very minute counts with every customer.