No Lines, No Waiting
Bringing service to the fore while conserving your cash
Monthly Archives: July 2009
2009
Hate to wait? I think they did… bad customer service to the fore!
Any questions?
(Not surprisingly, a search on our new website for “waiting” produces three pages of case studies and articles. Just browsing the headlines is informative…and a Google blog search for “I hate to wait” produces hundreds of thousands of hits.) (Do we see a pattern here, a universal thing about whether customer service matters?)
A tip of the hat to Occasional CEO buddy Eric Schultz, who keeps threatening to write a guest post for us someday.
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: customer satisfaction, customer service, waiting
2009
Customer Service in Healthcare (not): An All-Too-True Story
What is wrong with these people???
I’ve been having a pain lately, in an arm that shouldn’t be having pain due to a past condition. The orthopedist who took care of my bones said to get an x-ray at some local shop and send her the CD. (She’s happy to save me the time of driving into Boston, and she knows local clinics can make a good x-ray.)
So I called the radiology department of a well-known, highly rated clinic in nearby Burlington – let’s call it Elsie – to make an appointment.
(You know about appointments. They help customers get served quickly and conveniently, and help managers plan their resource utilization. The win-win thing.)
Me: “Hi. My doctor says I should get an x-ray and send her the CD. Can I do that? — Good, I’d like to make an appointment.”
Elsie staff: “Oh, you don’t need an appointment. Just come right in. I mean, you can have one if you want, but you don’t need one.”
Me: “Cool!”
Me to my manager: “I’m going over to Elsie to get an x-ray. They said I can walk right in – should be quick.”
I get there, find my way through their campus (the directions were perfect), and find radiology.
The line to check in goes out into the hall. And at the front of the line, the sign on the desk says the current wait time is 30 minutes.
I look at my watch, conclude I don’t want to wait 45 minutes (or even 30) for a “no appointment needed” x-ray, and leave.
The parking machine wants money for my ticket. I talk to the cashier and the information counter; saying I wasn’t able to get my appointment so I don’t want to pay. (I’ve been there less than 10 minutes.) Both people look at me like I’m crazy and say there’s nothing they can do. A third person says maybe security will validate it. They gladly do.
On the way out I call again.
Me: “I want to make an appointment for tonight.”
Elsie staff: “Oh, you don’t need an appointment. If you want to make one for sometime tomorrow you can.”
Me: “I can’t make one for this evening so I don’t have to wait?”
Elsie: “No…” (sounding rather uncertain about why I’d be asking)
It’s clear to me that my time is not of the least concern to this clinic. I’ve been hearing this about healthcare in general, but I know of places where they do care. (My own hospital is one of them, and I know there are others.)
I just wonder, what on earth is so complicated? I happen to know first-hand that an appointment system for a few workstations is not at all expensive. Instead, they have a line of people out into the hall – sick and injured people, typically – and they cheerfully (genuinely cheerful) say “Oh, you don’t need an appointment.”
Methinks the world of healthcare is (mostly) so wrapped up in its own importance that it doesn’t even occur to them to respect their customers’ time. And that’s gotta change.
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: appointment scheduling, customer experience, customer service, healthcare
2009
Medical journal article shows reminders help patients stick to the plan
A new study released Tuesday in the August American Journal of Preventive Medicine shows that reminders, including inexpensive automated reminders, substantially increased the number of patients who scheduled appointments and came in for a screening exam. In other words, reminders work.
(TimeTrade’s appointment systems can provide automated reminders of appointments that were already scheduled. This study looks at a related subject – a reminder to make an appointment. This journal article establishes, in a large scale study, what our customers have long said: reminders help.)
I was privileged to interview the study’s lead author, Adrianne Feldstein, MD, MS, an investigator at Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research, about the design and results of the study, which involved 35,000 patients.
Patients were.sent a series of reminders. Each one yielded progressively more response:
- First a postcard was mailed, yielding 9.9% response
- 30 days later an automated phone call brought the total up to 24%
- Another 30 days later, a second automated call brought the total up to 36%
Finally, the remaining 64% were given to local teams, who made live phone calls, raising the final response to 46.6%.
The study design didn’t examine cost-effectiveness, but the article cites earlier research in which a mailed reminder with live follow-up call was the most cost-effective. Interestingly (to me), neither study included email reminders – seems like a simple, obvious and inexpensive method to try, so in future research we’d love to see a split test: robocalls vs. emails.
Kaiser Permanente has a well deserved reputation for leadership in its methodologies. Thanks to Dr. Feldstein for her time in the interview.
The press release about the study is here.
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: appointment scheduling, customer service, reminders
2009
A trend to watch: people don’t like to wait for anything. Not even your lovely voicemail.
The front page of today’s Boston Globe spotlights an inside article about impatience: “I’m Not Listening: In an age of ever-faster communications, many have no patience for voice mail.”
This is ominous if you’re in a business where customers have to wait: when your customers find a competitor who doesn’t make them wait, you could be toast.
There are exceptions: this morning I scheduled a physical with my doctor, and I have to wait three months! For this we pay the highest healthcare costs in the world?? But, he’s my doctor, and I’m not willing to doc-hop – a good doctor is a special case.
Most services aren’t nearly that special, and impatience rules. Sources cited in the Globe say:
- More than 30% of voicemails go unheard for three days or longer.
- More than 20% of people with messages rarely check them.
- PhoneTag, a company that transcribes voice mails and sends the text to users [so they can be archived, searched, and quickly read], estimates it takes 6 seconds to read a voice mail that would take 79 seconds to hear.
In this case, text is the lethal competitor – texting or email, as provided by PhoneTag ($30/month). They sound like a potential winner, but I’d hate to be in their shoes – Google Voice offers a similar transcription service for free. (Uh-oh, Google has noticed this?)
Worse, if you like to plan by anticipating where the puck’s going to be, the demographics show it’s getting worse… Sprint has been working hard to listen to its customers:
”A survey done for Sprint by Opinion Research Corporation found that with the exception of people age 65 and over, adults respond more quickly to a text message than to a voice message.”
- Under-30s are four times more likely to respond within minutes to a text message than to a voice mail.
- Over-30s are twice as likely to respond within minutes to text.
Lesson: people hate to wait. (Where have we heard this before?)
Later this summer TimeTrade will report some new findings about this, the result of original research we commissioned. Nice of the Globe to set the stage for us. :–)
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: customer service, impatience, waiting
2009
The Psychology of Waiting Lines: why appointments are important
On Monday I mentioned The Psychology of Waiting Lines. Consider this, from the introduction:
…the waiting-line experience in a service facility significantly affects our overall perceptions of the quality of service provided .. the bitter taste of how long it took to get attention pollutes the overall judgments that we make about the quality of service. [emphasis added]
That was 1985, but it’s still true today, yes? The penalties for making people wait were clear, and still are. But back then it was costly to prevent waits by offering appointments. It was a different world: the Mac and PC had just been introduced, it was nine years before the first web browser, seven years before the 
Motorola Bag Phone that would be my first “car phone,” and author David Maister talks about waiting in line at Eastern Airlines, worrying that if he hands them his paper ticket, he might not get it back.
Today none of that’s true – except that the penalties for making people wait are still valid.
We don’t use “bag phones,” we all have cell phones. Eastern is gone, and heck, we print our own boarding passes at home. So I have to wonder, why do we still make customers wait?
Filed under: appointment scheduler
Tagged: appointment scheduling, customer experience, customer satisfaction, waiting
2009
“Waiting is frustrating, demoralizing, agonizing, aggravating, annoying, time consuming and incredibly expensive.”
Well! We couldn’t have said it better.
And who said it? Federal Express, in one of their earliest ads.
It was recently brought to our attention in The Psychology of Waiting Lines, a great article by David Maister. A 1985 article, no less.
You’ll be hearing more…
(A tip o’ the TimeTrade hat to Eric Shultz, who steered us to Maister’s article.)
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, waiting
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