No Lines, No Waiting
Bringing service to the fore while conserving your cash
Tag Archives: waiting
2009
Five of the Worst Places to Wait in Line
Customers hate waiting in line. In fact, some organizations have waiting lines that evoke animosity before the customer even walks in the door. Which organizations are the worst offenders?
According to polls on Yelp, Yahoo! Answers and other Web sites, there are some common places where the wait is considered abysmal.
If they haven’t already done so, organizations on this list should make some changes – if they care:
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Filed under: customer retention, customer service
Tagged: customer retention, government, waiting
2009
Low Tolerance for Error When it Comes To Customer Retention
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Nineteenth century British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli once said, “Never complain, never explain.” The sentiment may be hundreds of years old, but I witnessed a customer exercising that bit of wisdom just today. I was sitting at a tire store, waiting with another customer to have winter tires put on my car. The wait was ridiculous, and the other customer and I said as much to each other. There was no communication from the company, no explanation as to why something they told us would take 20 minutes was now spilling into hour two. After flipping through an outdated magazine for the third time, I watched as my silent companion walked to the desk, calmly asked for her keys, and left.
2009
Long flu shot lines hinder delivery. Appointments could help.
I can’t help but notice an unspoken sense of helplessness in all the coverage about flu shots … the millions and millions of flu shots that will be given.
It’s a project of unprecedented magnitude, and while government authorities are working their tails off to get everyone vaccinated, they seem to be overlooking a proven opportunity to improve reach: offering appointments can reduce wait times, which helps compliance. (”Compliance” is healthcare’s word for whether patients actually do what providers recommend.)
Citing a CDC advisor who calls it “potentially the largest mass-vaccination program in human history,” the Washington Post said Saturday
To prepare, more than 2,800 local health departments have begun recruiting pediatricians, obstetricians, nurses, pharmacists, paramedics and even dentists, along with a small army of volunteers from churches and other groups. They are devising strategies to reach children, teenagers, pregnant women and young and middle-aged adults in inner cities, suburban enclaves and the countryside.
Last night ABC News ran this two minute clip. (You’ll have to sit through a commercial first.) At about 0:36 remaining, Ryan Owens says “Many children will go to their pediatrician. Others will have to go to the health department and line up, just like these people are.”
He turns and points to a lengthy queue.
This is ridiculous: it discourages people from getting shots.
Of course we’re biased; we believe in the convenience and effectiveness of Web self-service appointments, and we sell the stuff. But seriously: this is a public health issue. People are less likely to do something when there’s a long wait.
Conversely, when the time factor is under control, compliance increases. Evidence:
- In May we reported on a talk at the Pediatric Academy Societies’ annual meeting saying Appointment scheduling issues keep children from getting vaccinated.
- At last April’s “Health 2.0 meets Ix” conference in Boston, Kaiser-Permanente VP of PR Holly Potter (@HTPotter) reported that Kaiser has found (with its millions of Web users) that when patients can pick an appointment time online, at their convenience, they’re 40% less likely to no-show.
This isn’t rocket science: You know yourself, when there’s a long line for something you’re less likely to do it. It’s just that healthcare hasn’t quite woken up to the opportunity. (Kaiser has, most haven’t.)
We hope private providers and public health officials alike will give us a buzz. Spread the word.
Related resources:
- Blog post: Medical journal article shows reminders help patients stick to the plan
- Our healthcare solutions page
- Case study: Sonora Quest labs TimeTrade smooths patient traffic and guarantees service within five minutes of scheduled appointment time
- Case study: Berkeley HeartLab Centralized scheduling helps provide cardiac patients with top-notch care
- Case study: Family Health Care Clinic Family Health Care Clinic delivers better care, 25% more visits, $2.5 million more revenue
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: appointment scheduling, government, healthcare, waiting
2009
Respecting customers’ time, part 2: Shrink the Stink
A Friday night post – some weekend reading, or maybe for you it’s Monday:
Waiting stinks.
And it’s a costly waste of time.
So let’s toss around some ways people use to shrink the stink.
Some businesses get it, and do a variety of things:
- “Take a Number” dispensers at the deli counter. Doesn’t save you any time, but gives you a good shot at “first come, first served.”
- Walk-in queuing systems are the software equivalent of “take a number.” (Sprint stores have a TimeTrade queuing system for walk-in service.)
- Cordoned “enter here” queues (at banks, post offices, airports) reduce the risk of getting stuck in the wrong line. (Why don’t supermarkets do this?? Don’t you hate it when the cashier turns on the “call supervisor” light for your line??)
- Restaurants offer “call ahead seating” to grab a place in line before you even get there, to reduce your wait.
- Some ERs publish their wait times on the internet. Associated Press, April 2009. And some let you call ahead and grab a place in line, then check back to see how close your turn is. That one’s not just a convenience, it keeps you (and your kid) from hanging out with sick people for hours.
- Then, of course, there’s making an appointment (or a reservation, as it’s called in non-service businesses).
#1, 2 and 3 still make you wait, but you can mill around. They don’t reduce your waiting time, but they do reduce the discomfort. In a sense, they make the waiting a little better.
The others, though, make your life better, because they address the value of your time. And now that I think of it, “Take A Number” and queuing systems do let you roam around and perhaps pick up a few items, letting you use that time.
Complex subject, this. One thing’s for sure – there’s a lot of waste involved in waiting lines, and that makes it an opportunity for improvement.
Think about it.
2009
Airlines and X-Rays: Customer Service in Capacity-Based Businesses
I had a shower-stall epiphany yesterday, a collision between thoughts rattling around in my head. I saw a pattern that spans many unrelated industries: customer service in capacity-based businesses.
It hit me because of events in two vastly different industries a week earlier:
- That Sunday I was on the phone with Southwest Airlines, and their system said “Our hold time is unusually long. If you want our system to call you when it’s your turn, press 1.”
- Two days later I had my adventure with the x-ray appointment (not) at a local clinic.
What do airlines and x-rays have in common? Both are capacity-based, which means customers need to be matched up with availability. And there’s a world of difference in how these two managed the customer experience.
- Southwest had their robot do the waiting, so I didn’t have to.
The clinic has lots of friendly, courteous people, but responsibility for my waiting time apparently hasn’t dawned on them. “Come on in, and we’ll get to you when we can.”
Think about this. Waiting stinks (and is a costly waste of time), so what ways can you think of to improve the customer experience?
Later this week I’ll return to this, but give it some thought. Maybe in the shower.
For a refresher on the cost (and value) of people’s waiting time, see our very first post: It’s RUDE to make people wait. And costly. That’s where this photo first appeared. It’s a real-life case study.
Filed under: online scheduling, scheduling software
Tagged: customer experience, customer service, healthcare, impatience, waiting
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
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
2009
Fortune interview on customer service in the downturn
Taking an ecosystem view of your world can help understand the nasty lasting impact of cutbacks in customer experience. Case in point: during a downturn sales decline because buyers aren’t buying; the ecosystem’s not flush with nutrients. By definition that aspect of your ecosystem will improve when the downturn ends. But if you soil yourself when times are tough, your position can be a lot harder to clean up later.
Voices from high places continue to warn about this. Yesterday’s online edition of Fortune, on CNNMoney.com, has an interview with author Emily Yellin (newly on Twitter as @EYellin) about how broken our customer service thinking has become. The title of her book shows the unspoken message that people get when service is crummy: “Your call is [not that] important to us.”
In the Fortune interview she raises two points we’ve discussed here:
- “As companies start to compete about price, service is going to be the one differentiator.”
I don’t know that I’d agree it’s the only differentiator, but it’s certainly a conspicuous one with big ties to customer satisfaction. (See Customer Experience has “direct link with loyalty” (4/28) and Customer Service Matters, 5/14.)
- “It’s not as easy to get away with giving bad service these days with the rise of the big megaphone that the Internet has given customers.”
Yep: that’s our series on the new post-Cluetrain world of “Customer Experience is not just post-sale.”
Look, it’s like any other relationship: you find out who somebody is when the chips are down. Prove your mettle. If you plan to survive this thing, plan for then. Think ecosystem, not just today’s balance sheet.
In the coming weeks I’ll be looking for real-world examples from past downturns to illustrate this. If you have any, send ‘em in!
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, downturn, waiting
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