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Chris:
Hello, everyone. Chris Higgins here, producer of The CX Leader Podcast. You know, we here at Walker really enjoy producing this show. But we want to make sure we're delivering on what you, our listeners, need in regards to thought leadership and helpful advice on creating the best possible experience for your customers. So I'm going to do something that no podcast producer would dream of doing. I'm going to ask you to pause this episode. That's right: pause this episode and go to cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and complete a short survey that will help us learn how we can improve the show. Go on. That's cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback. I'll wait a second while you do that. All done? Great. Thank you. Now, I won't waste any more of your time. Let's get to the show.

Steve:
It comes as no surprise to our regular listeners, but I often use my motor racing analogies on the podcast, so you know that I have a thing for speed. And guess what? So do your customers.

Jay:
If a business is slower than we expect, it really feels like you are stealing from us. You are stealing time. And time has always been important, but but now I think it is among, if not the most important element of customer experience because it is the only inelastic resource. Time is literally the only thing that we all possess equally.

Steve:
A look at "Time to Win: The 2022 Consumers Patient Study" on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and I'm so glad you're listening. As we like to say on this podcast, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader. And we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. You know, I usually have some sort of anecdote or narrative to set up our episodes, but this one is about speed and consumer patience, so it doesn't seem right to delay our discussion any further. My guest is no stranger to our podcast. I'm always grateful when Jay Baer comes on The CX Leader Podcast. Jay is well known as a keynote speaker on customer experience. He's an author and he's founder of Convince and Convert, and he, in partnership with Stats Social, just released new research titled "Time to Win: the Consumer Patient Study." Jay, welcome back to The CX Leader Podcast.

Jay:
Fantastic to be here, my friend. Thank you so much. We should just do this whole episode in like a minute and a half and really lean into this speed principle. That's it show's over.

Steve:
Well, I know, you know, you've always got great stuff, so congrats on the new study. But, you know, just in case people have been living in a cave, talk a little bit about just your background and sort of your body of work and then we'll get into talking about your new study.

Jay:
Thanks. I've been in marketing in CX for 30 years now, which seems like a long time when I actually gaze off the calendar. Certainly things have changed a lot since then. When I was an intern, many, many, many, many years ago, you know, we would actually mail things to clients, you know, with a stamp for feedback, and then we'd have a couple of days to kind of hang out, wait for the feedback. And those days, of course, are long gone. I've seen the march of speed and the expectations around responsiveness ratchet up throughout my entire career. I've written six books, and each book I've written has had a component of the book about speed because I've always believed it's important. But now, Steve, I find it to be even more important, and this is my deepest dive I've ever done on the on the need for speed in business, whether it's business to business or business to consumer, our expectations for what is fast enough continue to change. And I think most businesses aren't prepared to meet that test just yet.

Steve:
Yeah, I mean, you know, this is something in our study that we did, you know, back in 2013, we identified that speed was kind of one of the three key elements of having a good customer experience. But you've really taken it to a new level with this report. And what was the impetus? Why did you decide to focus on speed?

Jay:
Pandemic. You know, one of my observations was that a lot of things have changed because of the pandemic. Obviously, that's kind of axiomatic at this point. But but when I think about all these big macro trends that are affecting us, right, whether it's quiet quitting or labor shortages or supply chain or people deciding to homeschool their kids or, you know, all these different kind of macro shifts, when I when I looked underneath the surface of those, my observation was that the tie that binds them all together is that as human beings on this planet, we kind of came face to face with our own mortality, either either literally or figuratively. And that made us appreciate our time more. And so we all value our time more than we did before the pandemic. And as a result, if a business is slower than we expect, it really feels like you are stealing from us. You are stealing time. And time has always been important. But but now I think it is it is among, if not the most important element of customer experience because it is the only inelastic resource. Time is literally the only thing that we all possess equally. It doesn't matter if you're Elon Musk or somebody who's experiencing homelessness. It doesn't matter if you're a grandfather or a grandson or somebody in America or somebody in Venezuela. We all have 1440 minutes, Steve, And we've gotten to the point now where we treat those minutes very seriously.

Steve:
Yeah, I love that. You know, time really is the only thing that truly is finite, right? Your happiness, your love, your even money, you know, is not really finite. And then, you know, I'd love this same as I get older. I love to joke with people like I have a lot of ways that I enjoy wasting my time. So going to that meeting or that event, I'm going to take a rain check on that one.

Jay:
So that's right, it's Derek. Derek Seaver is a great author, has a has a terrific line about that that I've tried to model in my life over time, especially as I've had the good fortune to be able to make some some choices in how I spend my time. His philosophy is hell yes or no. That if you have a chance to spend time, go to a party, do a thing. If your answer is in hell yes, your answer must be no. Which is a good advice, I think.

Steve:
Hey. I got to ask you about the title, though, because it's kind of counterintuitive. Here, it's the the consumer patience.

Jay:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is kind of funny because impatience is at an all time low. And and but we thought we actually did some testing on the title and it was a little more interesting to have the consumer patient study than the business responsiveness study, especially for media. It just just rings a little more interesting to to their ear. But I tell you, it's funny that the pandemic made us value time more than ever, but the pandemic has not caused us to be much more sympathetic about responsiveness. In fact, one of my favorite stats from the report, Steve, is that 83% of customers expect business to be as fast or faster than they were before the pandemic. So this idea that your customers will give you a sort of a pandemic pass, that they will say, Hey, yeah, I get it, you're understaffed, or you got a bunch of new people in different roles or or maybe you're working remotely instead of together, or you can't find this ball bearing because they're out of ball bearings or whatever. They don't care anymore. They're like, Bro, it's been two years. Get your act together. Right? So. So we can't continue to use pandemic disruption as a customer experience shield. And I know you know how often that actually happens now. And I think we've got to set that aside and be like, look, it ain't easy, but we got to get back to the regular course of business and stop using the pandemic as an excuse.

Steve:
Yeah. And, you know, there's we can go into them. I'm sure you'll have plenty of examples, but the ante just keeps going up because there are some organizations that are just super fast. You know, one of the questions I was kind of playing around in my mind getting prepared for this is that is it really better to be fast than good?

Jay:
I think today it is because I'm okay if if it's not great, as long as I know that going in. So you go to the old the old axiom, right. Good fast, cheap pick any two. Right. We've been talking about that for generations. Good, fast, cheap pick energy. But this research shows the time to win is that fast needs to be one of them.

Steve:
Mm hmm.

Jay:
And then you pick one or the other two, Right? So you can be fast and good or fast and cheap. But you better be fast because two thirds of customers say that they care as much about speed as they do about price. They've elevated speed in the list of criteria to the degree that that fast has to be one of the ones that that you that you kind of say, yeah, we do that. And then we decide from a positioning standpoint whether we want to be quick and expensive, you know, in kind of high quality or quick and and sort of commoditized low cost. I think either of those are viable strategies, but you've got to pick one. And I think partially why that's true, Steve, is especially in B2B, you have so many new businesses that that have sprung up over the last, say, five years that have been built from scratch for speed. And so it's really hard for legacy businesses. You can get faster, but you're never going to like think about lemonade and the insurance business, right? Lemonade process has claims mostly with AI, but they still process they process claims within 3 seconds. If you're Allstate like, bro, that ain't going to happen. You're not you're not going to get there. And so you either you have to say, look, we're going to be fast enough or fast enough that our customers accept our our commitment to speed and then decide kind of what your secondary strategic imperative is going to be.

Steve:
Yeah, you gave some great examples. You know, when I was thinking about it, you know, there's a reason why fast food is such a huge business because, you know, when you know you're willing to make that tradeoff, sometimes it's not the best food, but you know what you're going to get. And when you need some food and you don't have that much time, you do it.

Jay:
So I will say this, though, if I may, that I don't talk about it much in the report because it gets a little too amorphous. I talk about it more in the in the keynote presentation in my consulting work around this topic. It's not about speed is always better. Usually that's true. Usually, usually the advice is get faster. And that typically is is sound. However, it's not true that speed in and of itself is always better because there is a circumstance where you can be too fast. You ever go to a mexican food place and you order enchiladas and then they come back in 90 seconds with your enchiladas and you're like, wait a second. Like this is improbable. There's no way. Did somebody else order these and then send them back where they premade under a heat lamp like we don't always want the fastest. You don't want the fastest tattoo artist. You don't want the fastest eye surgeon. Like there's a there's a scenario where too much speed actually creates doubt and dissonance in the minds of your customers. And so what you want the advice that I have is not just be faster. What you want to figure out is what I like to call the right "now." The right now is the perfect amount of elapsed time. And I think this is a really important principle for me to be in particular that for every customer interaction, wherever the customer is in the journey, there is a perfect amount of elapsed time. And essentially what it is is slightly faster than the customer expects, slightly faster than they expect. That's the right now. And so one of the best things you can do in business is to figure out what your right now is, because it will differ by business, it will differ by category, it will differ in some cases even by geography. But but that's kind of the magic formula is figuring out what is that sort of Goldilocks elapsed time.

Steve:
Yeah, I love this discussion of kind of the appropriate time and being just a little faster than the expectations. And again, I'll go back to the food example. You know, when you're when you're trying to grab a sandwich because your flight is boarding and you're going to be on an airplane for 3 hours with limited service, you know, you want that thing as fast as you can get it. But if you go out to eat with some loved ones or some good friends and you're at a nice restaurant, you don't want to be rushed. But on the other hand, you don't want to be sitting there waiting, you know, 20 minutes between your courses or you can't get another drink or whatever. So I love that. You know, it's it's not just about being fast, but being appropriate amount of fast and what's going on in the consumer's head when this thing is going on, when they're doing their time equivalent, what kind of the emotions are being triggered by the consumer?

Jay:
That's one of the things that we really spend a lot of time on in this study. And I should say this is a significant study. It's, you know, 2000 respondents normalized to the census. This isn't just, hey, I asked 50 people, this is a margin of error, two and a half points, something like that. So this is pretty sound data. And and what we really wanted to demonstrate is the correlation between responsiveness and and emotional state responsiveness and revenue responsiveness and loyalty. Because for me to say, yeah, you should be faster business, people will say, Well, yeah, we know that. But until you say and here's why. Because it's going to cost you real money. If you're not, nothing's going to change. We we know that. So on the emotion side, it's pretty staggering that that almost two thirds of customers say that they feel disappointed when a business takes longer to respond than they expect. A third say they feel disrespected, which is a very sincere emotion. And yeah, I mean, and then the converse is true as well. When a business is faster than customers expect, then they feel respected and happy and things like that. So yeah, it does trigger some pretty, pretty sharp emotions. And I think if you just consider your own life, right, we're doing some work around the house right now and you know, we've got sort of three crews that we're working with, and the one crew was always faster like like text you back right away. And I just feel great about them. And then this other group does decent work, but it's it's impossible to to hear from them. And you're always wondering, like, are they going to show up or are they not? Is it going to get done? You just have very different emotions about those two organizations.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is a friend of the podcast. He's been a guest numerous times. Jay Baer, he's a keynote speaker, author, always fun. And we're here talking about speed. And he's the right guy because he talks fast, he moves fast and he makes things happen. Now, what's the business impact for for speed? Is it creative to the business? Does it actually help the business?

Jay:
It depends on whether you're good or bad. So if you're if you're if you're faster than customers expect it, it is definitely a bottom line revenue impact. As I mentioned, two thirds of customers say that speed is as important as price, which is pretty significant. More than half of all customers will hire the first business to respond, even if they're not the least expensive in a competitive scenario. And I think this is such a huge lesson for B2B, this idea of, okay, if somebody fills out a contact us form or a demo request or whatever the inbound lead is, you got to get on that right away. But I will say, Steve, this is where the right now comes back into play as well, because I've bought and licensed a lot of software in my day, especially martech and adtech. And on occasion you fill out this form and then a salesperson is literally telephoning you within 5 seconds and you're like, okay, that's a little too fast. That's a little. Now I feel attacked right? So fast, but not too fast kind of comes into play there. And it's also really interesting. One of the pieces of advice I have for businesses reading this report is to figure out what your own Fast Pass is. You're familiar with the Disneyland Fast Pass. I think now they call it Lightning Lane. I don't know why they changed it, but they used to be the fast pass where you could pay more and you wouldn't have to wait in line for the rides. And you know, you pay substantially more for it. That will work in in almost any business. Right. What we saw in this study is that customers. Are very willing to spend more for less waiting. And very few businesses, especially on the B2B side, offer that kind of concierge, you know, fast paced speed lane opportunity. I think it's a really… It's just something that merits consideration, especially leading into 2023. Like, how can we give customers who don't want to wait the opportunity to do that and we'll just charge them more?

Steve:
That's a great learning for our CX pros there that may come back up here and take home value. Your best tip at the end of this thing, huh? I bet you got a few others.

Jay:
We'll see.

Steve:
No, I think that's powerful, because we will. We as consumers, we will definitely pay more for speed.

Jay:
For most things. Yeah, for most things. Yeah.

Steve:
Yeah. The other aspect, the speed that I was thinking about is it goes back to kind of classic process improvement, which, you know, I think part of CX grew out of total quality management and Six Sigma and those things, but non value added process or things like it's very frustrating. Like for example when you know you've already entered your phone number on the customer service thing and then the rep comes on and says, Well, can I get your phone number? And you're like, I already did that, right? So anything that's kind of like administrative or feels administrative, you know, that stuff gets big check marks today.

Jay:
Well, it's funny when I when I talk about this to businesses and we say, all right, let's figure out how to get faster, a lot of times, especially right now, businesses sort of recoil and say, well, we don't have we don't have enough people to to throw more bodies at this and answer the phone faster or respond to emails faster or answer chat bots faster or whatever. We don't have enough people, period. So how can we add people? And like look, in almost every case, it's not about headcount, it's about your internal policies and procedures that waste time. And that's an exactly perfect metaphor, right? Well, we ask them to put in their phone number and then we ask them for their phone number again. Couldn't we just solve for that? That doesn't require people. It just require some process engineering on your end. And that's that's the best place to start.

Steve:
Yeah. You know, because we've also had those other experiences where, you know, they recognize your phone number and they come right on the phone and they go, Hey, Mr. Walker, I've got all your records pulled up right here.

Jay:
What can I do? Like, unbelievable. Yeah. And they give you some more money, please.

Steve:
Yeah, perfect. This is probably a leading question, but I got to believe that there's some quick differences on on how people perceive speed and probably generational, maybe even some gender stuff?

Jay:
Well, because so often when you ask businesses about getting faster, sometimes what I've heard is, well, we don't need to put too much emphasis on that because we don't have that many young customers. The assumption being that that youth, because they grew up with technology, etc., etc., that they are less, less patient and more demanding from a time perspective of business. So we put that to the test. And as it turns out, the opposite is true. One of the most interesting findings in this research, Gen Z. The youngest consumers are the most patient. Baby boomers are the least patient.

Steve:
Well, they got less time.

Jay:
Less time. Maybe that's it. It's like, look, I got I got to use these minutes wisely. Gen Z's like, I don't care. I got minutes to waste. So I just find it really interesting because when we ask people, what do you expect to be true, it was the opposite. I thought the opposite would be true as well, having some Gen Z's in my own household. But they're like, Yeah, that's okay, you know, and I think some of it is Gen Z. This is sort of a different podcast for a different day, but Gen Z is very fatalistic about everything, right? A lot of them, quite literally a lot of them are like, Well, look, the planet is going to burn down anyway, so who cares whether I get the email back in a day, right? They just have like these other kind of considerations, which is kind of fascinating.

Steve:
Yeah, well, yeah, I think some of that's just a coming of age, hopefully. And I think all the generations I know when when the baby boomers were young, I think the Greatest Generation thought we were pretty crazy, too. So.

Jay:
That's right. You always hate your parents music, right? Until until then, you go to love it. Yeah. And from a from a gender standpoint, it turns out this won't be a huge surprise. Well, number one, it wasn't consistently different across across the whole study. The gender expectations around responsiveness are pretty consistent, but it is true. And again, this probably will not come as a shock that men are a little less patient than women overall, Not dramatically so, but they are they are definitely a little more demanding of what they expect businesses to be able to deliver.

Steve:
Yeah, and I think it probably goes back again to what you're buying. You know, there's sort of the hunter gatherer type of thing that goes on when, you know, some some people when they go to buy clothes, they're like hunting and other people… people are really you know, it's very much an experience that they want to enjoy. So.

Jay:
That's right.

Steve:
All right. This is a great study. And as always, whenever I have you on, I learn and I expand my thoughts here. So what should our companies be doing about this aspect of speed? What are sort of the key takeaways here for organizations and for CX pros really?

Jay:
Well, a couple of things. First is we touched on this understanding that that speed is more important now than it was two years ago, and that if you think about all the dimensions of CX, I would argue in this research largely underpins it. That time and responsiveness and speed is, if not the most important right up there. So elevate speed in the pantheon of your CX components would be the first thing. The second thing is to really spend the time to figure out the time. So we mentioned this principle of the right now the perfect amount of elapsed time for every customer interaction. One of the things I'd love to see business do over the next 6 to 12 months is figure out what that is for your business. So number one, know what your actual elapsed time is in each of these different customer interactions. And then then to test some different variables there and or do some research of your own customers to figure out, Hey, if it takes 3 hours on average to do this, what's the impact? If we can make that 2 hours or what's the impact if we made it 4 hours, if you don't know what your customers expect, then you can't really refine this to the degree that you're going to unlock the revenue potential that it definitely can unlock.

Steve:
Yeah. Boy, my mind's racing now with really complex B2B solutions. Where there's a relationship, it goes over time, there's transactions, but then there's also, you know, other aspects that go on for extended periods of time.

Jay:
It's long time.

Steve:
Yeah. I mean, you really have to break that down into all the aspects of that experience, right?

Jay:
So absolutely. It really is a research project that I think people should really consider undertaking because customer attitudes have changed fundamentally, like you can't step in the same river twice. And we think differently about time than we did two or three years ago. And the companies that really succeed over the next couple of years are going to be the companies that understand that and change their responsiveness strategy accordingly.

Steve:
Yeah, I mean, you've raised my level of awareness on this topic just in this just in the last 24 minutes here that we've been working on this. But, you know, like there's times where you want them to be fast, like you want them to respond, to acknowledge that you have a question or a problem. But then you think about like with your with your home remodeling, you probably don't want that guy rushing when you're trying to describe how you want it to look or the functionality that you want in your house. You want them to or think about going to see your physician. You know, you don't want to be sitting in the waiting room forever, but once you get back in the room, you don't want to feel like you're being rushed.

Jay:
You want a 30 second, or 30 second conversation either. Yeah, that's the that's the really interesting part about this. When you start peeling the layers of the onion, this idea of the right now that there is a perfect amount of lapse time that maximizes trust and minimizes hassle.

Steve:
Yeah yeah I think that's a…

Jay:
That's an but it differs all the time right. You know, your doctor is different than your lawyer, you know, in terms of how you want to, to deal with them and the time it takes. It's a it seems deceptively simple and then just get faster. But it's not that it's it's get appropriately faster.

Steve:
Yeah. No, the CX pros really need to think about the time in their processes and how that impacts their customers. I that's the that's is a great takeaway from this one.

Jay:
Appreciate it.

Steve:
Jay we've reached that point of the podcast where I ask every guest, you know, you've done it before, but we try to end on take home value. What's the best tip or what's the real message that we want the CX pros to take away from your time on the podcast today. Something they can take back to what they're doing and make a make an immediate impact.

Jay:
I think the most important thing we've touched on it is to figure out what is the right now for your business, especially for the key customer inflection points or the key interaction points across the journey. What is the ideal elapsed time for your customers in your business, in your industry? Some of that's going to require just tracking your actual elapsed time more than you probably do today. Some of them may require some customer interview work as well, but knowing that and then being able to hit those as a standard of benchmark an SLA in your organization is going to not only create revenue, but it's going to reduce churn.

Steve:
Jay, thank you as always. Jay Baer, keynote speaker, author. Unbelievable this new study has got out. It's called "Time to Win: the Consumer Patient Study." Jay, where can people find that as well as your other books? And and if they'd like to continue the conversation, how they can find you.

Jay:
Appreciate it. Thanks for having me back. There's a whole website for the study that includes the study, obviously infographics, video, extra resources, etc. Go to the, t. h. e. thetimetowin.com, thetimetowin.com. Grab it. It won't cost you anything.

Steve:
Thanks again, Jay. Appreciate having you on the podcast again.

Jay:
My pleasure. Thanks.

Steve:
If you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your businesses customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, find all our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their success. You can learn more about us at Walkerinfo.com. And remember, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader so go out there and find out what you're right now is. Thank you for listening and we'll see you again next time.

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