‘Slight problem. The front of the house has fallen off.’
I’ll be honest. It wasn’t a text I was expecting to receive that day. (And no, before you ask, I don’t know why things like this keep happening to me. But they make for good articles, I suppose. )
Our neighbours were having work done on their back garden. This meant lots of vans, lorries, and trucks, bringing dirt, taking dirt away, and presumably supplying tools to do something with the dirt in between.
On one of those occasions, a skip lorry turned up to take away a now-full skip. As the skip lifted it caught the telephone wire attached to our house, pulled it down, and took off the front facade with it. Not ideal.
The first we knew was when a rather sheepish looking driver knocked on the door to let us know what had happened. He was lovely, very apologetic, said he didn’t know how it had happened, but it had, and if we called his company, they’d send someone to fix it.
The phone calls came and went. Someone was going to come on Friday, then on Sunday, someone else was on holiday, but it would happen soon, they reassured us.
Fast forward a few days, and another message arrives.
‘Erm, the house is fixed again?’
My wife had gone out for a walk. When she got back, sure enough, the facade was back in it’s rightful place. But the skip people weren’t meant to be coming for another two days, and it would be really good if things stopped randomly happening to our house.
Cue the arrival of another man from next door, this time the person delivering the soil.
Oh hi, I’m really sorry. I was unloading the bags and I must have caught your wire, and pulled the front down. I hope you don’t mind, I borrowed a ladder and I’ve fixed it back up for you, so it doesn’t get damaged any more. I’ll get someone to come round later to fix it properly for you.’
The differences between these two experiences is subtle, but significant. Both are taking ownership, neither is trying to shift the blame. But whilst the first lot are being helpful, they lack a bit of the urgency you might expect a company to have when they’d left someone’s gutter hanging by a thread.
With the second chap, that sense of responsibility, of ownership, of urgency, is far more obvious, and the willingness to take on the effort for us.
This matters, because it’s not just the broken house that’s the problem. It’s the time that’s needed to get it fixed. The phone calls, the waiting in, the shifting of plans to accommodate someone having to come round. And this is the bit that often gets forgotten in the experiences we all have as customers nowadays.
Time is the scarcest resource we have. It’s finite. 4000 weeks, that’s all we get. If something goes wrong, am I confident a company will put it right? Yes, broadly, usually, I am. But am I confident it will be put right without me needing to invest time that I could otherwise be spending with family, with friends, at plays or exhibitions (if I want to sound intellectual), eating Dominos and watching football (if I want to sound truthful)? Absolutely not.
Long wait times on calls, slow webchats as agents deal with several customers at once, promised call backs that never appear, chasing companies to do what they say they’re going to do. All examples of organisations taking for granted their customer’s time, for the sake of their own internal processes and decisions.
More than that, the time complaining and sorting issues is compounded by the time thinking about having to deal with these things, the cognitive load that gets created preparing, waiting, worrying about whether the situation will be resolved.
Mistakes happen, problems occur, and that’s the time the best companies step up. They’re easy to contact, they own the problem, and they let you know what’s going to be done, and when. That’s what gives customers their time back, puts their mind at rest, creates certainty that the problem is going to be solved.
And all that faff in the middle, the back and forth, wasteful for customers, expensive for the company? Well, they can just skip all of that.