Impatience = Success

01.20.21 2:36 PM

An examination of human impatience and its effect on business success.

Do you know why Uber is so successful? Why DoorDash and SkipTheDishes are so successful? Do you know why Amazon has changed the game for deliveries across almost every industry? It is not as if Uber is a unique concept, nor is the idea of food being delivered to one's house. In fact, the industry of transportation as a service (TaaS, as the industry is called) goes back farther than the history of the automobile itself, as horse-drawn carriages existed. Why, then, did these companies have such a large impact on their respective industries? Stop reading here and take a minute to actually sit and think. The main answer (as there are several different small factors that played into their success) is the introduction of the tracking metric. In all 3 example businesses, their revolutionary addition was the fact that you could see (within some degree of accuracy) where your requested product or service was located. The Uber car is 5 minutes away the app will tell you, and it will show the icon's location as it travels towards you. The DoorDash or Skip progress bar clearly indicates what step of the process your food order is at, including where it is when the driver is bringing it to you. Amazon, especially in regards to the Prime 2-day shipping, has made tracking packages standard, so much so that (at least in Canada and the US), the app will notify your phone when your package is within 3 hours of delivery (along with every other step, from processing to shipping to the various postal locations it may traverse). But why does the tracking metric have such a drastic impact?

As it turns out, human psychology works such that we tend to hate the unknown. The creeping sense of fear or uneasy mystery that being in an unfamiliar place brings, especially if it is dark, is an easy example to use. Perhaps a more relatable example is ordering food at a restaurant, and having to wait well beyond what you might normally, and reasonably, expect to wait. Confusion, frustration, anger, and a host of other emotions can arise from such a simple inconvenience, because it is borne out of the unknown. We do not know why the food is late, and left to speculate on our own, we tend to assume the worst. This despise of the unknown is so powerful, in fact, that studies and testing have shown that a person would wait, happily, substantially longer for an event if they knew when it would happen, rather than a short unknown period. One such study measured passenger satisfaction with a subway service (c-train, metro, tube, whatever your local term is) over two different groups. The first group waited an average of 5 minutes, but the LED displays that would normally indicate how long until the next train would be arriving were disabled. The second group waited an average of 10 minutes, with the LED displays counting down the time until the train arrived. The second group's reported satisfaction and overall rating of the TaaS was significantly higher than the first, despite waiting twice as long. Why does any of this matter?

Time is of the essence.

Knowing that a customer is more content to wait longer, but have progress reports and a time estimate, every business should strive to quantify their processes, to the extent they can. That is to say, while it might not make sense to quantify the waiting process of an over-the-counter in-stock purchase, wherein the lead time from purchase to product arriving in the customer's hand is practically zero, any process that is longer than that should have a tracking system attached to it. With Uber in mind, even if the wait time can be measured in the single digit minutes, there is value to ensuring that all of the stakeholders of the process are fully informed, every step of the way. It goes without saying, too, that longer processes should most definitely be tracked, a la Amazon and Amazon Prime tracking. There is an important distinction in this aforementioned tracking that is worth highlighting, and is made clearer by comparing Uber and Amazon. In a process, the longer it is, the more parties involved, or as the complexity rises, tracking each step becomes increasingly expensive. The benefit provided by offering the tracking has diminishing returns, and so each process must be balanced against how difficult it is to track and provide updates. Amazon, for example, has several moving parts in the process of ordering anything from their website, from dispatching, warehouse workers building the orders, packaging, shipping, delivery: it is a very complex process. Consequentially, Amazon has decided not to provide every single step as an update to the customer, and instead focuses on the major updates, typically order received, shipped, out for delivery, and delivered. And for their purposes, and their customers, this is sufficient.

Sufficient is, after all, the basis of what a customer is looking for to quench their curiosity. Inundating a customer with tens or hundreds of updates as every minute step of a process is executed would not only be costly to the company, it would quickly become frustrating (and borderline harassment) for the customer. Finding a balance of sufficient updates to keep a customer happy against the cost of providing the updates will require fine-tuning over time, but will be well worth it to reap the rewards of more relaxed and less demanding customers (as an average). An important caveat to this system is the notion that providing updates removes or relaxes customer expectations for delivery on time. It might be tempting to think that, so long as the customer knows where their product is in the proverbial assembly line, they have no reason to complain about how long the turnaround time is, or if the expected deadline for delivery comes and goes. On the contrary: the tracking provides the customer with a method to hold you and your company accountable to the expected result. Under-promise, over-deliver still reigns king as your best approach to handling customers. As the tracking is fine-tuned, you will naturally come to be able to offer "higher" promises to the customer of what a reasonable delivery time is, and be able to execute. Part of this will come from being able to build in a buffer to the tracking, such that expectations are managed correctly, and not set unrealistically high. The other part, however, will come from something far more valuable. 

Improving any process demands that some metrics be put into place in order to gauge performance.

A popular quote within BMI and BMI's publications comes from Peter Drucker, and is "what isn't measured, isn't managed." Examining the quote, and its intuitive truth, I will save for another blog, suffice it to say that Drucker's quote applies to the notion of providing updates to your customers. How so? In striving to provide said updates, it will quickly become apparent that keeping track of all of the steps, from an order landing to customer delivery, is a far greater ask than it might initially seem. As any manager dives into the documentation of a process, such that they can build systems and workflows that can be triggered to provide updates, they will quickly begin to find that every process has more steps involved in it than they are necessarily aware of (combating this requires げんちげんぶつ (genchi-genbutsu; translated to "go and see"); a principle of the Toyota Way.). Nevertheless, improving any process demands that some metrics be put into place in order to gauge performance, for better or for worse. Beginning the task of providing updates to a customer unveils the perfect opportunity to start measuring, and therefore to start managing, the processes of the company. Once measured, a proper examination of what the metrics are, why they are, and how they can be improved can be taken on, refining the turnaround time for the overall process, and improving customer satisfaction even further.

You might note that I suggested earlier that I said a business should strive to quantify every process that they can, and balance the cost of providing updates to the customer against the diminishing returns updates might provide. Take special note: these two do not suggest that only the processes that should be quantified are the ones that are part of the customer update workflow or system. If you imagine a manufacturing plant, for example, this theory should be clearer. Every process that is quantifiable should be, and so along the assembly line, each step of widget production should be documented, measured, quantified. It takes 2.5 seconds to do step x, 1.5 minutes to do step y, 40 seconds to do step z, and so on. Providing each of these updates to a customer would present a cost too great to outweigh the benefit of doing so, but that does not discount them as necessary to be documented and quantified. The update to the customer may only be after a particular batch of processing steps have been completed, or perhaps it is only at the start of production and at its completion. Whatever update triggers you decide to set depends on the cost of tracking the steps of that update. 

Implementing an update process for your customers, wherever your business is interacting with them for a lead time, provides the opportunity not only to placate customer curiosity and demand for (perhaps unreasonable) turnaround times, it also affords you the opportunity to examine your own process for efficiencies, and a mechanism by which customers can hold you accountable - which perhaps could be rephrased as incentive to ensure timely delivery on your business' products and services. The speed and power of technology has bred market conditions that do not accept slow, mystery, or excuse in business. By recognizing the powerful psychology behind providing updates to a customer, and harnessing that power to your advantage, your business will position itself above any competition that does not offer the same certainties of tracking and delivery dates. Further then, measuring your own processes and working to refine them will generate a competitive advantage that cannot be overcome easily; ultimately leading to stability and prosperity.