Fireside Chat with Jay Baer on Consumer Patience

All right. So this is a fireside chat. Uh something we do every now and again uh to see what interesting things people have to say about what's going on. So my guest today is Jay Bear. Jay, who who are you and why are you here?

Well, it's your show, so you should probably be the better one to answer that. But I am Jay Bear. I'm a marketing and customer experience author expert and researcher, founder of the consultancy Convince and Convert, uh author of uh six books on marketing and CX keynote speaker. And I have a new research project about consumer patience and business responsiveness. And it's called The Time to Win, the 2022 Consumer Patience Study.

Always nice to see you, my friend. You too. So what is this study? What what made you want to do a study on consumer patience? I've always been fascinated by speed and and the implications for speed on business success.

And in fact, in in most of the books that I have written, there are sections about speed. So in my book Utility, there's sections about uh being useful by being faster. In my book Hug Your Haters, there's a section about improving customer service just by being faster. Uh in my book Talk Triggers, there's a section on creating word of mouth by being disproportionately faster, faster than customers expect. And so this idea of of speed has been a through line through my work for probably 15 or 20 years.

But this is my deepest dive yet, Chris. This is the first time I've done a study or research specifically around speed. And the reason I did it was my observation uh probably you know a few months ago, kind of coming out of the pandemic, quote unquote, is that I wonder how the pandemic has changed our relationship to time. Because as somebody who used to travel all around and give give speeches on stages and then traveled nowhere and gave speeches into this very same camera, um when when everything goes online, right? When so many things that you used to do offline now become online, online, and you know this as well as anybody, Chris, online your perceptions of time and what is long versus short are foreshortened or or or you know blurred in some way.

And so my question was does that then change the way people think about everything? And and the research suggests that um largely it does that that people um they they want everything right and they want it right now. Got it. Okay, so let's dig into this thing for folks uh who are just joining. If you missed it and you would like to follow along, this is the URL.

It's the time to win.com. Thank you. Uh first, let's talk about the methodology, which is my favorite uh page in the entire document because I'm a nerd. Um so this is a uh national study, uh 900 what 1900, almost 2000 response, 16 to 65, um, weighted against census data for age. How come it's not weighted for gender?

So, what's interesting about that, Chris, is I have done a number of research projects like this in my career, not only for books that I've written or keynotes that I've written, but but also for clients. And what I have discovered over time uh is that gender doesn't typically have a huge impact on attitudes around CX or around speed, at least in the research that I've done. And in fact, while we didn't normalize the respondent pool for gender, we did, of course, gather gender for every respondent. And I ran a crosstab on literally every single question in this study. And there was only two, I think, that were even meaningfully kind of sorta interesting in terms of men think this and women think that.

So long story medium, I have found that it doesn't actually matter very much. Do you see any um anything for folks who self-identify as non-binary or outside the traditional norms? Yeah, we did gather that data. We did uh allow for for um another choice uh beyond uh the the traditional male and female uh and I did run cross tabs on all of those as well. There were a couple of outliers, but nothing that was significant enough to draw a pattern from.

And of course, you certainly run the risk of not a statistically viable sample because it is, you know, one or two percent of the overall respondent pool, which is you know 80 people or something like that, right? So you start getting a little concerned about making mountains out of molehills statistically. Got it. Okay. So let's talk through some of the the major findings in here.

Uh, particularly uh how customers react. So short story shorter, uh how do people feel about speed when it comes to customer experience? They care about it a lot. And it's because I would argue, and and I do argue in this research that speed is the single most important factor in customer experience. Really?

Or at least speed to resolution, maybe not speed to response, but speed to to resolution. Um, and partially it's because time is the only inelastic resource. Like it is the only thing. And I really put myself to the test on this. You're you're smarter than me, so you'll probably come up with 15 other things I didn't think of.

But uh, like what what is the other resource that everybody on the planet literally shares equally? We have 1,440 minutes. Elon Musk has that much, somebody living um uh without a home has the same amount of time. If you're in Bulgaria or or Great Britain, you know, regardless of scenario or circumstance, we all have the same amount of time, and and we increasingly value that time because we have grown to expect everything to happen faster, right? I mean, it's easy to forget in the moment, but it wasn't that long ago that you couldn't just click a button on your phone and a car would show up or a pizza would show up, or or you'd open a bank account or any number of other things that can now happen uh in a matter of seconds, and and we care about our own time, and we hate it when businesses in particular waste our time.

And that certainly was true um in this research, because you see some of the statutes showing there, people hate it. They're disappointed when they have to get a hold of a business a second time or they have to wait, etc. Uh, it it is an egregious error on the part of businesses to to not be as fast as they can be. Gotcha. With these findings, uh, obviously 2,000 people is uh a reasonable sample for the United States of America for uh you know the national population.

It's uh got a margin of error about plus or minus 2.5%. Um how do these findings differ, if at all, between simple and complex sales? Simple sale, you know, swipe a credit card, you buy a service, complex sale, B2B SaaS service or college education or mortgage or Gulfstream Jet. Yeah. Most of the questions were asked in in in a non-specific way with regards to size or complexity of purchase.

And we did that on purpose because ultimately what what the vision here is, Chris, is to do some additional parallel surveys with 500, 800, 1000 respondents that are just B2B or just financial services or or just consumer goods or just furniture or just auto. Because as I go around the world giving presentations about this topic now, when I go do the car dealer conference, it sure would be cool to take this as the baseline research, but then make a car dealer version of it. And so I purposely didn't try to put like all the different scenarios in one research project. Um, because you get end up with pretty small sample size if you do it all together. And I wanted to give myself the ability to do custom ones down the road.

Gotcha. Okay. In a recent episode of Freakonomics, which is a phenomenal podcast on NPR. Stephen Dub. Yeah, Stephen Dubner was talking about just how bizarre a place the United States of America is.

It is a highly atypical country. Uh we are abnormally independent for uh compared to any other nation. Yep. This survey was calibrated on the USA. And we are a very, very strange society.

Yep. Um should the findings that are in here, do you think they're going to mirror what other cultures and other people will have? Or do you think that there's going to be regional variations based on culture? Will Australians be more patient than Mongolians? Will Chinese folks be you know more patient than Italians, etc.?

It's a great question. I don't know the answer, but I can make some guesses. Um directionally, I think this is universally true. Because this is about technology, pace of change, expectations for responsiveness. And there are some places um where, for example, cashless payments, right?

Everything goes quicker with cashless payments. There are places in the world that are much farther along in the United States in that regard, or mobile everything. You look at something like WeChat uh and and other apps, kind of all in one apps in Asia, which would, in my estimation, make this sort of desire for everything that happened right now even more uh significant. So uh I think directionally it's true everywhere, but I believe that's probably driven more so by level of technology embrace in that society. So Mongol, Mongolia is a good example.

Um that there are urban areas in Mongolia who who have uh you know persistent internet connections and cell phones and all those kind of things, but there are also big portions of Mongolia where they don't have Uber, right? Or or anything in that area. Uh when you have more time, you care less about speed. And and even though we all actually have the same amount of time, it's how much time do you think you have? And and the irony about it, Chris, and I and I've I'm trying to figure out a way to say this on stage in a way that isn't ridiculous and I'm not there yet.

But it's this idea that that we get so freaked out about time and responsiveness in a society like ours, which is the leading, if not nearly the leading society in that it everything is so efficient we actually have more time than anywhere else, right? Like theoretically, US has more time than almost any other country, yet we're also less patient, right? So it's like it's like this weird like reverse correlation where the more free time you have, uh the the more you want more free time. Uh it's it's kind of a slippery slope. It is, and I have a whole line of thoughts that we're not going to go into about politics and culture, about why that might be the case, uh, and capitalism economics, but that's that's for another show.

But to your original point, um, the same way that I I want to do parallel studies on a per industry basis, I would love to do the Canada version and the Australia version and the New Zealand version and the Germany version, et cetera. Again, it's hard to do that in a study like this because you've got to have four or five hundred completes in each country to really make it worthwhile. That gets expensive and time consuming. Um, and so I didn't do it in the baseline research. But you know, if somebody says, hey Jay, can you come give a keynote in in London?

Would I attempt to do a parallel study for that audience? Absolutely. Okay. Let's talk about the customer journey. Um, both the buyer's journey and the owner's journey.

You have response times throughout it, awareness consideration, evaluation, purchase, ownership, loyalty, service, support, and evangelism. Yep. Each of those will have measures of time, right? Yep. How are companies using timing data in, say, for example, a marketing mix model?

Yeah. So what's what what what I encourage them to do uh is operate with what we are now calling uh you may have seen me talk about this before, the right now. So the right now is when you deliver or respond or execute or solve or or close it out slightly faster than the consumer thinks you should. So whatever they think, slightly faster. Because because then they're like, wow, that was great.

If it's too fast, it's not good. So this idea that that speed is inherently better is not entirely true. It's largely true. But but this the advice in this research and the corresponding advice on stage is not is not just be faster all the time, because you can be too fast. Right?

You go to the Mexican food restaurant, you order enchiladas, the enchiladas come in like 45 seconds. We've all had that experience. You're like, bro, is there like a uh enchilada ferry? Like how did what is the quality basis for these enchiladas? How are they possibly ready now?

Or you know, when you're when you're shopping for a tattoo artist, you're not looking for the fastest tattoo artist in town, is not really a criteria that you want, or the fastest heart surgeon is also not something that you're typically looking for. So so there is a point at which raw speed creates distrust. And so the right now is just faster than customers expect, but not so fast that that they begin to lack trust. So what the right now is at each step of the journey is gonna differ. And it's gonna differ by by category, right?

Again, enchiladas versus tattoo artists. So my I I can't tell businesses off the top of my head what is the magic right now, but they should be able to find out to your point, right? In a marketing mix modeling, uh, a customer churn model in any number of other uh scenarios, they should be able to figure out if we are 20% faster at this step of the journey, these positive or negative business outcomes occur. Now, it's easier for somebody who has a data science background to do that than your average marketing manager or customer service manager, and I think partially that's where the disconnection lies. Yeah, that's what I'm wondering, because I I think if you had those numbers almost like channels in a mix model, where you could say, you know, the time of response as well as the channel of response, I think it'd be very illuminating to say, like, yeah, actually the time response matters more than the channel of response.

Yeah, I I would agree with that in in most cases. And one of the things we found um in the research is is there are there are customer contact mechanisms, which a lot of businesses kind of treat as as sort of the you know the shoebox under the bed. Uh and and customer expectations are actually fairly steep, even for those. So for example, um the the old contact us form, I don't think anybody would would realistically suggest that the contact us form is the most urgent way to contact a business or receive a response from a business, but I think just about everybody has one. Uh two-thirds of customers expect and anticipate a business to reply to a contact us form within 24 hours.

There's a lot, I mean a lot of businesses that are not meeting that test right now, right? They're just like, yeah, if it's on the contact us form, they can't be that important. We'll get to it eventually. Uh, but yet they're they're literally disappointing customers just in in even that most prosaic of contact mechanisms. Have companies looked at um service costs for that?

Because like if you if you don't answer your contact us, then someone's going to call your call center and now you're you're chewing up FTE hours. We talked about that a little bit in uh in the Hug Your Haters research when you published that book um five years ago, whatever it was, uh, that you're absolutely right. What when when you don't answer fast enough, or or even worse, don't solve the problem uh in the first channel, then it really just produces duplication or in some cases triplication of of contacts. And then what happens, and and this is still very common, customers will do the spray and pray, right? They'll be like, okay, I really need to hear from somebody.

So I'm gonna call, I'm gonna email, I'm gonna live chat, I'm gonna social, I'm gonna, you know, I'm sending like a you know, a singing telegram, like we're doing all of it, um, hoping that that one of these will will succeed. And in fact, in that research, and again, I I I would I don't want to hang my hat on this because that's been a few years since we did it, but at that time, it was some overwhelming percentage. I think it was 80 plus percent, if I recall correctly, of social media customer service um questions were after somebody had already tried to reach the business via phone, email legacy channel. So it wasn't like, you know what, I think Twitter's better. It was I'm not getting any help somewhere else.

So let's throw the Hail Mary bomb in and go to Twitter. Now, I think probably use of social media as a customer service channel has been normalized some since then, but I think it's still in very many cases, like it's the the the last resort. Makes sense. This is was this finding here that surprised me, which was customers expect businesses to be as fast or faster than before COVID. Given the number of restaurants and other establishments I've driven by that have the, you know, uh please be a patient, we have no staff signs.

Like there's one on the McDonald's drive-thru uh near my house. Every drive-thru. Why would anyone realistically have an expectation that a business will be faster when they have fewer staff and bigger supply chain problems? It's a it's a great question. And it's one of the most interesting findings in this research that that there is no pandemic pass.

This idea that, hey, they understand, you know, and maybe it's been too long now, or or maybe people are like, well, they just don't want to pay enough for their workers, or maybe they don't actually believe that supply chain is still an issue now, two years into supply chain issues, or whatever the circumstances are, and I don't know the exact uh reason because we didn't ask that question. But the the data show that that customers are like, look, man, it's been a couple years, get your shit together. And and that is, and that that has a massive implication uh for lots and lots and lots of businesses. So, what does a business do? Like if you're your McDonald's franchise and you're supposed to have five people on back of back of house and two people up front, and you've got one person each place.

What are you supposed to do? Yeah, well, my first job was in McDonald's, so I I have uh lived that dream uh in my in my past. Um I think it's really important, Chris, to note here that most of this research um hinges on customer expectations. And let me just back up a second and and say that expectations and expectation management is one of the most important things that all businesses can do, because there is no such thing as an inherently good or an inherently bad customer experience. It doesn't exist.

There is no good or bad customer experience. It's purely based on what you thought was going to happen. And in fact, I would define customer experience as the difference between what customers think will occur and then what actually happens. That being the case, if in fact you are short staffed, you're shorthanded, you don't have turkey. There's a restaurant in town here that never has turkey anymore.

Like Turkey is like plutonium. You can't you can't get it. Only in the black market can turkey be acquired. Uh which but they got chicken for days. Yeah, as much chicken, it will give you chicken, but you can't have turkey.

I'm like, how is what? Anyway, it's a it's a mystery to me. But in circumstances like that, the best thing you can do, obviously, is do what you can to solve the problem, but you've got to manage the expectations, right? So if you if you very aggressively, consistently proactively communicate, and and it can't, I think it's got to go beyond the please be patient, we're short staffed. I think you've got to give a little more detail there, a little meat on the bone.

Um, then usually people will give you uh, you know, a little bit of grace for a while. But when you read articles that McDonald's is raising their salary to you know $18 an hour starting, and the same McDonald's by your house has been short staffed for seven months. At some point you're like, well, wait a second, surely this problem can be fixable eventually. Okay. Another interesting finding uh in the paper was this one.

Uh men expecting businesses to reply faster than than women. Yeah. Is that is that men culturally in the United States, or is that the gender itself? What's your take on that? Because it's an it's it is a significantly different margin.

Yeah, it is, and that was we mentioned at the top of the show, that's one of the few where where when we ran the crosstabs, the men, women, and gender variant um, or or prefer not to state, etc., um was different enough to actually include in the in the produced report. I think it's cultural. I I think it's uh I think it's uh hey uh I want it right now, and and you know, men tend to um I think I'm not an organizational psychologist, but but tend to be a little less patient in general, at least that's true in my household. So anecdotally, anecdotally, I think it's probably a cultural imperative in this country. Gotcha.

Okay. So that was a case where if you ask Mrs. Bear, she would say, yes, this research checks out. Gotcha. But asking our friends, for example, in Paris, uh, might have a very different uh set of reactions.

Could be. Yeah, that and that would be a really interesting, um, a really interesting study to look at um that gender difference across a number of different uh countries in in different societies. South America, Africa, uh APAC, yeah, that would be a really, really cool uh piece of research to put together. Exactly. Uh, one of the other findings that uh should make everyone wake up is that customers are willing to pay a more between 19 and 50 percent more uh for for no lie, no waiting.

Um given this, uh does this is this across everything? Is this is this sort of a universal thing, or is this you know retail and and you know B2C specific, do you think? Well, we asked it without a qualifier around industry or product, because to ask the question qualified, it gets very, very detailed, and you really run the risk of of somebody misunderstanding the question. So we asked it pretty plainly, uh, and we did that on purpose. Um the other thing that's noteworthy about this is is there were some differences um in I just didn't get into it too much in the actual written report, but there are some fairly interesting, maybe we'll do a supplement on it, um differences in that particular question by cohort and and your Gen Z type people, and I think partially because some of those folks aren't necessarily making their own money yet, etc.

They're like, I would pay infinity dollars to never wait. I mean, it was it was there's some things there, and I wonder the reason we didn't write it up is because it was so dramatic. I was like, I don't know that I don't know if I want to hang my hat on that data. But but I have some Gen Zs at home, and they're like, Yeah, to never have to wait in line anywhere, I would give you all the money and all my parents' money. And I'm like, huh, interesting.

Um, so uh look, what do people hate worse than waiting in line? Not many things. And again, it it goes back to this whole idea of how much we value time and we hate the again, certainly in the US, we hate this idea that somehow we are frittering time away, that we are wasting time. One of the reasons why we don't take all our vacation and still don't, right? Even in a pandemic, we still didn't take all of our vacation.

So it's you know, it's it's how we are, I guess. We're just a bunch of lunatics. Um, let's talk about it. My daughter works, my daughter lives in Paris now and works there. Um, and it's her first job out of school, and and you know, all of her colleagues are not American, and they're always like, wow, you Americans, you work so hard, you're never taking a vacation, right?

It's like there's two people on the team who are always working super hard, everybody else gives them shit for it. My daughter and her colleague in China. It's like, huh, shocking. I was like, all the stereotypes are true. It is.

Let's talk about Flippy Sippy and Chippy. Yeah. Uh, flippy, sippy, and chippy are robots, these are robots uh respective different fast food uh establishments. I believe Flippy is at Jack in the Box. Um, and these obviously are our back of house uh machines that are uh Flippy, I believe, is doing mostly fries and burgers.

I think it's a fries. Um when we talk about AI and automation and we talk about sort of this this time to win. Is there a difference between the uh response times that are human-led versus response times period, machine or human led? Do consumers feel different if a business responds with a chat bot versus an actual human in the chat. Does this does the satisfaction remain the same if you know they get an answer immediately from something that's not human?

I think it depends on what they're asking about, right? So uh I think it would be foolish of me to suggest that that the uh technology is immaterial, or really it's not even about the technology, it's about the empathy that that technology can execute upon, right? So there is no good or bad chatbot. There's there's empathetic chatbots and chatbots that lack empathy because they're not programmed as such, or they're not designed to do that. Same thing with texting, same thing with WhatsApp messages, same thing with everything, right?

The way I'll I'll answer this um is we asked customers in this study if if you had to pick a contact mechanism that you had to use to get a hold of businesses, and you could only use one, what would it be? And overwhelmingly, they picked phone, and that surprised me. I I did not that one coming. I would have thought they would have said email or text or something that is inherently less filled with friction, but it does make me really stop for a second and say, you know, there's something to be said for having a live person on the other end who can respond to maybe questions that are illinear or illogical that can display kindness and empathy, warmth and humanity in a way that a bot uh has a has a difficult time doing. So I I think I don't want to read too much into it, but but I think that's a really interesting finding.

74% is the is the answer if customers say that they would prefer to use a telephone to get in touch with the company. And does that hold true generationally? It did, and that shocked me. Um it really did. I mean, there's a there's a three, four percent difference somewhere in there, you know, um, a little less, of course, for Gen Z, but but it wasn't meaningful enough to put in the study, which is why it's not in the study.

Uh, because I thought for sure, well, yeah, kids aren't gonna say that. Kids aren't gonna say to phone. You know, my kids don't like using the phone at all. But but I think the question is, hey, when the chips are down, right? And you're like, I gotta get a hold of somebody, the people still think phone is the best and most reliable way to do that.

I don't know if that's actually true, but that is the current perception. Well, like I said, you at least have somebody to yell at that uh you know that the bot never feels bad. You can't, you know, slam the phone down. Yeah. Exactly.

All right, let's talk uh generational stuff. This is one of the things I thought was was interesting. Yeah. In terms of who is most patient, uh you conclude Gen Z is the most patient, baby boomers are the least patient generation. Yeah, why?

So we looked at the way we put this together, the urgency index is you know, we asked each respondent to the study um whether they expected a reply from a business across the totality of contact mechanisms, right? So email, phone, live chat, WhatsApp, social, all that contact us forum, whatever. Um, and then we uh combine all that data um and then cut it by generations, and and found that the highest percentage uh of baby boomers expect a reply within four hours, regardless of contact mechanism. And the lowest percentage uh was was Gen Z. And we actually dug into that uh a little bit more and looked at it by channel and some other things that that get a little too granular to include in the actual written study.

Uh, but it turns out that that the Gen Z folks, and again, this isn't a massive difference, but it is meaningful. Um, the Gen Z folks, they they just don't hold businesses to the same standard, especially for some of the um more legacy contact mechanisms. So Gen Z, for instance, doesn't expect as quick of a response uh for things like phone and email. And that may be, I don't know this to be true, but it may be because Gen Z doesn't use phone and email as much, right? So they don't really have as much of a frame of expectation.

And I think again, part of it is some percentage of these Gen Z respondents aren't working, right? They don't have families, they're not going to soccer games with their kids, right? They they they they arguably have fewer leases on their time, therefore they may value their time a little bit less than as you get older. You know, baby boomers are like, I don't know how much time I got left. I better make sure I get this email answered, right?

So I want my response right now, right? So there is uh maybe it's a mortality factor, Chris. It'd be interesting to do some qualitative study on that too, because Gen Z and particularly Gen A, I mean a lot of uh Gen Alpha, I've a lot of Discord servers with folks in those generations, and there's a very, very strong anti-capitalist, anti-corporate um uh attitude. Uh it may also be possible that they just expect to be abused by corporations anyway. So they have expectations are lower.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Um that that that is a really interesting way of looking at it, right? That that they just they just figure it ain't gonna happen anyway. So why why would I think they're gonna get back to me in four hours, right? That that everything everything is doomed.

Um could be. Which which is not entirely uh an unreasonable perspective. Um I had uh an issue with my health insurance the other day. Uh we have this in Massachusetts, we have our a state exchange and we have corporations and things, and I and there's always this one disconnect in this system that they for some reason can't seem to ever solve, even though it seems like it'd be a fairly straightforward IT fix. I call them up um and services immediate, like you uh as a business owner and then also as an employee, your services immediate, you you get to you talk to a human right away, um and you get transferred to the appropriate department, you know, it's is good customer experience from a timing perspective, but they're still disastrously incompetent at actually fixing the problem.

This has been a problem that's going on for two years now. Um, and they can't figure out why. Going back to what you had started to say at the at the top of our chat about you know time being the most important thing. If the overall customer experience, the overall service being offered is a pile of manure, yes, does time really make the pile of manure better? Um, it does make it better, but it doesn't make it good, right?

So that that's why that's why in it you know, throughout this study, we talk about responsiveness, right? Not not solution, because that's a different research. It's different research for a different project for a different time. Um, and there's no question that that responsiveness without solution um is is only a panacea. Um, but I will also say that solution without responsiveness is ultimately satisfying, but super annoying along the way, right?

Like we've got somebody um doing some irrigation in the yard. Nice guy, took it on as a side project, probably bit off more than he can chew as it turns out. Um, and this was supposed to be like a three-week project, and now it's like a three-month project. It's gonna get done, and I'm confident that eventually I will be satisfied and it's gonna work out great. But along the way, it's really a slog, right?

And you know, and and it it has to ultimately be both sides of that coin. But I think the the best way to screw it up is is to be slow. And in fact, as we talked about in this research, if you're slow, you may not get the opportunity anyway, right? More than half of the respondents say that they have hired a business strictly because they were the first one to get back to them, even if they were the most expensive, right? We we hired a painter not long ago, exact same thing, right?

Three bids, one painter back in four hours, one a day later, one two days later. Guess who we hired, right? Like everybody, not everybody, but many people have been through that experience. So if you're not fast, you never get a chance to do it right or poorly. Gotcha.

Yeah, we had the issue with uh uh a tree service. Uh we put out bids to clear a tree that was you know crushing uh a good chunk of our backyard. And uh yeah, there were a couple of services, you know, by the time the winning service had we'd signed off the the other services were like, oh um, yeah, we we we forgot to get back to you. I'm like, well, it's a bit too late for that now. Yeah.

I mean, I mean, that's it, right? Like, if there's one thing I I hope this research will do, is that it will disavow business people of the notion that that kind of operating philosophy can work in 2022 and beyond. We just forgot to get back to you. What the actual F, bro. Like that's not good enough.

Uh, and and I think we all anecdotally know it's not good enough, but I'm like, look, we got it. The only way this is going to get solved if I have actual math around it. So I'm like, I'm doing the math. And we did. Gotcha.

If a company's just universally bad at everything, um, you know, we've throwing out, are we throwing out uh uh examples on the show? Well, I mean like my cable company, you know, bad service, uh high price, poor quality product. Uh, you know, it is it's still you know, fast, cheap, good, choose two. Like they chose none. They're not OPs, yes.

Yes, their product is twice as expensive and half the quality um the services as a business one. If every you're bad at everything, where do you start? Like should you try and and how do you prioritize you know the fast, cheap, good triangle? Yeah, I mean, I think this research shows that fast should be one of them, right? That that if you can't do all three and most can't, pick fast, because it matters, right?

It has like, you know, we've proven in this research that it has emotional consequences, it has revenue consequences, has loyalty consequences. So I would go either fast and good or or fast and cheap, right? But I would make sure that fast is one of them. Um, because again, our expectations around time will continue to ratchet up, disproportionate to our expectations uh around quality um or our expectations around cost, right? Like if you think about five years ago, what we think is fast versus what we think is slow is way different than five years ago, what we think is cheap versus expensive, right?

Like the the pace of expectation lift in speed and responsiveness way outstrips the pace of expectation lift in the other two uh corners of that triangle. So I believe the right approach is make fast one of your pillars, and then you as an organization decide whether you want to be fast and good or fast and cheap. How much of that's because of transferable customer experiences? One of the things you says is, oh, you know, all customer experiences is relative, but um, I think some of it's transferable too. So we have these devices and we are used to, you know, we swipe right on here, and you can get a car, a sandwich, a bottle of liquor, and a date.

Like we can probably, you know, in that order within 60 minutes. Even though my company or your company is not Tinder or Drizzly or Uber Eats or whatever, the customer feels like this is the standard and we're gonna be held accountable to other people's standards. Yep. How do we deal with that? Because we're none of those companies.

Yeah, I don't think there's a there, I don't think there's an out there. Um those companies that that have are really built from the ground up to to be fast, right? They're engineered for for lack of friction and responsiveness, are setting the standard for what everybody else comes to expect, right? And and I think it's one of the great business challenges of the next five to seven years is if everybody expects that that you get insurance like lemonade and you get your claim processed in three seconds, well, what happens if you're state farm and and it's not three seconds, it's three days. Um, at what at what at what point do people say, this is dumb?

I'm not gonna, I'm gonna go with these guys. Um, and when you're a legacy company, even if it's a five-year-old company who are not purpose-built for speed, I think it's a real question that we're gonna have to answer. I don't know the answer yet, uh, but I think it's a really, really important perspective. And and one of the reasons why I think it's the right time for this kind of research. How sustainable is that pace for those companies?

We've seen obviously in the last three months, you know, a massive number of layoffs in the tech sector around many of these companies. Yeah, uh is that because they've found efficiencies with AI and you know and technology, or is it that just that they can't that you know, they're they're basically burning the handle at both ends. I think it's both. Um, and I think from a tech standpoint, it it's it's also a macro kind of markets, like there's not more money coming anytime soon scenario, especially for for non-public companies. Um, you know, you've got to you've got to get profitable now because the the investment capital to power the next round is is not gonna be as easy to come by as it was before.

Um there's no question that that, and you know, you're you're one of the world leaders on this point, um, that that AI is is coming for the non-value workers. Um, and it has huge implications for what we're talking about here customer service and customer experience. Um, the problem is is as much as businesses have evolved to include chat bots and similar uh as a as a you know pretty significant piece of their overall customer service arsenal in many cases, um they're they're going about it to save themselves money, not to save the customer time or headache, right? So so you know, it's it's like let's use bot bots because it saves us cash, as opposed to let's use bots to produce a better customer experience. So I think we're gone kind of going about it the wrong way in many cases.

Um, but this idea of of of transference is hugely important. I I really thought about writing a book, uh, maybe we should do it together about this idea that the future of business is turning your customers into your employees, right? This this idea that, like, hey, you order your food at McDonald's and and you wash your car and you check out your groceries, yeah. You check out your groceries, you you book your flights, right? Like you clean your hotel room.

Like it's basically like we don't have to have employees because the customers are employees. I'm like, man, that that's uh that's a slick game if you can pull it off. How do you deal with that for companies and business models where fast is it is the is actually the opposite of what you want to achieve. I'll give you an example. Um, I've been doing the martial arts now for 30 ish, some odd years and things like that.

And generally speaking, the time from the day somebody steps on the floor to the day they get their first degree black belt should probably be about 10 years. Um the the the macro now, there's a lot of micro things along the way, you know, with the different colored belts and things along the way. But generally speaking, fast is not an advantage there. Obviously, having a good relationship is and you know, and building that trust in the business, but you definitely do not want fast. I don't want you know some yokel who got their black belt in three years to be backing me up and you know in the alley in downtown Boston.

Right. Yep. Um so I think in those cases, you think about you you can still have a value proposition that requires time. Tattoo artist, like we talked about earlier. But that doesn't mean that every node of the customer experience also fits that condition.

So if I want to, if I want to sign up for lessons, right? I'm like, someday, a decade from now, I want to be a black belt. Um it takes many, many steps, as you said. Well, the first step is picking a studio and and then coming in for a demo or a you know a free class, right? And there's a bunch of responsiveness dials that can be twisted just along the way.

Because again, you know, put in the contact us form. I'm interested in taking lessons. How long does it take, you know, the the studio owner to reply to that? Is it an hour? Is it 10 minutes?

Is it four days? That sets the tone for what could be a 10, 20 year relationship or no relationship at all. So even in businesses that that take a long time to actually deliver the goods or services, there's a bunch of other sort of micro moments that can and probably should be super fast along the way. It's one of the things that uh my teacher, uh Mark Davis at the Boston Marshall Arts Center has done really well for the last 30 years. It's 70% of martial arts studios went out of business in the last two years.

Yeah. Um, and his is one of the ones that survived. And one of the things he's done for as long as I've known him, he he's invested in an answering service that returns a call within an hour. No matter rain or shine. 30 years of this.

And that's why he's still in business. Yeah, I mean, you know, I I've been in in digital marketing uh since 1993. So 30 years now, nearly 30 years. And one of the secrets to whatever modicum of success I've been able to cobble together is we just email people back. Like we know when people are like, hey, we'd like to hire you.

We're like, cool, we'd like to be hired. And we do that really, really fast. Um, and it's like, you know, I mean, I don't, I wish it was more complicated than that. I mean, look, I I desperately wish I didn't have to do this research. Right.

Because to me, this is axiomatic. Like it's obvious. It should be obvious. If you're faster, people will give you more money. But it's not obvious.

And the research bears that out. So now I think this idea of what is the right time, right? What is the right now that it's in each of these steps? So for example, I need to pick a karate studio. What is the perfect amount of time to get back to somebody when they make that initial inquiry?

Is it five minutes? Is it an hour? Is it two hours? Like you you can you can figure that out in your own business, but there is um sort of the the perfect temperature of the portage at each of those process steps. And and I think what good businesses will do is kind of figure out what that is, and I'm excited to help them.

Exactly. So uh obviously the time to win.com is the place to get the study people want it. Where what else should people be uh looking at for? So at the time to win.com, we have the actual research. Uh we've got infographics.

There's one up there now. We have a new infographic that's gonna come out every month, which summarizes one of the sections of the research. Uh every Tuesday on my social media, I'm Jay Bear, all the places in the ways. Every Tuesday we have sort of a stat of the week pulled from the research with some uh description and maybe a contextual video, et cetera. Um, and then a bunch of other more fun stuff, uh fun stuff to come, maybe some webinars and speech excerpts and you know, all that jazz.

Sounds good. All right, we will see you out on the internet. Thanks for being here, Jay. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate you.