(Reuters) - Jere Downs, 46, who lives in suburban Louisville, Kentucky, scheduled her annual termite inspection on a day off from work. Then the inspector didn’t show during the four-hour window. Instead, he called to rescheduled a two-hour window the following Saturday. Another no-show and this time no call.
“Getting this annual inspection, a condition of maintaining the termite protection coverage, is turning into a real hassle,” says Downs.
Waiting for services or deliveries is more than just a major annoyance -- it’s also a big financial drain, according to a recent report by TOA Technologies. The time management company said it cost $38 billion a year in economic losses.
That’s a lot of waiting. To make matters worse for companies, the study and accompanying public opinion poll found beyond the cost there is collateral damage. Consumers’ have a lower opinion of the things they have to wait for -- even after just 15 minutes of lateness.
There’s no question this a shared experience among most consumers. How many times have you sat home waiting for the cable guy? Or a furniture delivery? Or a repairman?
There’s the two-hour window, the four-hour window and, ultimately, the we’ll-get-there-when-we-get there window. For anyone in the working world -- even those who don’t have to go off to an office daily -- time is money.
The survey conducted for TOA, a time-management company created to solve the “cable guy problem,” found that some 58 percent of those responding say they had to wait for an appointment at their homes in the past year. About half say they had to use a sick day or vacation day to wait for a service or delivery. More than a quarter say they lost wages waiting.
“You’re talking about a significant impact to people’s pocketbooks,” TOA’s CEO Yuval Brisker says. “There’s a double whammy… reduction in productivity and then there’s the cost to each individual worker who has to take time off from work...It’s an acute problem. We all experience this as consumers.”
To compound the frustration and expense of waiting, Brisker says the wait is often far more than the consumer expects.
“That directly impacts their impression of a company as a good service provider and whether they’ll stay with them over time,” he says.
To help protect brand equity, Brisker says, “All they need to do is respect consumers’ time.”
Increasingly, consumers are seeing options that allow them to, in varying degrees, figure out where the service guy is or when the delivery might happen. Domino's Pizza DPZ.N lets you follow your order through the process, from the prep to the baking to the delivery.
UPS UPS.N customers can see where in the country their package is and, ultimately, when it's out for delivery to their home at a time that's anyone's guess. But, catering to the need for more details, they now also offer a membership program -- for free, or with more bells and whistles for $40 a year -- that gives you more control over deliveries, including signing remotely.
Bob’s Discount Furniture, a New England retailer, decided to stop the guesswork for its customers’ deliveries and set up a tracking system.
“The tracking system is accessed by the driver through his cell phone and it contains information about each delivery stop for each of our drivers,” says Eric Adelstein, the company’s vice president of delivery operations. “Every time a driver arrives at a stop, he enters the time into the phone and the same is done once he departs a stop. When these times are entered into the phone, the system automatically updates the delivery time windows for the following customers that day.”
The tracker will also tell them the name of the driver making the delivery. Bob’s bought the system to help build goodwill with its customers.
“We also wanted to provide a competitive advantage and understand that sitting at home waiting for a delivery can be obtrusive for the customer,” Adelstein says.
Back in Kentucky, Downs didn’t have that advantage and now she’s left wondering what she needs to do to avoid wasting yet another day sitting home and waiting. Her termite coverage is at stake, her annoyance factor is high and her impression of the company is that her time is meaningless. Not a great message to send to your customers.
The author is a Reuters contributor. The opinions expressed are his own.
Editing by Beth Gladstone.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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