Last week, my mobile phone provider didn’t send me a SIM card they had promised. In my conversation with the call centre I explained that visiting their store wasn’t a good use of my time; something they might have guessed from my initial decision to have them post the card to me.

They said they couldn’t get it to me by the promised date any more (the following day).

I was cross.

The call centre person decided that it would be a good idea to recap on exactly what she and I had done up to that point.

I politely interrupted her and pointed out that, I was getting the impression I valued my time quite a lot more highly than the phone company. I didn’t want a potted history of my (bad) recent experience, I wanted a solution.

Oblivious to this and presumably because of some awful training, the lady decided to press on with the recap anyway.

I got crosser.

I interrupted her again, somewhat exasperated. I asked to speak to a supervisor.

She asked why.

I referred back to the fact that, since the whole transaction had been conducted by me on the basis of my valuation of the best use of my time, telling her what I was going to tell someone else wasn’t going to make me any happier.

She put me on hold.

I was left to stew in my thoughts of escalating crossness, perhaps only for a couple of minutes. During this time I rehearsed my (angry) argument and, as is the nature of such mental rehearsal, dug myself an angry trench from which to launch my attack.

In customer service situations like this, relatively short delays feel enormous to the customer (and make an initial problem much worse). Call centre’s should have a clock that runs at twice the usual speed if they want to understand how a customer feels. A rational analysis of hold times is meaningless: what matters is how the customer is feeling during that delay.

It’s been believed for some time that perceptions of time are linked to consumer evaluations: it even affects purchase decisions. If people perceive that they’ll spend a lot of time with a product or service they’re more inclined to purchase it. Studies have also shown that focusing marketing messages on time (rather than price) can have a positive impact (seeYour Money or Your Time).

Recently researchers set about exploring whether perceptions of time could be influenced: could the same event be perceived as more pleasurable by creating more focus on the time involved?

They discovered that when people focused on an event that was described as pleasant, breaking down the experience into subcomponents increased the amount of pleasure they anticipated.

On the other hand, when people thought about an unpleasant event, breaking it down in the same way increased the anticipated displeasure.

Whilst more work is needed to understand where the boundaries are, the broad implications of this research can be incorporated into marketing activity.

When the focus of a company’s product or service is something engagingly positive, breaking down the elements involved will increase the desirability of what you have on offer.

When the focus is something that is likely to be perceived less positively, for example a financial services product that people know they should get on and sought out but usually put off, you should do the opposite. Summarise the product or service into as few component parts as possible.

And, of course, if you’re in customer services and something bad has happened to a customer, don’t review every step of that negative experience with the customer, particularly if he’s already told you he’s thinking about the time he is wasting because of your error.

Source: Claire I. Tsai and Min Zhao. Predicting Consumption Time: The Role of Event Valence and Unpacking. Journal of Consumer Research, October 2011

Image courtesy: Bethan Phillips