The art of bending time (and it’s impact on customers’ perceptions)

In his book ‘Why we buy – the science of shopping‘ Paco Underhill describes a few techniques to ‘bend time’, and change the customers’ perceptions of a particular service encounter.

Bad times are whenever the customer is made to wait. Most people agree that one of the key factors for determining the quality of a service experience is the waiting time. The shorter, the better.

The interesting thing is: the way you perceive time though your ‘internal clock’ may differ from real time. When people have to queue up for up to a minute and a half, their sense of how much time has elapsed is fairly accurate. If waiting time is a bit longer than that, they may feel that the actual waiting time is much longer.

Underhill outlines a few tricks to bend the perceived time:

Lots of interactions:
the time a customer spends after an employee has initiated contact seems to go faster than time spent before the interaction. Having someone simply acknowledging that the customer is waiting, and offering a plausible explanation, automatically makes the waiting feel shorter.

Orderliness:
People like to wait in a orderly manner (specially the British!). If customers see that they will be helped soon (e.g. a system that says that waiting time is about 3 min, or a orderly queue), they will relax, and the time spent waiting seems shorter

Diversions:
Entertaining customers while waiting always makes that ‘dead time’ less painful. People waiting for at a hairdressers for example, always seem to be not so bothered, as they flick through magazines. Or in restaurants, when they offer you a drink or some nibbles while you wait to get seated.