When will my furniture be delivered? When will the repairman show up? How long till the doctor sees me? When will my call for technical support be answered?

Not knowing is soooo aggravating. And often, it's not how long we'll have to wait that's distressing; it's not knowing how long . . . or what the status is . . . or whether we've been forgotten altogether.

This state of not knowing is a highly charged one for customers. The longer they're forced to wait without an explanation, the more upset they become. And when customers face interminable unexplained waiting, they also become dissatisfied with other service flaws that might otherwise remain below their anger threshold.

Conversely, the simple matter of informing customers can go a long way towards appeasing them. As a woman in one of my seminars told me: "When I was put on hold while waiting for support and the message said I'd have a 15-minute wait, I was pleased. Not at having to wait for 15 minutes, but at being told how long. It gave me the option to hang up and call again later if I wanted to. Just being able to make that decision helped me feel I had some control over the situation."

But what do you do when you don't know how long the wait will be? For example, think about the last time (1) a delay or outage occurred that significantly inconvenienced your customers, and (2) you didn't know the cause, yet (3) customers demanded to know when service would be restored? At such times, what's a non-psychic to do?

An airline demonstrated a superb approach on a flight I once took — or rather waited to take, since the departure time had passed and we were not yet upward bound. Onto the intercom came the Person in Charge of Giving Passengers Bad News. He told us: "We're experiencing a mechanical problem, and we don't know how long it'll take to resolve. However, we will give you an update every 15 minutes. And we'll give you the update every 15 minutes even if we have nothing new to tell you."

Too often, passengers are told nothing at all. Yet, in times of intense uncertainty, people have a stronger-than-usual need for information. Happily, this airline understood that giving passengers some information was better than letting us sit there, fuming, grousing, and (not incidentally) driving the flight attendants crazy. Since they couldn't tell us when the delay would end, they did the next best thing: they told us when they'd tell us whatever they did know. The duration of the delay may have been plagued by uncertainty, but there was no uncertainty about what to tell customers.

Is a periodic update better than departing on time? Not at all. And would it have been acceptable if, every 15 minutes for the next six hours, you were told, "Sit tight. We still don't have a clue"? You know the answer to that! Clearly, a periodic update has a practical limit. But when wait-creating, uncertainty-making situations occur, most customers — including your own — would rather have a little information than none at all. You can be certain of that!


About the Author
Website: www.nkarten.com

Naomi Karten has always been fascinated by human behavior. Her background includes a B.A. and M.A. in psychology and extensive corporate experience in technical, customer support and management positions.

Since forming her own business in 1984, she has presented seminars and keynotes to more than 100,000 people internationally. Her services, books and newsletters have helped organizations and groups

• Manage customer expectations,
• Enhance their communications and consulting skills,
• Provide superior customer service, and
• Establish successful service level agreements.

She is the author of several books including:

Communication Gaps and How to Close Them, which provides strategies and guidelines for improved communication in such contexts as building strong relationships, delivering superior service, fostering effective teamwork, and managing change

Managing Expectations: Working With People Who Want More, Better, Faster, Sooner, NOW!, which offers a serious, lighthearted look (yes, both!) at policies and practices for successfully managing expectations in the workplace

How to Establish Service Level Agreements, a handbook based on more than a decade of experience providing SLA consulting and seminars internationally and which is designed to help you avoid the flaws and failures she encounters so often