Customer service plus social media equals `impatience’.

Older people amongst us may remember when the first Motorway, the M1 opened. There was not much traffic and no speed limit, and for those with the right car it was possible to get to the limited number of places it reached amazingly quickly. Now, the M25 of usually a car park, with everyone complaining.

The same thing is now happening with the Internet and cloud services, especially amongst mobile users. When the Internet started, even though bandwidth was limited, it was still possible to achieve results quicker than ever thought possible. Expectations were raised, and raised to the point where they are now not being met on a growing scale.

This is leading to what customer service specialist, KANA Software, is now calling the `Impatience Index’. This has emerged from research KANA commissioned from Omnibus Research, which shows that that consumers’ patience over customer service issues has, in some cases, truncated from 10 days to 10 minutes in the space of a generation.

The proliferation of digital devices and social networks has transformed British consumers’ tolerance of waiting times. What KANA calls the `expectation reflex’ is creating end users who now expect companies to respond, especially to complaints, in a matter of minutes rather than days. 

David Moody, head of worldwide product strategy at KANA said: “Little more than a decade ago, 10 working days was the conventional commitment of businesses and organisations when responding to complaints; and also the span of consumer tolerance. This no longer applies.”

KANA asked a statistically representative sample of UK adults how frequently they checked for communication responses on their devices. The key findings showed that men are generally more impatient than women. Men will check a device for responses on average every 22 minutes, 30 seconds. Women will check every 26 minutes, 15 seconds.

Interestingly, it also shows that the supposedly techno-phobic 65+ age group checks devices more frequently than the 45-64 year old group. This is thought to reflect the time they have available and their newly developed digital capabilities. This suggests digitally enabled pensioners will become the prolific and demanding complainants within five years.

One-fifth of all social media users will check for a response at least once an hour, with one in 20 checking every 10 minutes or more.

The most frequently checked devices across all age groups are email on smartphones, checked every 36 minutes, checking Twitter for replies – that averages every 39 minutes, checking phones for texts, every 48 minutes.

The also-rans here are checking for mixed calls – every 49.25 minutes, checking PC or laptop for email – every 54 minutes, checking Facebook for messages – every 57 minutes and checking voicemail, that’s every 1 hour, 5 minutes.

Not surprisingly, the most regular response checkers are the 18-24 year-olds, who indulge every 9 minutes, 50 seconds. At the other end of that scale are the 55-64 year-olds, who manage to last out – or is that perhaps remember to check - every 1 hour, 30 minutes.

KANA’s polling also found that the average UK consumer has routinely used more than seven digital communication channels in the past year, a factor that will be a serious challenge to the Chief Marketing Officers of most customer-facing businesses. The explosion of social media platforms targeted at consumers in the past 10 years and ease of adoption are creating headaches for businesses as more consumers take to social platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, to seek help and air their grievances about poor service.

And maybe they do have something to complain about, for the survey also shows that the average UK adult spends what the company calls a  `fraughtnight — in other words nearly two weeks each year waiting for service, making complaints and using digital channels to direct their ire at companies that provide poor service.

For the typical business, these findings may prove to be quite significant, particularly when the added potential for damage to a brand that social media can now rapidly inflict is factored in, as KANA’s Moody pointed out.

“In the past 10 years, organisations have lost the ‘time shield’ previously offered by postal services. The sense that a letter was on a journey and could be anywhere between the sender and the recipient has been lost. Our impression today is that as soon as we press send, ‘Mr or Ms Cosgrove in Complaints’ should be reading our complaint and working out how to respond. If we don’t hear back quickly, our impatience rises.

“Public-facing organisations have to recognise the adoption of social channels is truncating customer service processes. With smartphones acting as digital umbilical cords, the modern consumer is always connected. Unfortunately for service desks, ‘working days’ are an outdated concept.”