Business Monitor Lack of speed kills
There used to be a hippy phrase, ‘speed kills’ related to LSD. There should now be a phrase ‘lack of speed kills’ and it relates to pounds and pence. Increasingly, the customer expects rapid or, indeed, very rapid response. If you are considered slow, you are dead in the water. Marketing expert, Paul Clapham, reports on how you can use speed to your advantage.
T
here was a marketing theory called the GFC triangle; GFC stands for good, fast and cheap and the theory says that if you do two you donʼt need the third. I suspect that theory is dead, because everybody now expects ʻfastʼ to be part of a businessʼs promise.
When people, both buyers and sellers, talk about good customer service they typically talk about soft skills such as friendliness, good communication and accuracy. In reality what really floats that boat is speed. I am convinced that the reason for this is that we can measure speed, whereas those other virtues are nebulous. McDonaldʼs is the company most associated with ʻfastʼ as in
ʻfast foodʼ. When a few years back the companyʼs management declared their service model broken that judgement was based purely on speed. Accuracy, friendliness, quality of food and politeness didnʼt get a look-in. Consider also JD Wetherspoonʼs, the highly successful UK pub chain. It is effectively the McDonaldʼs of beer. You donʼt drink there so that you can chat with the bar staff, because, Iʼm told, that is actually gently discouraged. Their staff are in the business of selling as much beer and food as they can in a shift, sod friendliness, and they know it.
No valid excuses
How this plays with printwear covers a number of angles. Have you ever waited frustrated for a prospective supplier to return your initial enquiry? Can you put your hand on your heart and swear that it never happened the other way round? Sad to say, I canʼt.
With the range of communication routes available in the 21st century, I struggle to think of a valid excuse. Wrongful arrest, maybe? OK, seriously you may be genuinely incommunicado and just as frustrated as your prospective customer but increasingly itʼs a real rarity. Speed of delivery is another matter. How soon does the customer actually need the product? Can you make fast into the standard service with a discount for customers who choose slow. There is a clear danger which I recognise, that clients will demand the fast service at the slow price, but other business sectors have managed to make two tier pricing work, so why not printwear?
So how long will people wait for a reply? This information comes from research done in America four years ago. It was a proper survey covering 1,000 people, i.e. the number used by electoral pollsters in the UK. 64% of people using Twitter expect a response within one hour; 85% of people using Facebook expect a response within six hours. 77% of people would go elsewhere if they didnʼt get an email reply, also within six hours.
Publicity routes
I think that social media is an excellent publicity route especially because it is free. It is also important because it is a conversation and thirdly because it works. But from the above it is clear that the customers it brings are demanding. You might argue that customers ready to spend are entitled to be demanding.
| 28 | April 2019
Note that people did have a clear idea of their expectation of a businessʼs speed of response. Nor was it entirely unreasonable (apart, perhaps, from some of the Twitterati). Do you have a clear plan of how you respond to a new enquiry? I recommend that you should do. There is nothing wrong with having a structured response along the lines of ʻcan I take you through some simple house-keepingʼ, i.e. name, business title, phone numbers and email. You can and should say that taking those details is part of achieving the fastest possible response – which is true because your processes will be more efficient and thereby faster.
Harvard Business Review published a study of 1.25 million sales leads generated by dozens of American companies via social media. (They were obviously big companies, given that number). Those which had a policy of making first contact with a prospective new customer inside one hour were six times likelier to get a sales appointment than those who made contact an hour later and a massive 60 times likelier than those who waited 24 hours.
Even though, along with most others, I hold the Harvard Business Review in very high esteem, I find those figures rather surprising. But assuming them to be right, they are screaming “jump on that lead, right now”. Finally, I would add that I find it deeply disappointing that we never seem to produce this sort of research here in Britain; it always comes from America. One way for British business to be taken more seriously (especially after Brexit) would be to produce our own convincing research.
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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