The Waiting Game (play it at your own risk)

By: Nathalie Schooling

I don’t know if it’s still a policy at universities, but the rule used to be that if a lecturer kept his or her students waiting for longer than 15 minutes, they had the right to up and leave. It was a policy that not only gave students something to hope for (particularly if they had to attend a first lecture on a Monday morning), but also indicated a level of respect for them, and their time, by the academic institutions that implemented it.

It’s also a valuable lesson in client service that many of today’s business owners would do really well to learn. I’m fairly sure that if most of us, as consumers, added up the amount of time we have been kept waiting – for service at the bank, in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms, for our hair appointments, for our ‘on hold’ calls to be answered, etc. – we would discover that we’ve lost at least a couple of days over our lifetime.

This waiting game is indicative of a really strange mentality – both on the part of the businesses that keep people waiting, and the people kept waiting. On the business owners’ side, it demonstrates a level of arrogance that says ‘I’m so confident that I’ll keep your business that I don’t need to respect you as a person.’

From the consumer’s point of view, it could be argued that a willingness to suffer this kind of rudeness reveals a level of apathy and, even, a lack of self respect. Of course, it could also just be that after so many years of isolation in the past - and the resulting lack of competition - South Africans have yet to fully understand that they actually do have a choice (yes, even when it comes to doctors, dentists, and – dare we say it - banks).

The good news is that this realization seems to be increasingly dawning on SA’s consumer base. The flipside of this coin is that it spells bad news for the business or professional practice that is unwilling to change its attitude towards keeping its customers waiting.

In an increasingly commoditized world, the ultimate differentiator between the sustainable business and the one that has to shut its doors is going to be the customer experience each delivers. And a big part of that is how that business makes its customer feel.

Sure, there are bound to be situations where it’s impossible to avoid making your customer wait. But in these situations, an honest explanation and sincere apology can work wonders. Of even more value, however, will be a genuine effort on the part of any business to prioritise respect for its clients and manage its time (particularly in professional practices) so that quality of client experience becomes more important than quantity of clients per day.

The thing is, respecting your clients is one of the easiest aspects of client service to get right – and it has the potential to deliver some of the greatest returns in the long run. And recognizing that your customers or patients have a basic right not to have their time wasted is a great starting point.

Of course, failing to recognize this fact can, and probably will, have the opposite effect. The waiting game is a risky one to play, and if you insist on doing so there’s a good chance that your business or brand could eventually end up doing the waiting - for any customers, at all, to come through the door.