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| Scottish Sandbag |
Scotty: Do you mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.
Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Yeah, well, I told the Captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.
Scotty: How long will it really take?
Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: An hour!
Scotty: Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would *really* take, did ya?
Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Well, of course I did.
Scotty: Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.
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I own a 2011 hybrid as my routine ride, which, like most modern cars, gives you all kinds of alerts and reminders when you run into maintenance milestones. I’m OCDish about dashboard reminders, so when the oil change at 15% warning came up, I took the car into the dealership the next morning. It helped that summer Fridays at my gig are work from home, and the wi-fi at the dealership is good. Besides, oil changes are free, since I bought the car there.
When I checked in, there was a strong line for service – obviously, summer Fridays are a busy time – and my schedule was also up for a transmission fluid change. I gave the green light for the service, got a 60-minute or less time quote for the work, and set myself up in a quiet corner of the waiting room to work.
Now, I did not need to get out of there after 60 minutes. Realistically, I could have been there most of the day without any real issue, since I had everything I needed to work. But I had been quoted 60 minutes, and when that time came and gone, my antennae went up.
Had something gone wrong? Was the repair not properly booked, and was something more dire and expensive being done? Was the cellular service not working, and my phone not firing, which would keep the call that the car was ready from getting through? If that was the case, was I also missing other calls, maybe from co-workers?
All of those points seemed unlikely, but still, it has been more than the time quoted. Just sitting still and continuing to work was not working; a distraction was brewing. After 15 minutes of sub-optimal performance on the task I was trying to complete, I shut down my screens, packed up my gear, and walked back over to the repair bay.
Once I got there, I saw my car being worked on as the technician was just finishing up. Nothing more untoward than that. I waited at the counter for another 10 to 15 minutes, handed over my credit card for payment as soon as the keys were back with the desk, and was back at the home office with no incident.
A day later, the usual customer survey came in my email.
Now, I had received fine service. The facility was flawless on the wifi, and downright comfortable. I was fine with the price paid for the service. I will be back the next time, and I am likely to make my next purchase from this dealership as well. We’ve been going there routinely for over five years now.
But they didn’t get the full high marks, simply because they quoted me 60 minutes, when it took 90. If they had quoted 120 – totally understandable, given the amount of traffic they were dealing with, and the mild trickiness involved in getting into the transmission on a hybrid – and cleared it in 90, I’d have given them the 10 without a second thought.
Bringing this back to marketing and advertising, which is the point of the column.
It’s a fine art, managing client expectations. If you always beat your metrics and deadlines, you run the risk of having these estimates disregarded, and being trampled as having too much air in every estimate. But if you are always behind, that’s even worse from a job satisfaction standpoint.
My personal way around this is, whenever possible, to give two estimates – the best-case and the median, or maybe even the worst, if the task is particularly tricky. Especially when it comes to fast-turn needs for live campaigns, you might need to drop everything and deal with a fire drill, at which point any sand in the bags is just going to cost the company money.
Not everything can be a fire drill, but not every job can turn on the slowest move. And the best customer service is not a best-case scenario quote, especially if it's not likely to come true.
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