If NPS Is Ultimate Question, Then This May Be The Most Timeless Question

There’s a new metric in town, and it’s called Time Well Spent (TWS). This could be as important as the traditional Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) metrics. It gauges another level of customer satisfaction that most have not considered. But, Dave Norton and Joe Pine have!

I had a chance to interview Aransas Savas on Amazing Business Radio. Savas is a customer experience designer at Norton and Pine’s Stone Mantel experience strategy consulting firm. Toward the end of the interview, she dropped this nugget on me. You ask your customer a simple question:

Do you consider your experience with us to be time well spent?

Time is precious. Once it’s gone, you can’t get it back. You can’t pack it away and store it for another day. Nobody wants to waste time waiting on hold for a long time and interacting with people who aren’t trained or are incapable of answering their questions. Customers don’t like arduous processes. So, when you waste your customer’s time, it shows a lack of respect and is often the reason for low customer satisfaction or NPS scores.

Four types of time frameworks were developed by Pine, co-author of one of the most important business books ever published, The Experience Economy. They are:

1. Time Wasted: The simple definition of time wasted is when the experience is bad. And, if customers feel you wasted their time, there is nothing to stop them from looking elsewhere the next time they need what you sell.

2. Time Well Saved: When your product or service works as it should, you save your customers’ time. They don’t have to call customer support or look for another solution. This is what customers want and expect. When you understand your customers’ expectations and can deliver on them, they will say, “It is worth my time to do business with you.”

3. Time Well Spent: Do your customers enjoy their experience with your organization? If the answer is yes, then you are where you want to be. Wrapping all three of these together looks like this: You don’t waste your customers’ time with products or services that don’t work, you don’t require them to take extra steps to get what they want, and they enjoy doing business with you. That’s what gets them to say, “This was time well spent.”

4. Time Well Invested: Why stop with just Time Well Spent when you can create an experience in which customers recognize and appreciate you so much they will invest more time in order to get higher value. When you prove your value, customers will go out of their way to do business with you.

Once you understand the four frameworks, The Time Well Spent metric provides insight related to the customer’s experience:

· Did you “get the job done” for your customer?

· Were they engaged with you?

· Did they consider the experience worth the time they spent with you?

The Time Well Spent score will correlate to customer satisfaction ratings but may give you more insight. A low score could mean the customer got what they needed, but it was a terrible experience, specifically an experience that wasted their time. The opposite is also true. A high score on the Time Well Spent question should coincide with high customer satisfaction. That’s an indication that your customer felt good about doing business with you. If they have a similar experience every time, the result is increased trust and confidence, which can lead to customer loyalty.

Not wasting a customer’s time is crucial. After all, why would someone want to do business with an organization or person that didn’t respect their time?