Does your PR start at the back of the queue? 8 ways you can win over customers while they wait for

Hello, my name is Jim James and I'm your host on this Speak PR podcast. Now, on this show, I like to help entrepreneurs and business owners to unlock the value in their business by providing some free and some effective communications experience and advice. Now, I've been an entrepreneur and a PR agency owner for over 25 years, serving over 500 clients large and small around the world. Today, I'd like to talk about how PR starts at the back of the queue. Now, I raised this because I recently went shopping, as most of us are doing now that lockdown is coming over, and I was just so struck by the difference in the customer experience now that we're starting to go back into the market, but also these tools and these thoughts apply just as much to business, to business as they do to consumer. Now, I say PR starts at the back of the queue partly also because I've been having some conversations with people who have said to me that if they could, uh, they wouldn't do public relations, that it's really just a, you know, a necessary evil, that, that they feel that it's too much like hard work, that, uh, you can't prove the results, and that they're kind of worried that they might be saying the wrong thing. And I'd like to just visit that as a definition, because public relations isn't just about media relations. Public relations is about influencing and engaging with all of our publics that are responsible for the well-being of our business. In our SPEAK PR methodology, which stands for Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know. We talk about personalization being for the different audiences, and we categorize them as 3. One is the internal audience, those staff members or people that we pay. The second are our partners, people that we have a relationship with that we rely on to help provide our company support. And thirdly, for the external, for the people that pay us, our customers. Now, the idea that public relations really should be at the front of the queue, not the back of the queue, came to me, as I say, when we were at the back of the queue last week going downtown. Now, there is a maître d' in London who was interviewed called Fred Sirieux, and he's a French Maître d'. And he said that, you know, when you talk about hospitality, you're talking about connecting with people. It's about giving first and giving generously. And I thought, well, that's, that's a nice way to think about all of our customer service should be about hospitality. It's not just about the restaurant business. That should apply regardless of our business. They plan on there being 5 smiles from the staff en route to the table from reception. 5 Smiles. And I'd read recently as well on an e-commerce website that this particular provider believes there should be 3 wins before you ask a potential customer for money when it comes to, in their case, buying a CRM system. 5 Smiles, 3 wins. The point is that we're, as businesses, we should be giving first to give people the sense that we are inviting them to do business with us, and not just once but multiple times, so that we are genuinely seen to be engaging with these people that are potentially going to be customers for life. So I'm minded of a great person in the public relations and management consultancy field called David Meister. And David Meister and I had the, the good fortune— I had the good fortune, I should say, to correspond with David back in the mid-'90s when he was still writing. And he wrote many books, including Managing the Professional Services Firm and The Trusted Advisor, which are really guidebooks for anyone that's interested in running a consultancy firm. But in, in his website, he has an article called The Psychology of Waiting Lines. And I was looking for this because what I realized from the experience of going downtown to do some shopping, I had very different experiences depending on the shop I was in. But I'm also having very different experiences when I'm ringing different people. I rang a bank the other day and The conversation got cut off midway, but they didn't ring me back. And because they'd rung me through one of these sort of private phone numbers, I have no way to call them back. So on David Meister's website, he talks about how products are consumed and services are experienced. Now, I went to the Apple Store. And it makes me feel that it's certainly in the case of Apple, it's a service. And the overall experience was fantastic because outside the store they'd set up some waiting lines, but also they had people outside to greet us and give us the instructions before we went into the store. Now, I was noting that all the other stores in the high street, People were waiting in line. There was no queue and no attempt to engage people until they sort of got to the front door. So really, the journey on this customer experience starts well before our our clients or customers are inside our office, our restaurant, our store, our factory, or wherever it is we're doing business with them. So David Meister reflects on a Federal Express advert. Where it says that waiting is frustrating, demoralizing, agonizing, aggravating, annoying, time-consuming, and incredibly expensive. And this calls into question what David calls the first law of service, and he defines as S equals P minus E, where S stands for satisfaction, P is for perception, and E is for expectation. So So if we expect a certain level of service and perceive the service that we get to be higher, then we're satisfied. In other words, if I go in expecting something mediocre but I get great service, I'm going to be satisfied. If I'm expecting a high level of service and I'm treated poorly, I'm going to be dissatisfied. Now, this matters because in this day and age of social media, as I've shared earlier on, in this time when people can leave reviews on TripAdvisor, Google My Business, there are more and more ways that consumers can leave notes directly for our own companies, but also can share those experiences through their own social media channels. And when they do that, they're perhaps on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, and they're then out of our control and quite possibly out of our even purview unless we use some of these sites like Talkwalker that I'd mentioned in an earlier podcast. So all service managers, all of us as entrepreneurs, need to pay attention to the satisfaction levels but also the perception levels and the expectation levels of our clients. So it's not just about what was actually done for the client, but it's what was perceived by the client before they were taken care of and what the client was expecting. Now, these can all be managed, which is good news. So there was a case in a hotel apparently where waiting times were being complained about. What they did was they, they installed mirrors On either side of the lift so that people could check what they were doing. I remember being at a hotel in Beijing where it was all dark and gloomy inside and mentioning to the manager afterwards that you couldn't see any of the signs next to the buttons because the light was so sort of low mood. That anybody could get lost. I went back another time and they put in some rather larger, larger signage. Small things like this. Now, in restaurants, and I remember, for example, going to Hong Kong to the Waterworld with my daughters last summer, and at every, every waiting line, it'll, it'll say something like, you'll be waiting at this point for 30 minutes. And then of course the irony of that was there were no queues, so it made a bit of a mockery of the 30-minute wait time because we could see the ride with no queues in front of us. But the idea of setting expectation that there will be a wait— and of course ironically enough, we were— we felt like we were getting ahead because it said 30 minutes and we got on in no time at all. So we felt like we were winning every time we got a ride with no queue. Now, David Meister says there's a second law of service, and that is that if we start well with a client or a customer, then it's much easier to keep them smiling than if we start badly. And we've all known the expression, you know, you can't make a good first impression a second time. Right. So this idea that if you were to settle down, and as this one waiter said, you know, if you sit down customers in a good mood, it's much easier to keep them happy than if they start off in a bad mood. They're always looking for reasons to be upset. So here are some 8 ideas or thoughts that David Meister then goes into, and I share with you now with full credit. That number one, unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time. So boredom is watching the passage of time, as Henry James once said. We're thinking about what else could be done, what else we could be doing instead of waiting for either the service, the phone to be picked up, or to get service at the counter. People want to get started. There's a delay if you're waiting outside that shop or that restaurant. The idea that you're sort of not doing anything with your time, for most people, that's pretty frustrating. Now, on Singapore Airlines, the moment you get on the plane, they sit you down, and within minutes of the door shutting, they will hand out menus but also hand out a hot towel to everybody. Not just business but economy, the whole of the cabin. They realize that people want to get started on their journey, so they settle them down by giving them a steaming hot towel and a menu. Number 3 is anxiety makes waiting times seem longer. If we're worried about what we're going to be doing, for example, at the dentist or the doctors or Waiting for an answer somehow. I mean, if there's a sale on, you're worried about missing out. We're worried about, are there going to be enough of the, of the phone that we want to buy, for example? Another thing that happens, of course, can be cognitive dissonance. In other words, questioning our own purchase. Now, this happens not just in consumer but in business too. There's an anxiety that we all have when we're about to make a purchase. Although my daughters might disagree with you on that, that they don't seem to have any anxiety at all about purchasing. But most of us worry a little bit about either spending the money or the decision that we've taken on, uh, on the purchase. Is it the right one? Can we afford it? And so on. And in an industrial setting where a purchase can affect a business and there'll be other people in oversight, we could be making a purchase that makes a difference to our job or not. The third is then thinking about if anxiety— what could your customers be asking themselves about whilst they're waiting, and how can we reassure them? Maybe while they're waiting, can we have signage? Waiting the other day at Homebase, for example, I didn't know that they actually had in store what I was looking for. I was going to have to wait for half an hour to get inside the store to find out that they did or did not have, in that case, rat-catching traps. They did have them, by the way, and I looked to be the only person buying rat-catching traps. But how can we reassure our customers that while they're waiting, they're not wasting their time, but also they're going to have a good result when they, when they actually go inside our store, our factory? Our clinic, whatever it is. The 4th on the list is that uncertain waits are longer than known finite waits. I've mentioned already how theme parks will put up markers. If you go on the Vodafone website, it says— oh, in fact, always says— our call center is experiencing unusually heavy demand. One wonders when they don't have that, but Waiting times that can be finite, not just longer than and you will wait, but 5 minutes, 10 minutes. And some of the more sophisticated call center chatbots tell you, for example, that you're going to be in a queue and how long that's going to take. What can we do for our own businesses to reassure people that they're going to get an answer to their phone call Or to the customer query before they need to leave. For example, if we've got customers who have parked in a car park, they need to know. Or for parents that are going to go off to pick up children, for example, they need to know when they're likely to get an answer. Now, another point is the unexplained waits are longer than the explained waits. So everyone is using the current due to COVID, our wait times are longer. We've all got used to that now. We're becoming perhaps even immune to those. But if we can explain the wait— we're sorry because either somebody's not come back from their shift, or the product hasn't arrived in shipping, or there's been some sort of a delay— people want to have both the part of their brain that needs resolution met, but the part of their ego that needs to know they're being taken seriously. So being ignored and being disrespected are really great causes why people then actually might turn away and leave the queue and go somewhere else. Number 6 is that unfair waits are longer than equitable waits. So this idea of FIFO, first in first Out that whoever comes in first gets to go first. Now, in bigger queues right now, we're currently still doing social distancing and waiting a meter to two meters behind one another. But when the crowd starts to hedge towards the front of the line, there's an anxiety about missing out. We've all seen this on the aeroplanes. I used to laugh about this, especially in China. I used to say to everyone, you've all got a seat allocation, so you're going to get on the plane. There really is no need to rush. But people worry about there being an unfair wait or of missing out. And in theme parks and ski resorts, sometimes they now do the priority pass where if you pay extra money, you get to go to the front. If you're going to do that, personally, my recommendation is that that's a slightly different place where they actually get in, because all it does is to make those people feel slightly embarrassed or, or high and mighty. But it certainly creates, uh, sort of an antipathy amongst those people that are waiting, and it's not a sense of a two-class system. So if they're going to have a two-class system, at least don't make it obvious for those people that have paid a normal fare but just don't feel like they can afford the premium fare. Number 7 is the more valuable the service, The longer the customer will wait. Now, if you want to wait for dog grooming at the moment, that can be almost 6 months right here. Obviously, dental appointments— people, the children wait 12 months for a dental appointment. But we expect to go to McDonald's and drive through. So the more valuable the service, the longer the customer will wait. But let's understand how long that should be against their expectation, not against our own expectation of how important we are. And the 8th one is that the solo wait feels longer than the group wait. I've been kind of amazed when I've been waiting in queues that it's not just social distance, it's almost like social isolation. In the UK, we have a reputation for having a fantastic sense of humour, and yet people are standing around in absolute silence. It's almost as though they're afraid to talk to each other from 2 metres apart. If that's the case and you have a facility or venue, can you somehow reassure people by either having performers? For example, if there are children waiting, if it's a business, can we have music playing? Can we go out and give people samples? Can we go out and give people conversation starters or have a greeter, someone who reassures people and asks them what they're looking for? Because the waiting on our own gets us then to start to think about what we're waiting for, why we're waiting, and whether we're making the right choice. These are free public relations ideas because public relations isn't all in the media. It's in the mind of ourselves and in the mind of our partners and our staff and our customers. So I hope these tools and these ideas may be something that you can use for your business. And in the meantime, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating. Thank you.