Kim Gaskill argues that delivery services disrespect customers' time with vague appointment windows like "sometime between 8am and 5pm," while doctors schedule appointments to the hour. She calls for companies to treat people's time with the same respect that medical offices do.
It's a new day. I'm Kim Gaskill and this is the Daily Spark. What do you think about delivery guys that set an appointment with you and they give you a 3 or 4 hour window of time that they're gonna deliver it? Now they're only doing like a 1 or 2 minute drop-off. It's not like they're coming here— even a repairman might be here for an hour or two and might get held up at another appointment. But when they're just delivering a package and they can't be any more accurate than that, that's a little bit disrespectful of my time. When I make appointments at the doctor, they want me there 10 or 15 minutes early to make sure all of my paperwork and check-in stuff is done so that when my appointment time rolls around, I'm ready. I'm ready to get in there. Everything's done ahead of time. They don't like it when you're late for the appointment because they stay on a pretty tight schedule. They actually overschedule most of them, hoping for some cancellations or planning for some cancellations. So when there aren't any, you get backed up and it could be an hour or two that you're waiting. Because their schedule got all jammed up. But for the most part, I think that it is disrespectful for people to not keep their appointments or to give these large windows of time that they say they'll be there. That's telling me you disrespect my time, that you're, you're, what you're doing is more important than what I'm doing. Not many people, especially entrepreneurs and people in business, that are on a very busy schedule anyway and trying to jam everything in, not many people can just take 4 or 5 hours to sit around all day. We had plans today. All of us had appointments scheduled. And, uh, when they messaged and said they were going to have this delivery that had to be signed for between these 10 and 1 hours, now that changes the entire day. That changes the dynamic of what we already had planned for the day. Because someone has to stay here for that 3-hour window, hoping that they actually come in that 3-hour window and give up a large block of our time for a 5-minute encounter, basically just to drop off a package. I think everybody should respect each other's time a little better than they do. I think companies could do a better job of scheduling their deliveries and equipment and service calls so that it doesn't inconvenience the customer as much. And I hope you're trying not to inconvenience your customers as well, because that is a one-way street and it shouldn't be. Join me again tomorrow for another Daily Spark.
