Chapter: It's About Time (Part One)

How what you do with customer time determines the value you create

I consider this a complete chapter, but not a finished one. That is, it’s close to chapter length (6,000 words), all the sections and key ideas may be there, but I have a list of other examples and ideas that I plan on going over and see which should also be included.

As you may recall from the Table of Contents in the Book Proposal post, I think this will be the second chapter in the book. As with the first chapter on the Progression of Economic Value, this one discusses all of the economic offerings, whereas all the rest of the chapters focus on transformations, with of course transformative experiences an integral part of the fifth and final economic offering. (I do think it could possibly fit as the last chapter, bookending the first one.)

I look forward to your feedback; the form will be at the end of Part Two, which is where you’ll see the focus on transformations in full.

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The most precious resource on the planet is the time of individual human beings.

There’s a long history of companies competing on time, such as reducing changeover and setup and cycle times to increase variety and customization; shrinking cycle times to lower costs; or lowering distribution times through more efficient warehousing, picking, packaging, and shipping. None of this is bad, and it generally enhances the economic value created. But all such initiatives focus internally, and in many cases lowering the time that a company’s processes take forces customers to spend more time themselves on buying, using, or resolving issues with the company’s offerings. (Witness how contact centers purposefully reduce the time service representatives spend on the phone by compelling customers to spend more time in “phone tree hell”.)

That’s not the way to treat such a supremely valuable resource, a resource on which customers themselves increasingly put greater and greater value as we shifted into the Experience Economy. Executives must instead embrace customer centricity, focus externally, and compete for customers’ time. After all, we have only a limited time on this earth to experience all we’d like to experience, and only 24 hours a day, seven days a week to do so. And once it’s gone, it can’t ever be recovered.  

What does anyone do with a precious resource? You first conserve it as much as possible, and then you use it wisely. That is what you must now do with your customers’ time. You must eliminate activities that waste customers’ time; save their time when they desire it; offer experiences where customer value the time they spend; and even – especially given the further shift into the emerging Transformation Economy – guide customers in investing their time.

No one should inflict their customers with time wasted, while focusing on time well saved merely yields great service. This may forestall the forces of commoditization for a while, but recognize that people – whether consumers or people within business customers – want both goods and services to be commoditized, in order to spend their hard-earned money and their harder-earned time on the experiences & transformation they value much, much more highly, with experiences offering time well spent and transformations time well invested.[i]

Every offering in the world can be placed on one or more levels of this Time Progression. It simply describes the impact on customer time of how companies interact with those who buy from them, while prescribing how businesses can improve their processes and offerings in ways that both conserve and use more wisely that most precious resource on the planet, customer time.

And since time-well-invested transformations are guided atop time-well-spent experiences, which are staged atop time-well-saved services & goods, it’s important to understand and act on each level in this Time Progression in order to achieve the highest level.