Satisfying Your Customers Need for Speed Today

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(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jay Baer. He is a customer experience and digital marketing pioneer, expert, advisor, researcher and analyst. He’s written sixth bestselling books. Couple you’ve probably heard me talk about here on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. He’s also got a great popular twice monthly newsletter. Go get it. It’s called The Bear Facts, and you can find it@thebearfax.com. We’re gonna talk about a research report that he just participated in compiling on consumer patients and business responsive. I have no patience, so I can’t imagine what this is gonna be about. But it’s called Time to Win 2022 Consumer Price Patient Studies. So Jay, welcome back to the

Jay Baer (01:43): Show. Thanks so much, John. Great to be here as always.

John Jantsch (01:46): So you’ve really, you know, it used to just be enough to be a mark, an author, speaker, and consultant. You’re like a pioneer and expert research or an analyst. I mean, I’m,

Jay Baer (01:55): My mom’s an English teacher, so I just said, gimme a list of adjectives or Simi, and I work with that.

John Jantsch (02:01): All right, so, So time to win research study, Just what was the methodology? What were you trying to compile?

Jay Baer (02:06): Yeah, so I’ve been really interested in speed for a long time, as I know you have as well. In all of my books, there is at least one section about speed and how speed is a competitive differentiator in business. This is the deepest dive I’ve ever done though. I said, I’m gonna do a whole research study on speed, responsiveness, and consumer patients. The thesis here was the pandemic has changed our relationship with time. That when you take a bunch of things that used to be offline and you move ’em online, naturally online, you think things should happen faster. And five minutes of waiting online feels like an eternity offline. You can probably get around it. And so the thesis was that we think differently about time now because of the pandemic and the research bore that out. I partnered with Stats Social, talked to 2000 American customers, ages 18 to 65, normalized to the census. It’s good research. You know, it’s plus or minus, it’s two and half percent. You know, this isn’t a 200 person, you know, research, this is a real deal.

John Jantsch (03:00): So, you know, I’m, we all have anecdotal stories, right? If we called three contractors and the only the one that called us back , or the one that called us back first, it’s the ask price. It’s like, you know, if you show up, you got the job. But is, I mean, so essentially, I’m guessing the major hypothesis here is that, that the faster you can respond, the more you’re gonna get.

Jay Baer (03:20): Yes. And that is true. 53% of consumers have hired a company that responded first, even if they were not the least expensive. So, so that anecdote rings mathematically true in this research. So clearly there is a business imperative to be first in a competitive scenario, but there’s also a bunch of other economic consequences of being faster and slower than customers expect or anticipate. So we documented all of those in the research. So there’s big attitudinal shifts amongst consumers. There’s big, you know, likelihood of spending money or not spending money in loyalty as well. So all the things that businesses care about, making sales, making repeat sales, average order size, consumer psychology, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Each and every one of those is impacted by a business being faster or slower than customers anticipate.

John Jantsch (04:11): So, you know, I call businesses today and I find myself, Oh gosh, they didn’t answer the phone. God love ’em. But you know who nobody can get help anymore. I’ll give ’em a pass. I think you’re suggesting that I’m an outlier.

Jay Baer (04:23): Mathematically, you are an outlier, and this is one of the most interesting statistics in this time to win research study. The time to win.com is that 83% of consumers expect businesses to be as fast or faster than they were before the pandemic. So this notion that, oh, labor shortages, supply chain force, pelan, fire, you know, flood tsunami, it’s okay, we understand they don’t care anymore. Like it’s been a couple years and I think consumers are like, you know what, like you’ve had two years to sort it out and we feel it for you, but I still want it right now. Sorry.

John Jantsch (05:01): So I spend a lot of time, you know, really talking about this idea with lead generation. So, you know, somebody goes out there and they click on something or they click on that little chat bubble. Yep. And they want to, you know, they wanna get ahold of somebody very quickly. But you specifically are focusing as much on customer experience maybe after somebody’s a customer as well. I mean, how do you see the differences in those two elements?

Jay Baer (05:23): Yeah, we actually broke it down by customer journey scenario. Yeah. So in the research we say, Okay, how much is speed and responsiveness important to you? When you’re finding out about a product, you’re sort of in the research phase. How much is it important to you when you’re getting an appointment? How much is it important when you’re paying for something? How much is it important when you need help, have a question, et cetera. And so across, I think we looked at six or seven different nodes in the customer journey. It’s crazy. Speed is important in all of them, right? There is no scenario under which speed is not important. And in fact, two thirds or more of customers say that speed and responsiveness is important or very important in every single step of the customer journey. Two thirds of customers. Now, there are scenarios when it’s even more important.

(06:11): So if you need help, like something is broken and you’re like, I need you business company person, you know, contractor to fix this leak of in my plumbing, then it’s even more, you know, important. Then it’s upwards of 83%. But it is actually really interesting, John, I thought that we would see a greater difference that people would say, Look, when I’m just in research, I’m just like, Right ITing the tires. Like what sweater do I wanna buy? It’s not that important for it to be fast. Nope. Super important then too. It’s important all the way across the line. And I think part of that is just the world we live in now, and the fact that our expectations around speed and responsiveness have just changed a lot. I mean, five years ago what was, you know, fast then is slow today.

John Jantsch (06:55): Yeah. And I really get that about in the presale environment because I mean, we may not go to ourselves and say, I’m gonna try out this company and see how fast. Right. But we are trying them out. Right? Absolutely. I mean that’s, it’s like if that’s the experience when I haven’t bought anything, you know, that’s what I can expect it to be after I do. Right. Or worse , maybe after I do for a lot of small business owners. I mean, Well, let me ask a set up question to this first. Is there a number, I know it depends, but like, is 15 minutes , like the new threshold, you better respond within that amount of time? Yeah,

Jay Baer (07:25): It’s a great question. It actually depends, as you might suspect on channel, because consumers have a different expectation for response time based on what they’re using to interact with you. So, so we actually asked about website chat versus phone versus text message versus social media, et cetera. And generally speaking, people expect a reply within four hours for everything except for email contact us form, and an online review. Everything else is within four hours, so in some cases faster. But if you can say, Hey, we’ll get back to you within four hours across the board, unless it’s sort of a contact us form. And even then it was kind of surprising we asked about this, you know, the contact us form is usually like the redheaded stepchild of contact mechanisms, right? Like every business has one, but people figure, well, if they’re using that, they can’t be that important, right? Uh, turns out 67% of customers expect businesses to reply to a contact us forum within 24 hours. And that doesn’t happen very often.

John Jantsch (08:30): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have clients that 50% of their leads come in through that vehicle

Jay Baer (08:35): Still. Yeah. But, and they probably, you know, respond, responding two or three days and it’s like, what if you could shave that down for like six hours?

John Jantsch (08:43): No, Jay, they’re clients of mine. I mean, we have an automatic response that goes out immediately. It sends them to tax.

Jay Baer (08:48): Oh, clients of yours. Yeah. You gotta figure

John Jantsch (08:50): It out. It does. There seem to be a correlation between the gravity of the purchase. So in other words, if I’m buying a a $29 thing, maybe there’s one need for speed as opposed to this is going to be a long term significant, you know, months over months investment.

Jay Baer (09:04): Great question on the purchase, on the research and purchase side. No, actually, because whatever you need at that time, whether it’s socks or a car, you

John Jantsch (09:11): Need that. That’s important.

Jay Baer (09:12): Yeah. You need that thing right now. That’s why you’re doing this at all. Now, there’s definitely a little difference in, in urgency if your car is broken versus your sock has a hole in it that, you know, there’s a, there’s an implication difference there. But ultimately, if you are in the mode to go get a thing or you need help, you want that help. Now, nobody ever says, You know what? I’ve been thinking it’d be fine if you guys did that more slowly. Nobody ever says that.

John Jantsch (09:38): Right? Except to the brain surgeon

Jay Baer (09:43): , right? Yes. And it’s funny you say that. I’m actually, I’m writing a speech about this research, about the research. It’s one of the things I talk about. It’s like the lesson in this research is not that speed is inherently better. It mostly is, but there are circumstances when you can be too fast. Right? Nobody wants the fastest tattoo artist in town, you know, and we’ve all experienced, you go to like a Mexican food restaurant in particular, and you order enchiladas and the enchiladas come back in like 90 seconds. Or like, how is there like an inch aada machine? Like there’s no way this can be a good enchilada. So there’s a point at which

John Jantsch (10:16): I always actually assume some, I always just assumed somebody else sent those back.

Jay Baer (10:20): Right, exactly. I didn’t want these. Give ’em to John. Yeah. So you can be too fast. But I don’t wanna belabor that point because for most businesses and most scenarios, Yeah. You know, we’ve all heard that the old saw good, fast, cheap. Pick any two, right? When I will tell you, having done this research is fast, should be one of ’em. And then you decide whether you want to be fast and good or fast and cheap, but it should always be fast.

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(11:54): All right. So I know that you did some ranking by demographics mm-hmm. Scroll back to top