With all of our time being very limited, it’s hard to consider trying new things this year. In order to have room on our plate for investigating, planning and testing new things, we’d have to make room on it first.
One of the largest time consumers in life is decision-making. Especially when you have to consult others. And, if your employee must make a customer wait while they consult with their manager, you’re not only wasting company time, but the time of your customer too!
Case in point…during the holidays we were shopping for raisins. The store we visited had 2kg bags on sale at $3.99. Unfortunately, all the 2kg bags were gone when we got there. The missus opted to grab 2 – 1kg bags and ask the cashier if we could get the same price (the cost of 2 single kg bags was about a dollar more than the 2kg bag). The cashier had to call for a manager and we (and the rest of the customers behind us in line) waited roughly 10 minutes for the decision to be made to give us the discount. My point is, the time taken for this decision took 10 minutes of company time, 10 minutes of our time PLUS 10 minutes of each of the customers behind us. For a dollar.
Tim Ferriss, in his book The 4-Hour Work Week, describes a situation at his own business where he found that he was receiving more than 200 customer service related emails per day. That’s a lot of time to read, decide and relate the answer before the customer is taken care of. What did Tim do? He sent out an email stating (I’m paraphrasing here) if the problem takes less than $100 dollars to fix, use your judgement and focus on making the customer happy. DONE! He continues stating that 90% of the issues were fixed with less than $20 invested.
What does this single decision do for you?
It’ll save you a lot of time answering questions, freeing that time for other ventures or to focus more on your other tasks.
What does it do for your employees?
Empowerment is a powerful thing. Remember when your parents allowed you to cross the street for the first time? Stay home alone? How did that make you feel? That doesn’t change with age. Being given the trust and power to make decisions on your own makes one feel good about themselves.
Have you ever visibly noticed that someone is feeling good about themselves?
Don’t you want those people helping your customers?
Couldn’t you use a little extra time on your hands?
So, what’s your company going to do with its extra time this year?