Yesterday I wrote about the anxiety of waiting in lines, and how it impacts the customer experience. Today I’m going to continue that thought, looking at three key points that David Maister wrote that I think resonate in our industry. I see them as situations that every one of our customers is challenged with.

1. Occupied Time Feels Shorter Than Unoccupied Time

In what is perhaps a sad commentary on my household, a day without a television is a minor inconvenience. Two days is a concern. Three days? Three days seems like an eternity. If you take away everything else we might use to fill our time, then three hours would quickly feel like three days.

2. People Want To Get Started

Home owners lacking transparency into what is going on may spend the entire process feeling like nothing has happened. In the absence of available information, they resort to the only thing they know; phone calls. They need to know what’s going on. They need to know that things have started. These calls eat up hours of time from both adjusters and contractors, and this time can never be replaced.

3. Anxiety Makes The Wait Seem Longer

I can’t think of many things that would make me more anxious than handing over all of my possessions to a stranger’s company, and then standing around and waiting for them to come back to me. We’ve all experienced the frustration of sitting in a doctor’s office or an emergency room, and we know that the more anxious we are about when things will be resolved, the longer that wait feels. Our customers are in the middle of (hopefully) the most traumatic experience of their lives. How long does a day feel to them? A week? And with each passing day their anxiety compounds.

So recognizing that anxiety impacts our business, we must now ask how we can combat it. How can we, as business operators, reduce customer anxiety? Tomorrow we’ll wrap up this topic by considering how we can use transparency to our advantage.

Continued in Part 3…