Learning to wait
Customer expectations are changing all the time. Except when they aren't.
Life is full of little inconveniences. Perhaps now more than ever.
The era of next day GP appointments feels like a distant dream and your chances of living within walking distance of one of the UK’s few remaining bank branches is slim. Over the past few years, industrial action has meant that travel and public services have been subject to more disruption than usual. Extreme and unpredictable weather events are going to be a perpetual inconvenience – at the very least – in the present and the future.
The long tail of the Covid-19 pandemic is helping propel some of this disruption. It’s manifesting in all sorts of places – from extended NHS waiting lists to the backlog for driving tests.
But this might not be a short term phenomenon. The foundations of our contemporary stresses are solid, and longer term then we might like to think. In short, we’re headed into a new age of inconvenience. The last decade – characterised by its cheap rides, just in time delivery and abundance of content – is under threat.
The Age of Inconvenience
At Trajectory, we’ve been monitoring this Age of Inconvenience for some time – in fact, it’s one of the macro-trends on our Now & Next trends platform. Like most impactful trends, it has several drivers. The slow and uneven wake-up from Covid has played havoc with global supply chains and meant that more people are waiting to do things that the supply isn’t there for – whether that’s pass their driving test or get a hip replacement. War in Ukraine and avian flu have also contributed to shortages over the past two years, while business attitudes to the kind of just-in-time supply chains and fine margins have changed too – that feels riskier now, so there’s more of a priority on resilience. Long term health issues and an ageing workforce are shrinking the labour market and mean many essential services are struggling to recruit staff.
What’s interesting is that consumer expectations appear to be changing in tandem. In recent decades, as rising affluence and new technology has meant that consumers expect more things more quickly. But in this new era of inconvenience, expectations are going the other way. We now expect things to take longer than just a few years ago.
Trajectory have tested the average expected wait time – in minutes or days, depending on what we’re talking about – among UK consumers. By comparing today’s data with that of a few years ago, we can see how expectations are changing.
Not all things are changing at the same speed. Delightfully (for this newsletter, at least), some things aren’t changing at all.
Changing quickly
There are no areas we tested where customer expectations are intensifying, that is, where people now expect to wait for less time than they did a few years ago. That in itself is pretty remarkable. Of those where expected wait times are increasing, we’ve drawn a (fairly arbitrary) line between those where the change is pretty large and those where it’s smaller.
There are some echoes of the core drivers of inconvenience in there. Worsening experiences of public services and public awareness of the challenges they face means that we now expect to wait four minutes longer for emergency services to respond to an incident. We expect the council to take longer to respond to a query and for parcels from big retailers to take longer to get to us. So far, so unsurprising.
But, our expectations are also lower for more everyday interactions, where it’s less obvious that the legacy of the pandemic or bottlenecks in global supply chains are causing us to wait for longer. In 2020, when we asked for the bill in a restaurant, we expected to be paying six minutes later. Today, that’s nine minutes. We expect to spend longer queuing and paying in the supermarket. We also expect to be kept waiting by our friends for longer. When we texted friends in 2020 we expected a reply about a quarter of an hour later. Today, we expect to wait nearly half an hour (glad that’s not just me).
Changing slowly
There are several areas where our expectations are lengthening, but a bit more slowly.
In most cases, these reflect the trends in the faster changing areas above, but where we either extend a bit more slack to the service provider or where expectations weren’t that high to begin with. In 2020, had we called an ambulance and a taxi at the same moment we’d have expected both to arrive at the same time. Today, the taxi just about shades it. We expect to wait a day longer for a parcel from a small retailer, but there’s consistently been a wait differential between smaller and larger online retailers.
Not changing
There are a handful of areas where our expectations are unchanging, immune to minor details like a pandemic, global supply chain disruption and service delays.
In several of these cases, I suspect that part of the reason we see no change is because we view these services as running to stand still. Delivery slots from supermarkets might be a key example here. Consumers are clearly aware of the pressures retailers face in meeting demand – and have told us they expect to spend longer when waiting in store. But as more resource is devoted to online retail fulfilment and grocery delivery is more widely used, the end result is no change to expectations. More is happening, but the end result is that expectations are unchanged. A similar thing might be happening with download time expectations where top internet speeds are increasing concurrently with increased demand and use.
What does this mean?
Unhappy customers. There’s nothing in this data about how happy we are to be waiting longer, but it’s a pretty safe bet that in most of these examples, customers are expecting to waiting longer and are pretty unhappy about it. On some things we might be sympathetic to worsening expectations – e.g. when waiting for a friend to reply. If you’re an organisation who’s customers are waiting longer, how should you respond? If you can’t reduce wait times, can you make the wait more convenient for customers, by offering them certainty over when they’ll get what they’re after?
Convenience at a cost. There will always be a market for convenience. The availability of products and services whenever we want them, wherever we want them is an inevitable response to busier lives. But increasingly, such convenience will come at a cost. Tiered pricing already exists for many on demand services. On demand platforms like Netflix introducing ad-subsidised models that are cheaper than the traditional ad-free experience are obvious responses to this.
Learning to wait. If there’s an upside to longer waiting times it’s that it slows the pace of life (albeit in sometimes inconvenient ways). Earlier this year we wrote extensively about Time Millionaires – a group who came out of the pandemic wanting to do less, both in terms of work and leisure. To have a slower life, with less rush and less fuss.
Some things don’t change. The perennial implication (for this newsletter). Lots of things change, just as many don’t. It seems that nothing will change our expectations of takeaway delivery, download speeds or internet set ups. There’s a lesson in this (and it isn’t just about BT’s customer service) which is that when thinking about change, the things that aren’t changing are just as important as the ones that are. They’re all part of the same future.
More than this
We’ll be exploring this data and more in our next free webinar, held on Thursday 29th August at 0900. Our topic is Distraction – how we’re integrating technology into our busy lives and what it means for the way we relate to wider society. Register here.
If you can’t make it, all the content from the webinar will be on the Now & Next platform alongside the Trajectory Macro Trends (including the Age of Inconvenience), all our trends briefings and reports and the Optimism Index. If you’d like to find out more about becoming a Now & Next member, click here.
Finally, if you want more on customer expectations, customer experience and what not to do, you should definitely subscribe to John Sills’ excellent CX Stories substack.
This is fascinating, going to be quoting this often. It seems many of the areas people expect to wait longer now are those that involve more of a human connection. But then, I would say that.