Time To Revelation
"Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend," said the ancient philosopher Theophrastus1. "Time is money" is our more capitalist modern equivalent. The idea of minimizing time spent on support in order to maximize profit from a sale underpins much of our society's customer service philosophy.
After customer satisfaction, time to resolution might be the most commonly measured customer service metric. Handling customer questions more quickly is considered an unequivocally good goal. Who would complain about faster service? Well…we'll get to that.
Physics tells us you can slow down time for yourself, if you move fast enough. Getting your whole support department moving at a relative speed which would allow them to measurably improve your time to resolution could be difficult. There are only so many billionaire rockets to rent, for a start.
Some animals experience time very differently than we do, but you try training a salamander to handle complex billing enquiries without their moist skin constantly breaking the company laptops. It's hard.
So we are left with tweaking processes, choosing tools, improving training. Hiring skilled people. All valuable activities to be sure. But in the relentless pursuit of faster, we can sometimes forget to look for better. Or smarter.
Answering 30% of incoming questions in under 10 minutes is impressive. Not answering them because you fixed the problem that was generating them is more impressive but less obvious.
Taking an extra 10 minutes to understand why a customer is asking for a feature, recording it, passing it on to the right people - that investment in a slower initial response time may generate hundreds or thousands of dollars in value for customers, down the line.
Giving people time out-of-queue to write knowledge base articles might double your first response time for the day, but reduce incoming questions for years.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.2
1. As quoted in "Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. V, sec. 40". Though it does not appear in any of Theophrastus's extant writings, so it may be a later invention.
2. As said by Ford Prefect to Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." This one I confirmed in my own copy.
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