Customer Experience Optimization

Let's talk about the sort of perception of time, and what the research shows us is that perception of experience time is largely different by attention. Time bothers us when we pay attention to it, and so the name of the game is to give people distractions. It makes time feel like it went by quickly.

So, give your customers something to do while waiting.

Compare an elevator ride, some companies use music but usually they use irritating music, but what if you play them the news or some kind of interesting podcasts, and then it almost becomes something, it's distracting and fun to be waiting.

The other thing to do to manage time is give people a sense of progress.

Okay the one thing we really don't like is not knowing, right? Not knowing when this thing is going to end. Actually, airlines used to be bad at this. You had a boarding time but it was never kind of clear exactly when it was.

And now they've shifted to telling you exactly when the boarding time is, and they even have a countdown telling you, boarding is going to commence in X amount of minutes.

The exact same amount of time where you know kind of you have a sense of progress versus you don't have a sense of progress, feels completely different.

And so, Disney recognizes that it has people waiting in lines for a ton of time. And so what they do is they have these kind of milepost where they say, this is how much time you have left to go, to give you a sense of what's happening.

Because we really don't like, because we don't like to have an experience where we don't have control.

So you want to give people a sense of control. What matters is not actual control, but it's your sense of perceived control. Do I feel like I'm controlling the time, that's passing? Or is this something else controlling it and I have no control over.

Most of the time, customers are engaging in these experiences and they're not cynical. When We go to Disney, We know they're messing with our mind with all the information about the waiting time, but it still works.

You can have an objective time in which something happened that's very different than the subjective time, in which something happened. And so the question is, how do you manage that subjective sense of elapsed time?

Understand How Consumers "Experience" and Rewire Your Approach To Product Strategy.