“Better 3 hours too soon than a minute too late” – William Shakespeare.
In many cultures being late is regarded as very impolite. That’s the reason why you usually invest in being punctual. Both in your private life as well as in business. For now we’ll assume that you’re doing just fine in your private life. Because of that assumption and because this is a business blog, we’ll look at the whole issue solely from business side of things. Timing of delivery is a question which is of importance for every business. No matter if you have an internal customer like another business unit or an external customer. And to give things an interesting twist, we’ll change the perspective a little. We do not ask how bad delivering too late is. Instead we ask: How good is delivering too early?
But let’s put this in a little more scientific context. We ask if customer satisfaction increases when goods/services are delivered sooner than expected. At first glimpse this seems to be a very stupid question. You might want to instinctively answer: of course! But the world out there is often a very surprising one and the obvious answer is not always the right one….
Customer satisfaction is one of the most important metrics you measure in your business, no matter how big your company is, what kind of services or products you sell or what kind of customers you have. There are many possibilities and best practices out there how to measure and also maximize customer satisfaction. But all of them (or at least the good ones) follow one important rule: you always want to maximize customer satisfaction in the most efficient way. Your resources are limited and that means there are limits to what you can and want to do. This fact brings us back to the initial question. Do you want to invest resources to deliver sooner than expected?
Let’s look at an example. Assume you have an important customer named Joe Demanding. Due to some reasons you couldn’t deliver on time on your last transaction and Mr. Joe Demanding was really upset about that. However you got another chance and this time you certainly want to deliver on time. Fortunately things are going well. One day you even receive a status report mentioning that assigning just a little more resources, you might very well be able to deliver ahead of the promised date. That’s great! You smile, relax and, while leaning back in your chair. write an email: go ahead, approved. Great decision! Isn’t it?
As you might have guessed already the answer is no. Delivering sooner than your customer expects is not increasing customer satisfaction. It’s just a waste of resources. Why is that? The human mind is a lazy one. It doesn’t want to think if it does not absolutely have to. That’s the reason why in most cases you simply trust somebody when he says he’ll deliver at a certain date. You simply don’t expect a delivery arriving too late. Even if you could know better. Imagine you’re ordering a Christmas present at an online shop on December 22. There has been a lot of snow in the past week and much more is announced to come. The website tells you: delivery on December 23. Do you really doubt that? Or do you just think: ok if they say they can do it….
If you deliver something too late you’re forcing the customer to think. He will have to start asking himself questions: Can my business partner be trusted? He has already delivered too late. Maybe the product is not only too late but also lacking in quality? You are forcing the customer to negative thinking and that is putting a burden on your customer you certainly want to avoid. On the other hand if you deliver too early that simply means that you stick to your word. That’s just what the customer expected from you anyhow. In the worst case it’s even a nuisance. The customer has not planned for an early delivery and having to think about that is actually a burden too. Imagine a customer preordering a newly released book. The delivery is expected in the first week of October. That’s just fine, as the customer is on a business trip the week before. Now he gets an email that the book was delivered early while he is still on his business trip. Almost certainly this will do anything but increase customer satisfaction.
This leads to the conclusion: delivering too early is not only not increasing customer satisfaction, but it might even lead to decreased customer satisfaction. Interesting, you might say, but how can I use this in my daily business? In principle this finding leads to the following three basic rules:
1. Delivering too late is not good. You seriously want to avoid that!
2. However on the other hand, also never try to deliver too early. It’s even better to delay delivery till the agreed time.
3. And the most important point: Delivering on time is expected by the customer and not creating positive reactions by itself. That’s why (timely) delivery is certainly a point of contact you should use. Don’t just bill the customer. Take this opportunity to make your customer aware of the fantastic work you did and let him know, that you are the reliable partner he seeks!
Aside from those basic rules this discovery leads us to another question: if exceeding customer expectations in delivery time is not doing any good, is exceeding customer expectations in other aspects doing any good? There are certainly many teams which “strive to constantly improve and exceed customer expectations in every way!” That’s certainly a nice thing to say to your team to motivate them. But does exceeding customer expectations – let’s say in quality – really do you as a business any good? Good question, but that’s something we’ll answer another time. Stay tuned….
In this article we tried to look at a known problem (delivering too is bad!) from a different perspective (is delivering too early better?). And we’ll end this article changing the perspective again. Why? Because innovation is one of our main driving forces and changing perspective is what innovation is all about. Let’s consider the following question:
Are there situations in which deliberately delivering late has a positive effect on customer satisfaction? Let us know what you think!
Take care!
Business Psychology 