Valuing Customers' Time

August 23, 2010

Interview with Adrian Ott, author of the book The 24-Hour Customer: New Rules for Winning in a Time-Starved, Always-Connected Economy

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Mike Carruthers:
In the attempt to win new customers, businesses tend to focus on price, product quality, customer service, that type of thing…

Adrian Ott:
But they don’t think about the time constraints that customers have. And if you can time slice or time shift your product, sometimes you’re going to reach some people that you haven’t reached before.
 

Adrian Ott, author of the book The 24-Hour Customer... 

Netflix is a great example of that, where they took into account what customers wanted to do from a time perspective on movies on demand and look what it did to Blockbuster. You can leave your competitors in the dust.

It’s not just about saving customers' time: it’s also about offering products that fit into their schedules, as a company called Digital Chocolate did. The company is run by video game pioneer Trip Hawkins.

Trip observed that video games tend to take a lot of time and so what he did is he time sliced video games into smaller "high quality" time segments so that they could be played on a mobile phone anywhere. He ended up opening up a whole new set of customers for his business.

Adrian believes that when you understand and factor in how important time is to customers, you can grab a real competitive advantage.

Businesses need to understand and play into our ebbs and flows of our time and attention rather than fight for time and attention – I think they’re going to be a lot more effective. 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here