The Experience Strategy Podcast: Time Well Spent

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In today’s episode, we focus on a foundational strategic principle Experience Strategists call “time well spent.” Consumers have a choice about where to spend their time and money and those decisions are usually driven by how much value they get from an experience. Tune in to hear fresh ways for understanding the value of people’s time spent with your business, and how to design your service and products to create experiences that customers want to buy.

Introduction: [00:00:00] This is the Experience Strategy Podcast where we look at the best and the worst customer experiences and ask what were they thinking? And now, here are your hosts experience nerds, Dave Norton and Aransas Savas.

Aransas Savas: Welcome to the Experience Strategy Podcast. I'm Aransas Savas.

Dave Norton: And I'm Dave Norton.

Aransas Savas: Today's episode focuses on a foundational, strategic principle of experience strategy. Time well spent. Most companies, frankly, are at far greater risk for failure than they even know. Because they don't know whether or not people consider their experience to be time well spent. I personally really love talking about this because as someone who has spent a lot of my career being responsible for defining and delivering on the value and impact of the products and experiences I create, I've constantly been challenged to [00:01:00] demonstrate that the experiences and products make a difference on the business. And honestly, it wasn't until I was introduced to the idea of time well spent that I felt like I had a metric that consistently measured this in a meaningful way.

I think we all understand that time well spent is valuable to people. I don't think everyone understands why it would be the first principle of experience strategy. And Dave, you've been on the cutting edge of this thinking, so if you can just start out by telling us why it's so important that we pay attention to time well spent.

Dave Norton: It's interesting we don't think about this too much, but one of the most important paradigm shifts that experience strategists are helping companies to understand is the value of people's times, right?

And that we can design for time.[00:02:00] Whole business models are built around the idea of selling perishables or baked goods or advertising. We're building houses or creating SAS software, and now we've got like ntfs which are like creating stocks for your Mona Lisa. We've got all kinds of things. We produce mortgages and chocolate and garbage services and babysitting services. Everybody thinks that these are the things that really everyone is going to love them for, and that's true. But while there's an infinite number of things out there for them to consume and use, the consumer has of course, a finite amount of time to enjoy those things. And an infinate number of things to consume and a finite amount of time, leads to a real problem. It's a good challenge.

Aransas Savas: It's such a good point. As a consumer, I have to choose [00:03:00] where to spend my precious time and my money, so I've gotta prioritize somehow. Like I don't care necessarily if the product is differentiated or if there's amazing advertising behind it.

Yeah. That may make it sexier and that may make it higher in my consideration set. I care if the solution is innovative, but really you're right, it is that precious's finite resource of my time that drives my decision making at the end of the day. And so, fundamental to this concept is that people are making their decisions based on three key questions, number one, does it feel like time well saved? Number two, does it feel like time well spent? And number three, does it feel like time well invested? So where do those categories [00:04:00] come from, Dave?

Dave Norton: So back in 2002, Joe Pine, the author of the Experience Economy, and I were working a lot together on all kinds of different problems. And I came up with the notion of time well spent and suggested it to him and we began to use this idea as a foundational principle for experiences.

And then a few years later, Joe realized that you could tie time well saved to services, you could tie time well spent to experiences and you could tie time well invested to transformation. So it was an evolving type of a thing that we were working on in the early days of experience strategy. Of all the three, I think time spent is the most important for experience strategy and for companies who really want to engage their customers. That's where you need to start, I really think.

Aransas Savas: I agree. I agree. [00:05:00] So let's spend some time talking about how companies can actually do this. It just makes sense, right? ? Again, it is a finite resource, but I think if companies are looking to do this, the first thing they need to do is talk to their customers and define what time well spent looks like for your customers.

But talking to them and asking them, how do you wanna spend time with us. What is good or great or meaningful in terms of time well spent with us? And then, and I love that you've broken this down into the model. It's what is the value of time and what is the value of well spent? There's some great questions too that I think companies can use to start to understand this.

They can ask things like, I don't know, does anyone really want to spend time with our people, our apps and our [00:06:00] stores. Do they want to interact with our call center or our products? And if so, what?

Dave Norton: No, most of the time no right.

Aransas Savas: When it comes to call centers, let's be honest. But there are some delightful examples, right? Like I would call Lands End any day because I am better for having talked to their call center reps. I've made a better, more informed decision. Although I know plenty of people who under no circumstance ever want to engage with a human, so that's a whole other conversation. But that to me brings up the fundamental right, what do we have to do as an organization to be worthy of their precious time? Especially if we look at it in comparison to all the other things that are asking for their time. Are they able to get their jobs done with us? And is what we're doing meaningful or is it just good or good enough?

I know you've been doing a lot of work around meaningful experience, so I love this idea of asking ourselves [00:07:00] what would make the time they spend with us deliver meaning? What would make it meaningful to them? And then I guess the next area really is to ask our customers, are they getting value out of the time they spend with it? Are we getting value out of the time they spend with us or our app, or our product or our service? Are our channels simply helping them spend less time with us or are they actually creating time well spent value?

Can you give us some examples, Dave of how you've seen this used to full effect?

Dave Norton: Sure, let me take you back a little ways. About 15 years ago, the big Dutch banking company, ING decided to move into the US consumer market. And at the time, online banking was really starting to take off. And a few banks were experimenting with the idea of an online only bank because [00:08:00] of the capital requirements of physical branches, they're just so high.

And so in ING steps back, takes a look at what's going on with technology, the impact that it might have on branches, and decides to enter the US market with a very novel approach. They provided these great online banking services, but they're also going to do physical locations. Only these locations. They won't be branches like we think of them. They'll actually be cafes. And here's the kicker. The call center is going to be above the cafe, so when the employee needs a break, she can literally go downstairs and answer financial questions while serving up lattes.

Aransas Savas: That's brilliant.

Dave Norton: Trying to get a little employee engagement going. Trying to change kind of the cube mindset and

Aransas Savas: I love the way that brings up, meaning for both the customer, the brand, and the employee.

Dave Norton: Exactly. And it [00:09:00] was one of those ideas that was just a really cool concept. Their idea was to try to maximize the experience for the customer and the employee, while at the same time eliminating the costly elements of branches and to really gin things up, they were going to offer the highest saving rates for deposits. They called the account an orange account, and it was like a no brainer to move your money there because of the higher rates. Which they could afford because of the lower cost of business through their cafe slash online barista strategy.

It was awesome. And I signed up right away, even though there wasn't a branch or cafe near me, because honestly, going to the branch most of the time is not time well spent. It's time wasted. Let's be honest about this. So in my mind, this is a company that is really thinking about how people want to interact, what they can do to make the experience actually [00:10:00] an experience so that when you actually went into these cafes or into these locations, you would want to be there. You would want to be a part of it.

Aransas Savas: I love that. As you're sharing this too, I'm thinking about Southwest Airlines and how much they have, whether as a strategy or as simply a brand's identity, taken this approach. They're keeping cost low through lots of smart business decisions and making themselves competitive from a cost standpoint. They're adding value at every possible touchpoint through their interactions.

And similar to this ING story, they're doing it by giving their customer service agents more autonomy and more agency to delight the customer by allowing their flight attendants and pilots to engage with their customers in a really meaningful way and saying, you know what, get out from behind your [00:11:00] desk. Get out there and connect with people and with their communities and show your whole self. In the part of doing so, because it only makes us as a brand richer when our humans that we're employing and our humans that we're serving feel connected and seen. It makes so much sense as you talk about it. Those interactions are gonna happen. The flight delays are gonna happen, but even in those rough moments, let's create connection and make those moments matter. So what happened with ING as a result of all this?

Dave Norton: They were still really new in the US market in 2008 when the world crashed, you'll remember. And so ING, the parent company sold off the company to a credit card firm you might have heard of called Capital One.

 So now we know. Capital One Banks as ING Direct became Capital One Banks. And all those [00:12:00] ads for those super cool banking locations, that's the evolved original idea. The original idea was ING direct and they've evolved it since then to make it a little bit more full service, but still feeling like time well spent. You're not gonna go into each one of those locations and have a cafe kind of experience. But you are going to go in and you're gonna get some of the best online banking services, and you're going to get some really good time used in the right way. And I think a lot of the industry is moving towards a very similar concept. So thanks ING for helping us to think about that.

Aransas Savas: I love too that story because you've shown us how this idea can go from something perhaps bespoke to translate into something that can very easily be scaled. But it was the underlying intention to create value in the time well spent or the [00:13:00] time spent with the customer that led them through all of the strategic shifts as they merged.

Dave Norton: They might have been doing that because they felt like it was differentiating. They might have been doing it to capture market share. Those are great reasons to do it. They were trying to certainly disrupt the industry, all of the things that we consider to be very strategic objectives, but it was by focusing on time well spent at a strategic level, I think, that they were able to really reimagine channel design and business model design. So kudos to them.

Starbucks did really the same thing. They came into the category. They're the classic story of managing for time well spent, you feel like going into the Starbucks store locations is an experience in and of itself. Even to this day, people enjoy going into Starbucks where a lot of retail locations, they don't really enjoy going [00:14:00] into it. And it's because Starbucks really understood time well spent.

Aransas Savas: I think about that in comparison to like a seven eleven. Which is all about efficiency. Get me in and out as fast as possible, whereas Starbucks is give me an experience and engage me with staying here and spending more time here. And they've really banked on that at Starbucks, it seems.

Dave Norton: They really have. And we can thank them for all of the offshoots, all of the other brands that are doing very similar things. I think Panera Bread, for example, owes homage to Starbucks. I think Chipolte to some degree, it's roots in Starbucks. It's become very common, but you feel very differently about your experience than you would at a seven eleven.

I think it's interesting. I don't know if, for nerds like me, a few years ago when Facebook was being hit by so much negative press about the amount of time that people were spending on their social site that [00:15:00] they came out and talked about moving from time traps to time well spent, and that was gonna be their focus. They're going to try to make you spend good time with their social platform.

Aransas Savas: That's such a great example here, Dave. I think about watching their group strategy emerge and as a user it really felt less like a time waster and a numbing action of just going into stuff that ultimately didn't really add any value and that I didn't really care about.

And with groups, I can nerd out with other sourdough bakers and learn and be inspired and connect on a much more meaningful level. And I've been super fascinated as an experience strategist and designer to watch them bet big on groups and it really does feel like the majority of their [00:16:00] strategic decisions are investing in the power of groups. Looking at their advertising, looking at where they're developing, it all points to a big strategic investment in groups. And I think it probably is to your point, it is driven by getting out of the time trap business and into the time well spent business. Cause they get it. If we're not adding meaning people will go elsewhere where they can get it.

Dave Norton: Yeah. And you think about the negative social consequences of people wasting time on things like doom scrolling and so forth. There's a real impact. We have to be careful about what we do with our customers and what we require of them. I think the opposite of example, a company that thought that they were doing time well spent, they thought they were doing experience strategy, I don't know, but they designed it from their point of view and not from the consumer's point of view would be IKEA. Also, a company that 15 years ago really came into the US market [00:17:00] and for a while there people were amazed by it.

But now, the levels of frustration are up because why? Because they force you to spend a certain amount of time going on the same journey over and over, just by the way that their store is set up. It might be part of their business model, but it's alienating meeting people and that's gonna affect their growth and it has already affected their ability to grow.

Aransas Savas: It is such a good example. I always feel like they should have a robust staff of marriage counselors waiting at the exit. Because all of that running around in circles makes me feel like a rat in a maze and it makes me hate my life. But then again I don't wanna pay their exorbitant delivery charges, so I'm not gonna order from them. So I might as well just get those services elsewhere.

Dave Norton: Yeah. And I think all companies need to be asking themselves, [00:18:00] are we creating kind of an IKEA experience for our customers. That's not time well spent. It's not time well saved

Aransas Savas: No, it's so true and I think there's an economic value to this. A good strategy around time well spent can really help organizations prioritize how to deploy their channels and their products, and create interactions that make the most out of their most precious and expensive resources, their people. And of course how the customer invests back in them.

The other thing I really like about time well spent is that it is inherently customer focused. So you know, so many of the strategies that we look at are based on a business outcome. But for time well spent, it's really just so simple. How does your customer get [00:19:00] value? How do they spend their time?

And it's easy to get that information. It's really just as simple as asking your customers. Was your time today well spent at IKEA? My answer is always, no.

When it's Yes, ask them why. Like it's simple, clear language that customers understand it. It is easy to understand and it is easy to track. It can be monitored just as easily, perhaps a lot more easily, frankly than things like net promoter scores that measure referrals. Here we're really asking questions that target the customers understanding and appreciation of our experience. Just so simple and straightforward.

Dave Norton: Yeah. And you can probe around time attributes. Like where do you feel like you are wasting time? Where do you feel like you're most excited about the time you were [00:20:00] spending? If you weren't spending time here with us, what would you be doing instead?

Aransas Savas: All I can think about now is IKEA with everything you ask.

Was I wasting time? Yes! What would I wanna be doing instead? Anything.

Dave Norton: Exactly.

Aransas Savas: It's so clear. It's so clear. The other thing I love is that you can really link the questions to how you innovate and how you engage and how you tell the story of your brand. Like, how do we help our customers get the job done better? How do we make it time well spent for them? It's such a powerful question. How do we keep them engaged with us and make it time well spent? If some channel or tool, like shopping in IKEA doesn't feel like time well spent, do we need it for IKEA? The answer is probably yes. Different strategy. . . It's an expensive real estate.

Dave Norton: Totally is. And you can personalize and group your customers based on how they perceive time well spent. So [00:21:00] you might include a question like, tell us what feels like time well spent to you, and we will customize our services to fit. Or you might say something like, we have six different cohorts who define time well spent differently.

These are our target audiences. So you can use the principle very simply as a way. For some people calling into the call center is time well spent for these types of situations, right? For most customers in these situations, it's not, so there's a lot that you can do in terms of personalization and group segmentation around the term.

Aransas Savas: We can probably use IKEA again here. For the meatball lovers, it is super simple. They can pop right in and get those meatballs right by the exit .

Dave Norton: That's exactly where I go. Honey, I'll meet you at the meatballs. I'll be right there.

Aransas Savas: But I think even for the people who really care about design, they've done some beautiful installations of their [00:22:00] designs that help people imagine more uses for their space. That's an exciting time beneficial reason to go into those stores. Or for the parents who have childcare. I doubt they still do that post covid, but for those people who are getting free babysitting out of it shifts the equation a little bit.

Dave Norton: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe we're not the target audience.

Aransas Savas: Yeah. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. Maybe married people should just avoid it. Maybe it's great for everyone else. But that I guess is the underlying truth of all of this. If we get to know our customers, if we understand what makes time spent more valuable to them it can inform the way we think about everything in our business, from the technology to the products that were delivered, to how, when, where, why we innovate, to what our [00:23:00] key performance indicators are, to how we design our process experience and everything can really be strategically informed by this idea of time.

Dave Norton: I would love to see a day when CEOs ask their direct reports to help them understand if the initiatives they're doing either detract from or improve the customers sense of the time invested in the company was worth it. Okay, I want my time spent numbers. Do people feel like they spent time with us and it was worth it? If not, what do we need to do to change this particular product or this particular channel, or this particular activity, or this particular event? What a powerful way to lead an organization going forward.

Aransas Savas: Absolutely straight from the top. Let's value the most precious resource our customers [00:24:00] give us. Imagine. So let's sum this up into some actionable takeaways, Dave, so that folks can get out there and start doing this. So I think the biggie, first and foremost is whoever you are, whatever organization you are leading, your customer's time is important. It is precious. Every single business has the opportunity to design their experience to ensure that your customer's time with you is well spent.

Number two, there are three big questions every business should be asking about their experience. Does it feel like time well saved? Does it feel like time well spent, and does it feel like time well invested? But of these time well spent is, I think, inarguably the most important of them. And so if you wanna understand that for your business, here's what you ask.

How do people wanna spend time with us? What does good mean in terms of time well spent? [00:25:00] And what is the value of time? What is the value of well spent? As you come to understand these questions, you are tapping into powerful strategic insights that you can use across literally every decision you are making as a business leader.

We hope that listening to this podcast was time well spent for you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for investing your precious time in this show. We want to learn from you, so reach out to us on social, or on our site and let us know what you want more of.

Closing: Thank you for listening to the Experience Strategy Podcast. If you're having fun nerding out with us, please subscribe, and share wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Find more episodes and continue the conversation with us @experiencestrategypodcast.com.