(Featured image: cottonbro studio/pexels)
Economic transactions like purchases are often treated as exchanges: you pay someone money and get goods or services in return. But is the only thing that matters that the benefit outweighs the cost – that you get value for money?
I drive an old car. That is to say, for the last four weeks, I didn’t drive anything at all: the car had developed a fault, and was off the road during that time. At the end of that period, the fault was identified and repaired, and my car was mobile again. Yes, it had taken a long time, and the repair was pricey, but I got what I needed in the end. All’s well that ends well?
A journey through unnecessary uncertainty
Not quite. If, when the car was towed into the dealership, I had been told that the whole process would take nearly a month, I might have huffed and puffed and rolled my eyes, but I would have had something that had been all too scarce for most of those four weeks: information. This is an underestimated aspect of interaction – commercial or other. Information allows us to make decisions and choices – even if it is not absolutely uncertain. It has instrumental value. In addition, offering information is an indirect signal of care: it takes effort to acquire and to communicate it, and the willingness to make that effort tells the recipient that they are being valued.
Being left in the dark, in contrast, leaves one with the sense of not mattering much, and finding it hard to make decisions. Here, there was a lot of being left in the dark: the four weeks immobility did not happen in one go, but in several successive chunks, each one accentuating the agony.
It started with some good facts, though. The car was taken to the garage on a Saturday (let’s call that Day 0), and by the end of Day 2 – the Monday evening – I had received a call confirming the fault had been diagnosed: a defective low-pressure fuel pump. This is a part that rarely breaks, and it had to be ordered, with a delivery delay of 3-4 days. Once the part was in, the car could be brought into the workshop and fixed.
It is important to note that these facts were not remotely incompatible with a duration of four weeks to fix the car, but still, that did not quite occur to me. We don’t reason with raw facts, but we convert them first into meaning – we answer the so what? question. We do that by interpreting them into possible conclusions (about present situations) or predictions (of future situations). But we rarely do this in a comprehensive manner, considering all possibilities. Moreover, to do so, we add some preconceptions and assumptions (and often a good dollop of wishful thinking!), and end up with what we believe is the right, the most plausible, the most likely meaning. And we reason based on that meaning to make decisions.
To me, the facts meant that the part might (and, with added wishful thinking, would) be delivered by Day 5 or 6, and that the car would then immediately be rolled into the workshop and fixed. My expectation wasthat the car would be thus fixed by the weekend or, latest, a few days after (Day 9 or 10).
People abhor uncertainty, and so, eager to get some form of uncertainty-reducing confirmation, I tried to get in touch with the service department several times on Days 6 and 7 to find out whether the part had been delivered, but my calls were never returned. Without new information to update my expectation, other than receiving no information, I felt very much left in the lurch. No news was definitely not good news to me.
The next Monday (Day 9), the service manager eventually called me with “good news”: the part had been delivered, and they would start work on my car “at the end of the week or next week”. New information! Ok, it was a week later than I originally had assumed, but now I could surely expect the car to be ready by Day 13, or at the latest early in week 3 (Day 16), right? As the end of week 2 approached, no updates were forthcoming, and my attempts to find out what the status was were once again left unanswered. By the middle of week 3 (Day 18), my mood had changed to dull resignation. I realized that I had not been the only person subject to wishful thinking. My wishful inferences had, in fact, been built on the service manager’s own wishful thinking.
Insights from the waiting game
The saga eventually came to a conclusion. I received a call on the morning of Day 24 with the joyful news that my car was in the workshop. Wishful thinking played its last trump card: surely, I would now be able to collect the car in the evening, at long last? Yet once more, no update came. Wishful thinking folded and pessimism took its place. The mechanics had probably found another fault, that would turn out too expensive to fix. I could not even muster the energy to make another call to the garage to get confirmation of this doom scenario. Then, late in the afternoon of Day 25, the call came: everything was fine and I could pick up my car the next morning… after 26 days.
What can be learned from this extended event? One thing is that managing uncertainty is tricky. We need to navigate between what we would like to happen, what is likely to happen, what might happen, and what we fear might happen. Emotions – both the optimism of wishful thinking and the pessimism of the doom scenarios – are a poor pilot to avoid trouble. The only role we should allow them to play is to define what is the best-case, and the worst-case scenario.
Faced with uncertainty, we fill in the blanks with whatever we can find – assumptions and preconceptions, some informed by facts, others more instances of speculation and conjecture. We do well to try to be more conscious of how we construct meaning from scarce facts, and to keep emotions out of this process. This will help us avoid jumping to conclusions, and shape a more accurate picture of the different scenarios and their relative likelihood (what Annie Duke calls Thinking in Bets). Perhaps even more importantly, it will help us avoid the emotional anguish of repeated cycles of building up hope and soon seeing it quashed.
For anyone dealing with customers, the lessons are, if anything, even clearer. There are three. One is that information matters more than certainty. Even if you are uncertain about what might happen, or when, you can offer information – information that allows customers to make choices, rather than leaving them to their own speculation. Use your judgement, your best- and worst-case estimates, and indicate what is likely and what is possible. Two: don’t give information that is based on wishful thinking. Just be straight. And three: be responsive. A quick call back, an SMS or email signals to the customer that you care about them. Failing to respond to their calls also sends a signal the customer: they’re not important enough to deserve being kept informed. You have direct influence on your customers’ ability to make good decisions, and on their mood. That contributes to their satisfaction well beyond offering them value for money.
Koenfucius 