Hyphenated-Americans, Swiss Trains and Service Metrics

By Merit Smith
Vice President
Director, Health Care Practice

I don’t like the idea of hyphenated-Americans. But the fact is my wife is a second generation Swiss-American. (I didn’t even know there were such people until I met her family.) And I never understood how deep and subtle their Swissness was until we traveled with her parents to Switzerland to visit their home villages.

One of the important things I learned about the Swiss is that they have a different concept of time than North Americans. I guess we should expect some time weirdness from the people that invent clocks and watches. But in Switzerland, “time” is different than it is in America.

I first realized this as we took the morning train from Zurich to Interlaken. The train was scheduled to leave at 8:03. I was standing in the train, arranging baggage, and looked out the window at the clock on the train platform. Just as the hand hit 8:03, the train began to move. I wondered, “Wow. How did they do that?”

Over the next several weeks, I realized that there wasn’t any special trick with the clock and the train. It was just the Swiss concept of time. That concept seems to work something like this:

Time is important. We accurately measure time. Accurate measurement of time let’s us plan when things will happen. Everyone knows what time it is. Things happen when they are scheduled. This is not special. This is as it should be. This is Swiss time.

Being an American traveler, I have a different concept of time and transportation. When I think of my typical travel experience with American, United or Delta, I realize that the airline and I may be in the same time zone, but we seem to be using different concepts of time. They measure it in funny ways. They conceal it. Their idea of time is just about the opposite of what my idea of time is. They focus on on-time departure, while I hope for on-time arrival.

To look good on this service measure, they play tricks. On-time departure can often mean push the plane back from the gate on time, sit in the plane at the gate for a while, then actually take off and get to the destination, but late. The airline thinks they did it right, and their numbers reflect that they did. I know they didn’t, and my experience reflects that I’m right.

We frequently work with health care organizations that have substantial service, cost and quality problems. In nearly every one of these engagements, confusion about time is a major part of the problem. Frequently, the first step in moving forward is to help our client understand that they and their clients may have different concepts of time. And that if they align themselves to the client’s concept of time they have made a huge step towards improving service.

This sounds simple, almost trivial. “Of course we consider time from the customer’s standpoint.” But the reality is that most of our measurements and statistics about time are from a producer’s points of view, not the consumer’s.

Think about time measurement in a call center. Because call centers manage “production” by tracking speed to answer, average talk time and after-call work, it is hard for them to understand that the caller has a different experience with the call. The caller experiences “wait” and “talk.” The customer service representative thinks: “It was a two and a half minute call. Good call, good service.” The caller knows the call took almost five minutes. “That wasn’t good service. In fact, why did I have to call them in the first place?”

It’s the same event, but with two different time experiences. The call center manager can prove that they are providing good service, but their customers know that they are not receiving good service.

The problem of different time experiences with service transactions or interactions isn’t limited to call centers. Look at the metrics and measures your service organization uses to monitor and manage service. Do they reflect the customer’s experience of time?

“Ninety-five percent of calls answered in 30 seconds.” Why do I always get in the other five percent? “Ninety-eight percent of clean claims paid in 30 days.” It was clean when I sent it in. Does that 30 days start when I sent it and end when I get it back? Is it calendar days or work days?

Here is the hard fact of service management. I can’t deliver high quality service if I measure my experience rather than my customer’s experience. I just have to understand that it is the customer’s measurement of time that counts. And I don’t need a Swiss watch to do that.