There's a little piece on the British Psychological Society (BPS) website about how people are instinctively lazy (it's a way to save energy), even though we prefer to be busy. The article talks about how people can be spurred out of that laziness in quite subtle ways.
Where this applies to SMEs, is in the idea of giving customers something to do to keep them busy where they'd ordinarily be bored. For example, the article mentions that some airports make people walk farther to
luggage carousels so they spend less time waiting for their
bags to turn up.
If you know your customers will face long queues or waits – perhaps you run a garage and people come in for emergency repairs – then this could be something worth investigating.
Maybe customers could fill out a questionnaire about the kind of services they'd like to your business offer and how well they've been treated so far. Perhaps you could say you're working with a charity and people should choose where they want donations to go. (Waitrose do something like this.)
Whatever it is, just by giving our customers something to do, we could improve their perception of our businesses, even if the actual time taken to serve them doesn't change.
I think some airports also do this because it reduces incidences of back injuries related to passengers having been seated for so long.
Read more about the
British Psychological Society Article.
