Too busy?

Have you ever contacted a Customer Service department as a customer of one of the many companies that claim to provide a service? If you have, I’m willing to bet that one of the first messages you received was, “We apologise as we are very busy at the moment?”.

Which prompts the immediate question: “Busy doing what?”

“Busy” means you are tied up with work and can’t take on anything else for a while. But your work is the customer, and your daily duty is only to sort out the problems your company has caused, so you must be able to do that.

If you are a medical insurance helpline you should be doing nothing but sitting there waiting for customers to call. Your goal is to help them resolve their pressing health issues and provide them with reassurance.

If you manage the customer experience for an airline—a business prone to daily delays—your only job should be to reroute passengers quickly and efficiently, find their luggage, and compensate them for genuine loss.

How can you be so busy helping the customers you’ve already let down that you can’t help the customers you’re letting down right now?

It’s a fact that company policies add enormous drag to the process of resolving customer issues. For example, how far do insurance companies go to avoid paying out on claims? However, the root of customer disappointment lies in tolerating the wrong employee behaviours.

Consider the response you get from friends, relatives, and colleagues when you ask them the simple question: “How are you?” Very often, they say, “I’m so busy.” People say it all the time. It’s a way of subliminally expressing that their time is more valuable than yours (like people who are habitually late). The truth is that humans are as busy as each other, and the rampant advance of technology has not mitigated this - it has exacerbated it. So, if being busy is all you can talk about, then you ought to be less busy. You are trying to accomplish things of which you are not capable.

These four tips may help:

1. Apply the 5-Minute Rule - any task that can be completed in under five minutes should be tackled immediately.

2. Break big tasks into smaller steps, creating a clear path to completion.

3. Reward yourself for progress, however small.

4. Minimize distractions by turning off notifications, creating a clear workspace, or using tools like focus music to drown out background noise. A distraction-free environment reduces the temptation to procrastinate.

Busy people never tell you about it. They don’t complain about everything they must do because they are busy doing it.