Back at the beginning of April, I conducted an interview: Interview and customer service stories with Michael Heppell, where Michael shared a number of fantastic stories about customer service.
At the end of the interview (the bit after I stopped taking notes), he told me about an initiative that he was launching in May and asked for my help.
The initiative is called How to Save an Hour Every Day, which aims to help the people of Britain save a million hours in the month of May.
Last time I looked at the site their counter was up to just over 281,000 hours saved over the course of the first 9 days.
Now, there’s a book to go with the campaign, which is not a surprise as Michael is a best-selling author, but what I found interesting is the way that the site (and the book, presumably, as I haven’t read it) suggests some ideas to get started but then logs lots of contributions from the #saveanhour hashtag on Twitter. Here’s a few Twitter user examples from the campaign site:
- Don’t answer mobile calls & say will call you back. Caller could have left a message on voicemail & save both of you time. Tweeted by @suzguest
- Leave for work 10 mins before rush hour traffic. This tip easily saves more than 10mins and you’ll waste less fuel! Tweeted by @arribus
- Use @toodledo to manage your todo list online electronically. Saves hours rewriting your priorities. Tweeted by @GreenStonesUK
- I’ll work from home and save an hour of return travel instead of going to the office. Let’s do that every work day! Tweeted by @tutticornet
- Use www.doodle.ch to check availability for meetings. saves to-ing and fro-ing. Tweeted by @chrissiegibson
- Use a to do list and prioritise! complete the big tasks first leave the quick simple ones until the afternoon. Tweeted by @winfieldsimon
Apart from knowing Michael and this being a great initiative and being something that we should all think about…you may be asking yourself…….how does this fit with what I normally write about on the blog?
Well, here’s why I think it is important. I normally write about how we can grow our businesses by building better relationships with our people and our customers. But, as we all know, we live in such a time-poor environment these days that often it is our relationships with those around us, whether they are team-mates, customers, colleagues, friends, families, stakeholders etc, that often suffer.
Therefore, doing what we can to help ourselves and others save time could have dramatic effects on our relations with those around us.
So, here’s my contribution to the idea stream:
What’s yours?
Thanks to frogthroat for the image.
