Revolt? What Eight Seconds Means for Your Customer Engagement Success

At eight seconds, humans now have shorter attention spans than goldfish. That’s according to a recent study sponsored by Microsoft, and it’s down from twelve seconds in 2000. Goldfish can apparently focus on something for nine ticks around the clock, but for us humans, we peter out after an 8-second ride.

The suspected cause? The mobile revolution: the introduction of technologies like the smart phone freed us up from landlines, hardwire desktop and terminal systems and it’s making us masters at multi-tasking. But it’s also impacting our attention spans.

It got me thinking as I reflect (for eight-seconds) on my recent July 4th party, how much the mobile revolution has shaped our world. We may not celebrate it with a work holiday and fireworks like we do for the American Revolution. But the profound impact mobile presents is worth attention (and celebration) because it is fundamentally changing how we interact with one another. It is shifting power in ways that will lead to the rise and fall of many institutions.

For Metaverse Mod Squad, the mobile revolution has certainly defined our business. In providing services to clients, we like to start by helping them rethink any red tape processes that pre-date smart phones and 24/7 connectivity. Today, speed is paramount. Real-time conversations about you are happening with or without you. If you’re still waiting for the monthly data report from customer support or marketing to know what people think of you, well, have some cake and wait for the guillotine to fall. You’re a lot more than eight seconds late.

Today, it’s absolutely critical to be engaged and be visible, in some fashion, 24x7x365.  Fortunately, there are a plethora of digital engagement tools to create and maintain support channels for quicker responsiveness.  Also, instituting service level agreements (SLA) is a great way to provide the upfront rules of engagement, in other words, Bill of Rights, to build trust and confidence so essential in today’s fast-paced, short attention span and multi-tasking world. (And the company pitch: companies like Metaverse Mod Squad can help you establish and execute your rules for customer engagement. Couldn’t help myself.)

If you haven’t defined or shared your customer engagement rules — your Bill of Rights — with external customers, let alone your internal teams, it’s not too late.  Knowing you have only eight seconds to make an impression, delight your customer or save an account should be motivation enough.

Now if only somebody could invent an eight second blog post.  Oh wait…

Amy Pritchard
CEO