Long lead times a turn off for the now generation

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We now live in a world where instant gratification is craved. We want everything and we want it all now, we simply don’t want to wait. Instant messages, email, fax, internet, fast food (the faster the better), Instant education, job, wealth, no waiting at the hospital; we want an instant diagnosis, and, of course, an instant cure. We want information in an instant and we even want our big ticket items straight away. Six week lead time for a new sofa, no thanks I’ll take the display model and I’ll take it now.

This may explain why there is now so much personal debt. In the days before easy credit if you couldn’t afford it you couldn’t have it and our grandparents knew they would have to save long and hard before buying anything approaching a luxury item. Now of course the notion of whether someone can actually afford anything is a secondary consideration and sometimes not even that.

It is no surprise then that buyers are becoming increasingly frustrated to be told that the car they ordered, to their exact specification, may take four months or more to arrive.

Car dealers who supply new cars really cannot really win; when the global recession hit all businesses had to tighten their belts in and in the case of car manufacturing that meant factory redundancies and production being wound down in line with receding demand.

This coupled with the fact that dealers decided that staff were the easiest and quickest cost saving and new car sales in December being far greater than initial predictions, means that customers are waiting far longer for their car to be built than anyone anticipated. These same people also probably found it hard to get served in the first place.

The reason car businesses are so keen to put the customer first apart from the obvious, is that they realise that the mistakes of the past have put them in the position they are today and with growing competition and shrinking margins the focus on customer care has never been greater.

But if there isn’t the staff to handle the enquiries effectively and efficiently enough in the first place then, in this world of instant demand, the business is in danger of letting customers evaporate and, in turn, disappearing up its own tailpipe.