TORONTO – The number of people who now spend their hard-earned cash to pay for time – and the number of businesses which have sprung up to serve them – highlights how the entire telecom industry must shift and show Canadians that it, too, not only respects their precious time, but can give some of it back.
In his first ever speech to the Canadian Telecom Summit, Rogers Communications CEO Guy Laurence departed from the standard executive speech at these sorts of functions (often just a bit of information smothered by a lengthy commercial for the brand). That was not the case with Laurence’s essay on time in the modern world. Honestly, we counted two sentences that pumped RCI. The rest strictly spoke to his thesis: Time Is The New Currency. (Photo by Michal Tomaszewski)
“Seventy two minutes. That’s how long it took me to get here today,” Laurence said in launching his talk. “If this was my commute for the next 25 years, I’d spend almost two years of my life travelling to and from work.” It’s an apt way to demonstrate time constraints, given how commute times are rising quickly in Ontario.
“While busy parents pay more to have their groceries delivered right to their doorstep. Let’s be clear, it’s not about avoiding the grocery store. It’s about buying back two hours of their life every week,” said Laurence.
“Why was speed dating invented? So single people could process the maximum number of prospective partners in the minimum time! We even have single people paying others to screen potential dating partners. New York magazine recently ran a story about a businessman who hired a young woman to comb through online dating sites and assemble a weekly shortlist of candidates. She’s paid $100 each week. He’s still single, but that’s another story.
“Why are we so willing to open up our wallets to buy time?”
We’re all working harder, we’re increasingly stressed and 43% of us reported to Statistics Canada that we have no time for fun any more, he continued. Then he did some awfully depressing math (especially for those of us over the age range presented).
“If you’re in your mid-thirties, let’s say you’re going to live till 90. You have roughly 55 years left to live, but on average you spend one third of your life sleeping… this brings you down to 440 months. Now if you subtract the time you spend at work you’re left with 200 months, or just over 16 years. Suddenly your 55 years turned into 16.
“And I should point out that this doesn’t include the nine months you’ll spend on the toilet." – Guy Laurence, Rogers Communications
“And I should point out that this doesn’t include the nine months you’ll spend on the toilet,” he added, to a big laugh.
This compressed amount of time, especially for Generation Y – a group which will be half of every company’s customer base within six year, Laurence noted – is enormously important to them and will shape every business in the future, especially wireless, broadband and media companies. But so far, the industry, and most others, are missing the mark by miles.
“Technology is inherently set-up to give people more time. We are supposed to be part of the solution. But let’s pause and mark our own industry homework on how well we’re doing.
“Today, mobile apps save consumers 88 minutes every day. That’s 22 days every year… not a bad start. Retail is another example. Almost half of all Canadians said they shop on-line to save time and to browse 24/7. We’re now buying everything from movie tickets, to shoes, to furniture off the web to avoid long queues, and busy parking lots. 
So that’s good, right? No!
“Some stats I saw recently show only 5.3% of Canadian retail sales are online versus 23% in the UK, so even if those facts are half correct we’re not in a good space. And mobile ecommerce tends to track behind general ecommerce,” said Laurence. He went on to praise how Canadians have generally made the leap to online banking and some mobile banking but pushed the telecom industry to do far more. The Millennials and the Gen Y Canadians don’t want to wait for anything. They would rather go on line and solve any customer issues on their own “in three minutes” he said, than ever make a phone call to a call centre.
"If we don’t make sure we understand how valuable their time is, and design what we do with this in mind, then we will be irrelevant.” – Laurence
“They place a much higher premium on time and they expect technology to deliver it. Time is so important to them that they are willing to make less money so they have more time,” said Laurence. “Within six years 50% of the population will be Gen Y. If we don’t make sure we understand how valuable their time is, and design what we do with this in mind, then we will be irrelevant.”
If you want to look at it in pure business terms, gaining an hour of productivity improvement for every working Canadian, every year, would be worth $750 million to the Canadian economy, the CEO explained. And, if you turned that one hour into one week, it’d be worth $38.9 billion. So, since “we already know mobile apps save small businesses almost 600 million hours annually, while smartphones and tablets save nearly 2 billion hours… not a bad start," he said, quoting Conference Board of Canada figures.
“Trucking companies are monitoring traffic flow and re-routing drivers real-time to avoid traffic jams and wasted time on the road. Health care providers are diagnosing patients remotely reducing the need for clinical visits and emergency room wait times. Hydro providers are using spot pricing to charge for power based on real-time usage eliminating the need for field technicians to check each and every customer home. So we are fine, right? No I don’t believe so, I think we can do a lot more. I think Canadian businesses and the public sector are underserved by technology in the quest to be more productive and give back time,” explained Laurence.
“Are we really bringing simplicity to our customers? Not enough is the answer. We also waste their time by talking to them in a language they don’t understand. We talk in megabytes and gigabytes…and now we’re starting to talk about zettabytes. A zettabyte as you all know is one sextillion bytes,” he added, with a dollop of sarcasm in his voice.
“The late Steve Jobs once said: ‘My favourite things in life don't cost any money. The most precious resource we have is time’,” Laurence said. “As an industry we need to take this message to heart. And we need to do it quickly. Our customers don’t have time to waste – and neither do you.”
