KANA (its About KANA’ says: “we help create differentiated and personalized customer experiences”) has pulled together some research to show that consumers patience has worsened from “10 days to 10 minutes in the space of a generation.”

It’s all because of the technology of course. Time was when Mr or Mrs Grumpy Consumer wrote, addressed, stamped and posted a stiff letter of complaint, preferably in green or red ink and then waited 10 days to get a soothing reply. Today, says KANA, the ability of the technology to instant message means that a new generation of consumers expect an almost instant response from those they hold to account.

KANA asked a sample of UK adults how frequently they checked for communication responses on their devices. The key findings:

Men are generally more impatient than women. Men will check a device for responses on average every 22 minutes, 30 seconds. Women will check every 26 minutes, 15 seconds.

One-fifth of all social media users will check for a response at least once an hour, with one in 20 checking every 10 minutes or more.

Now for the age thing. This is the frequency, by age, with which consumers check for responses on their devices:

18-24 Every 9 minutes, 50 seconds

25-34 Every 9 minutes, 55 seconds

35-44 Every 21 minutes

45-54 Every 36 minutes65+ Every 47 minutes

55-64 Every 1 hour, 30 minutes

Just as we might have expected, the under 35s are the most demanding. Then the checking rate climbs up in a disciplined way until we hit the ‘over 65s’ who check more often than the cohort below them - more time on their hands perhaps.

The lesson, of course, is that companies must take all this into account and up their game: “Reductions in consumer tolerance can and should be met with a level of service that meets revised expectation,” says DANA.

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