It is a common experience that a two minute wait can feel like nothing at all, or can feel like ‘forever’.
What has been relatively neglected, however, is much substantive discussion of the experience of waiting.Īs Levitt reminds us, “Products are consumed, services are experienced.” Accordingly, if managers are to concern themselves with how long their customers or clients wait in line for service (as, indeed, they should), then they must pay attention not only to the readily-measurable, objective, reality of waiting times, but also how those waits are experienced. (2) However, most of this work is concerned with the objective reality of various ‘queue management’ techniques: for example, what the effects are upon average waiting times of adding servers, altering ‘queue discipline’ (the order in which customers are served), speeding up serving times, and so on. The mathematical theory of waiting lines (or queues) has received a great deal of attention from academic researchers and their results and insights have been successfully applied in a variety of settings. Once we are being served, our transaction with the service organization may be efficient, courteous and complete: but the bitter taste of how long it took to get attention pollutes the overall judgments that we make about the quality of service What is more, each of us who can recall such experiences can also attest to the fact that the waiting-line experience in a service facility significantly affects our overall perceptions of the quality of service provided. The truth of this assertion cannot be denied: there can be few consumers of services in a modern society who have not felt, at one time or another, each of the emotions identified by Federal Express’ copywriters.
#QUEUE LINE ROOM WAITING SERIES#
In one of a series of memorable advertisements for which it has become justly famous, Federal Express (the overnight package delivery service) noted that: “Waiting is frustrating, demoralizing, agonizing, aggravating, annoying, time consuming and incredibly expensive.” (1)
#QUEUE LINE ROOM WAITING PDF#
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