Science / Medicine : ‘Wait Watchers’ Trying to Take Stress Out of Standing in Line : Psychology: Researchers have been analyzing queues with an eye to--if not making them shorter--reducing the tension.
Standing in line--at the bank, the market, the movies--is the time-waster everyone loves to hate. Stand in just one 15-minute line a day, every day, and kiss goodby four days of idle time by year’s end.
While we’ve been waiting and grumbling, researchers have been analyzing lines with an eye to making them, if not shorter, at least less stressful.
The field of line analysis--more scientifically known as queue theory--began in the early 1900s when a Danish telephone engineer devised a mathematical approach to help design phone switches. Researchers found that the principles developed through that system, which helped process calls more efficiently, could be applied to help move people through lines more efficiently.
The concept has spread from the communications and computer industries to other fields, helping modern researchers predict such things as how long customers might wait for a restaurant lunch or how many customers might visit a bank ATM at noon on Saturday. Now, some researchers have gone beyond a mere mathematical analysis of lines, focusing as well on our psychological reactions.
In one recent study, Richard Larson, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wanted to determine which of two approaches would be more tolerable to Bank of Boston customers. As Larson’s researchers filmed the customers, one group watched an electronic news board while waiting in line; the other group was advised via an electric clock how long the wait would be before each one entered the line. About 300 customers, nearly a third of those filmed, were interviewed after they finished their transactions. The findings, published in the Sloan Management Review, an MIT publication circulated to corporate managers, showed that:
* Customers in both lines overestimated their waits by nearly a minute; those who watched the news board overestimated the most. On average, customers thought they waited 5.1 minutes to see a teller but actually waited 4.2 minutes.
* Watching the news board did not change customers’ perceptions of their waiting time. But it did make the time spent more palatable, customers reported. (After the bank removed the news board, many customers asked that it be reinstalled.)
* The news board also seemed to make customers less fidgety. Without it, they touched their faces and played with their hair. With the news board in view they stood still with their arms at their sides.
* Customers who were advised of the length of the line via an electronic clock at the entry did not find the experience less stressful than those not told the expected waiting time, much to Larson’s surprise. Nor were they more satisfied than the other group with the service. The electronic clock’s display of waiting time may backfire, Larson speculates, by making respondents even more aware of time wasted standing in line.
* Customers in the lines with the clock tended to play “beat the clock.” They felt they had “won” if they spent less time in line than predicted. The clock also seemed to make more customers balk at joining the line if the predicted delay was lengthy.
* In both lines, customers altered their definition of a “reasonable” wait depending on their time of arrival. They were willing to wait longer during lunchtime than during other times of day.
Larson’s recent findings bear out a formula published in 1984 by David Maister, a former Harvard Business School faculty member and now a business consultant. When it comes to lines, Maister said, satisfaction is tied to both perception and expectation.
“Nowhere in that (equation) does reality appear,” Maister said with a laugh during a telephone interview. Giving a personal example of how perception influences reaction, he said he would wait “40 minutes for a performance by a world-class musician but less than 30 seconds for a hamburger.”
Larson, a professional “wait watcher” for 20 years, puts it a bit differently: “When it comes to customer satisfaction, perception is reality.”
If those concepts are true, taming customer unrest does not necessarily mean a business must beef up its staff to eliminate lines, Larson and Maister contend. It’s much more a matter of “perception management,” they say. “People in the service industries who think they have a line problem may be able virtually to erase customer dissatisfaction and customer complaints not by changing the statistic of the wait but by changing the environment of it,” Larson said.
He points to a number of companies already actively wooing waiters. Some companies use a “queue delay guarantee,” giving customers free dessert or money if the wait exceeds a preset time period.
Larson predicts customers can expect lines that segment them by personality type. Impatient souls may have the option of paying more to join an automated express line; “people watchers” could opt to wait for less expensive, friendlier human service.
