Understanding the roles of the customer and the operation for better queue management

Queuing, a familiar element of most service delivery systems, has the potential for significantly affecting the customer’s overall satisfaction with the service encounter. A customer’s degree of satisfaction with waiting or with the service received in its entirety is dependent on the actual performance of the delivery system, the customer’s expectations regarding that performance and the customer’s perception of the service encounter. The actual operational performance of different queuing configurations has been previously addressed, as have the issues of managing customers’ expectations and perceptions regarding their queuing experiences. This earlier research has identified several factors which can affect a customer’s perception of waiting and consequently his or her satisfaction with that wait. Proposes a taxonomy based on the service manager’s ability to control the customer’s perception of the queuing experience. Defines which queuing factors can be controlled by the firm, which factors can partially be controlled by the firm and which factors are outside the firm’s control, and suggests tactics for managing queues for each category of factors.