Waiting Time Management

INTRODUCTION

Waiting is a form of imprisonment. One is doing time-but why? One is being punished not for an offense of one’s own, but for the inefficiencies of those who impose the wait. Hence the peculiar rage that waits engenders the sense of injustice. Aside from the boredom and physical discomfort, the subtle misery of waiting is the knowledge that one’s most precious resource, time, a fraction of one’s life, is being stolen away, irrecoverably lost.

- Quotes from a Time Magazine author, Morrow (1984)

Waiting is a pervasive element of many purchase situations. Customers can wait minutes, hours, days, or months to receive service. They can wait before, during, or after purchase. They can wait because there is a line-up, there is a delay, or they arrived early for an appointment. For many customers, waiting for service is a negative experience. Thus, speed of service is increasingly becoming a very important service attribute. In fact, some people hate waiting so much that they are willing to hire other people to wait for them. For these reasons, managers are continuously seeking ways to speed up service, believing that waiting will affect service evaluations negatively.

Customers expect some level of certainty about the service, such as the length of their wait. The restaurant operator assesses the customers’ expectations, translates the customers’ needs into adequate service specifications, and produces capacity. However, when the capacity produced does not meet customers’ demand, a customer begins the service in a queue and perceives the capacity to be insufficient. This poor start may negatively influence the customers’ assessment of succeeding services, and the entire experience (Corsten and Stuhlmann, 1998). Therefore, the study of the customers’ assessment of service is a good starting point for managing service.

As mentioned by Hwang and Lambert (2005), the problem of waiting is critical in service encounters. No customer feels satisfied when...