I recently read an article entitled “Managing Real and Virtual Waits in Hospitality and Service Organizations”, published in 2005 in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (CQ). If you manage or own a business where customers experience a wait, I highly recommend reading this article (link at bottom).
There are three ways to manage waits –
- Manage the actual wait time. This involves accurately matching resources to customer demand. Ideally, customers would experience no wait whatsoever because the business would be able to accommodate all customers regardless of demand.
- Manage the perception of the wait time. Because it’s almost impossible to do the above, businesses utilize various methods of entertainment or distractions during wait times. Examples of this would include televisions or shops within a waiting area, banks using winding lines, elevators using mirrors and music, etc. When not completely focused on the wait time itself, research shows that customers perceive the wait time to be shorter than it actually is, in turn increasing customer satisfaction.
- The last and most effective method, make the wait invisible by creating a virtual queue. Effectively, this is what the Recess Paging System does. By allowing customers to reserve their spot in the queue and then do whatever they choose in the mean time, a virtual queue creates the effect that there is no real wait time at all. Disney has been perfecting this method in their theme parks for over a decade, creating a system called Fastpass.
Disney has thrown millions, if not billions, of dollars into perfecting this system over the years to increase customer satisfaction within their recreational parks. Instead of using bulky and expensive kiosks, laptops, or FM transceivers, Recess takes the same virtual queue system and wraps it into a neat little package. The entire system runs off of an iPhone or iPod Touch and notifies guests by texting their cell phones.
With Apple recently lowering the price of a new iPod Touch to under $200, isn’t the investment worth making your customers happy?
If you’d like to read the mentioned article, you can find it here: Managing Real and Virtual Waits in Hospitality and Service Organizations.