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Customer Experience

The Waiting Experience

Published April 8, 2022 11 min read Translated from the Arabic original

Introduction

Waiting for the maghrib (sunset) call to prayer during the blessed month of Ramadan reminded me of the waiting experience, and of how many organisations across every sector are working to address waiting as a pain point in the customer journey, or are trying to design around it. New generations have become less patient and less tolerant of the idea of waiting. Time has become tight in the midst of the demands of life, and the customer’s priority now goes to services or products that respect the value of time and deliver what’s expected of them in a matter of seconds. In this article, I’ll discuss some of the methods used to address the waiting problem and dig into a little of the psychology behind it.

According to one study, the level of satisfaction with the waiting time is no less important than the level of satisfaction with the service delivered when it comes to its impact on customer loyalty. At best, this means that companies who don’t lose customers outright over unjustified wait times are still adding to their base of dissatisfied customers and chipping away at their loyalty levels.

Technology and Its Role in Addressing the Problem

Technology has been put to work on the waiting problem, and queue management systems were invented and have spread widely across service organisations. The technology has addressed delays caused by chaos, yet employees have found ways to work around these systems, either to hit targets or because they have no will to deliver. The customer with “vitamin W” (wasta, i.e. connections) ends up being served without taking a ticket; on other occasions, employees would deliberately cause the system to malfunction, or strike a deal with the security guard overseeing the queueing system not to issue tickets for certain services, so that those services wouldn’t be monitored and delays wouldn’t be tracked. Elsewhere, the time-based delivery targets are unrealistic, which pushes employees to game the system or to deliver a poor experience by rushing customers through. What was thought to be a solution to the problem became the cause of new problems.

Digital apps play a major role in saving time, either through online stores with delivery services, or by allowing the customer to order through the app and pick the order up later from the branch (with the aim of killing the wait).

Differentiating Between Customers Based on Their Segment

Other industries have come up with the idea of differentiating between customers based on their tier, like banks setting up dedicated communication lines, account managers and service locations (branches or employees within the branch) for their most important customers. In the airline industry, loyalty programmes grant priority to the most loyal customers.

These differentiations have to be made clear to customers. If they notice a pregnant woman, an elderly person, or someone with special needs being served directly without waiting in the queue, their feelings will turn negative unless the reason for the differentiation is clear to everyone from the start, whether through signage or at the service provider’s location. It is also vitally important that the differentiation isn’t based on a personal relationship. I clearly remember rating one vaccination centre with the lowest possible score because I noticed them letting an outside visitor jump the queue and go straight into the clinic for a vaccination, because of a personal connection or family tie to the nurse administering the vaccines.

Whoever Pays More Gets Served Faster

Several airlines have introduced a priority service: whoever pays for it gets to board quickly and ahead of others through a fast lane onto the plane (avoiding the wait). At Disneyland and Winterland, there’s a fast lane at popular rides, and to skip the wait, you have to pay more. Many government agencies could create a sustainable revenue stream from this (for instance, an expedited appointment for beneficiaries for a fee). At the end of the day, many customers are willing to pay more for a better experience, and being served quickly without a wait is part of making that experience better.

Enriching the Waiting Experience Itself

One way to kill the sense of time passing is to enrich the wait itself and make it enjoyable. Among the most well-known methods is distracting the customer from the fact that they’re waiting (the time a person is occupied feels much shorter than empty time). That’s why you’ll find, at barbers and doctors’ clinics, previously newspapers and magazines, and now televisions or free Wi-Fi. The idea is to distract you from waiting, not to educate or entertain you per se. A local example is Jahez, a food delivery app, which built a game into the app so you can pass the time while your order is being prepared and delivered.

It is said that the main and logical reason behind the presence of a mirror in lifts is to kill the sense of waiting (lifts 20 years ago weren’t as fast as today’s lifts), yet many fast, modern lifts still include a large mirror. Similarly, placing a queue for men parallel to a separate queue for women kills the sense of time, as both sides start sneaking glances at each other (with exceptions, of course). One of the best ways to distract a customer is through art. Places that have designed their interiors with care, spreading artworks across their corridors along with ornamental plants and large fish tanks, will keep customers absorbed in contemplating these features without feeling time pass, unlike a sterile, empty environment. The same applies to waiting areas: those that provide comfortable seating reduce the sense of waiting, especially when they also offer free hot or cold drinks, because that flips the moment from a wait into a moment of leisure and rest. Other places provide charging stations for smart devices, and this makes the customer feel they’re gaining something in exchange for their wait (so their patience increases). They can start using their phone freely, knowing the battery won’t run down.

Pulling the Customer Into the Service Before It Starts

When you get the customer to do anything connected to the service, that gives them the feeling that the service has already started. This applies to forms a customer is asked to fill in before receiving the service, or, for example, when guests in the waiting area at fine dining restaurants are handed a menu to browse. There’s another practice in customer care (specifically in live chat) where the conversation starts with an automated chatbot to collect initial data about the problem by presenting options for the customer to choose from (Twitter calls them quick replies, Google calls them chips). This tactic pulls the customer straight into the conversation so they don’t feel they’re waiting, and it also saves their time and the agent’s time thanks to the initial data already collected about the issue.

Acknowledging the Customer’s Presence

In a social experiment run by Apple, the experiment was applied to two groups. With the first group, staff greeted them warmly when they arrived, smiled at them, and asked them politely to wait while they finished with other customers. With the second group, there was no interaction at all. Both groups were made to wait for exactly three minutes. Then the participants in both groups were asked about how long they had waited, and the second group, the one that had been ignored, felt they had waited far longer than the first group. The tactic here works on the customer’s perception of time itself. This reminds us of the famous trick at pedestrian crossings (the button you press to switch the light to red so you can cross). Its effect is purely psychological and it doesn’t actually do much in most cases; it was put there as a way of acknowledging the pedestrian’s presence and to make them believe that pressing it will shorten their wait and give them priority.

Setting Customer Expectations

Screens that show the sequence of beneficiary numbers, and sometimes display the average service time, do a lot to set expectations and ease the pain of waiting, because the wait time is now known. But it’s sensitive and needs to be accurate, because it can backfire, especially since the one who set the number is the service provider themselves (and it becomes a promise that must be kept). The same applies to a receptionist or cashier in the absence of screens. If they tell you that you’ll be served in 10 minutes and you end up waiting half an hour, you’ll absolutely be angry, possibly before you even get the service. In the world of user experience, many tactics are used for the same purpose, for example, a progress bar while filling out a survey gives you a sense of how much time is left to complete it, which reduces the likelihood that participants will drop off before finishing.

I recall a visit to a government office early in the morning. There were waiting numbers, but no screens showing service durations, and because not all service staff had arrived, many visitors started getting bored and leaving. By the time the staff were all in and the service got fast, many had already left, because the lack of clarity around the wait time caused psychological stress, and that makes the wait feel longer and longer. The same applies to hospitals. Sometimes when you go in without an appointment, your only concern is to know how many patients are ahead of you so you can estimate how long you’ll wait before your turn comes.

Clarifying the Reason and the Expected Duration of the Wait

Humans feel that the wait is much longer if the reason for the wait and how long it will be are not clear. The lack of this information increases anxiety and makes people feel powerless. If you’re in a hospital and the doctor is late for your appointment, your feeling of waiting will be far longer if you haven’t been told why. Compare that to being informed that the doctor was called to the emergency department to deal with a critical case and will be back in half an hour. The same applies to flights: those that are delayed without a set time turn every minute of waiting into what feels like an hour.

The Willingness to Wait Is Tied to the Value of the Service

When you’re at the supermarket with a full cart, you won’t want to waste the time you’ve already spent gathering items from different shelves. But if all you’re carrying is a bottle of water and a chocolate bar, you’ll have no patience for waiting and you might just dump these items anywhere and walk out. That’s why many supermarket chains have a dedicated lane for customers with 10 items or fewer. You’ll also find yourself letting another customer go ahead of you at checkout if they’re only carrying a few items. The same applies to restaurants. Some people will wait months for a dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant, yet feel bored after 10 minutes of waiting at a fast food joint.

This also reminds us of Apple devotees who queue for hours, and sometimes days, to get the latest iPhone. The lesson is to know how to create an impression in your customers’ minds that raises the perceived value of the service/product you provide.

The cover image shows a very long line of tourists at the entrance to the escalators at the Eiffel Tower in France, while the other entrance leading to the regular stairs is nearly empty. The value of comfort on the way up was enough to make dozens wait.

Conclusion

The topic is rich, and waiting experiences vary widely across industries and sectors. It’s impossible to cover all the practices in this modest article. What I hope is that I’ve drawn your attention and offered some solutions you can draw inspiration from to improve your customers’ waiting experience. A note of caution: the solutions I’ve proposed are for forced waiting that can’t be avoided. The original move should always be to dig into the root of the problem to uncover the causes whose treatment may shorten the wait or eliminate it altogether. The root cause may be human, technical, or procedural. And with God lies the right path.

See also Moments That Matter and Customer Journey Mapping.

References

  • Bielen, F. and Demoulin, N. (2007), “Waiting time influence on the satisfaction-loyalty relationship in services”, Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 174-193. https://doi.org/10.1108/09604520710735182
  • The Apple Experience: The Secrets of Delivering Insanely Great Customer Service. New York, McGraw-Hill, 2012. p173
  • Wilson, Alan M, et al. Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm. London, McGraw-Hill, 2021. p410
  • de Castella, Tom. “Does Pressing the Pedestrian Crossing Button Actually Do Anything?” BBC News, 4 Sept. 2013, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23869955. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.

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