Lesson 6: Waiting Line Models Flashcards
Importance of Good Services
- Time has become more valuable
- Customer loyalty is significantly impacted by good/bad service
- Technological advances have made better and faster services possible
- Providing a level of service acceptable to customers offers a strong competitive advantage
- Congestion could affect other business operations
- Extra cost related to waiting space facility
Customer Satisfaction
A measure of the customer’s reaction to a specific service encounter.
Customer expectations
Preconceived notions of what will occur at a service operation, often influenced y prior experience, advertising, and word-of-mouth
Disconfirmation
A marketing measure of the difference between the customers expectations from a service operation and a customers perception of its performance
Actual Waiting time
Time, as measured by a stopwatch, of how long a customer has to wait prior to receiving service.
Perceived waiting time
Amount of time customers believe they have waited prior to receiving service
Perceived waiting time is in the customer’s mind, which is the time duration they believe that they have waited. For example, on very a hot day waiting 15 minutes in scorching sun could give you a feeling that you have been here for more than 30 minutes. However, at a nice saloon with Wi-Fi you can spend 20 minutes without realizing it.
Perceived waiting time plays a measured role in customer satisfaction. So, if the waiting time cannot be reduced, the organization puts effort into reducing the perceived waiting time.
Techniques to reduce perceived waiting time:
Distractions which engage the customers away from waiting. For instance, offering coffees or light snacks, providing newspapers or magazines, playing popular shows on a TV, etc.
Keeping the line moving by offering fast check-outs, priority check out, etc.
Keeping non-service staff out of sight, because staff idling while customers are waiting will give negative perception about the organization’s intention to provide better services.
Providing expected waiting time in advance, which will prepare the customer mentally to wait.
Self-service counters will transfer some responsibility to customers. Not only will it reduce lines, but customer generally don’t mind when waiting is due to them. For example – bank ATM, self-ticketing, self-check-in, etc.
True or False:
Waiting lines occur even in under loaded systems because of variability in service rates and/or arrival rates.
True
True or False:
A system has one service facility that on an average can service 10 customers per hour. The customers arrive at a variable rate, which averages 6 per hour. In this circumstance, no waiting lines will form.
False
True or False:
Typically customers will perceive waiting times to be less if the line continues to move.
True
Why is there waiting in a queue even if the service capacity exceeds the average demand on the system?
Variability in arrival and service rates
Waiting time in system
Waiting time in line + service time
Arrival Pattern (Rate)
The rate at which the customers join the queuing system.
The Poisson distribution is widely popular for queuing systems consisting of human customers.
Poisson distribution is defined by Lambda, which is arrivals per unit time. Typically, when the arrival pattern is following the Poisson distribution, the interarrival time, which is the time between two arrivals, follows exponential distribution.
If arrivals per unit time is Lambda then the mean interarrival time is 1 over lambda.
Service Pattern (Rate)
The service rate is defined using Mu, which is the number of customers served per unit time. It is also exponential for most of human based service systems.
Queue Discipline
Queue discipline is the rule used to form the queue in the system. Most commonly it is first-come-first-served (FCFS). In this course, we will only consider FCFS.
