How companies manage queues has barely moved on since the 1950s. Disney is best at handling physical waiting lines, but too often IT is in charge of phone systems or online chatbots. Insights experts Carl Davidson and Duncan Stuart report.
You probably spend far more time waiting in queues than you think. Research by Microsoft in the UK shows that Brits spend about a fortnight each year in queues.
This is split about 50:50 between physical queues and online ones. But industries as varied as banks, airlines, hospitals, telcos, government departments, city councils, hotel check-in, fashion stores, event ticketing and restaurants depend on queues to manage demand for their services.
Given how ubiquitous queueing is, why are so many companies so poor at managing them? Phone your bank with a credit card query and you know what you’ll get. “You are in a priority queue. Your call is important to us. Please hold the line.” And God help you if you’re trying the IRD.
It’s more than 70 years since Disneyland pioneered the technology and psychology of waiting in line. The psychology of queuing has been well mapped out, so why have we made such little progress since 1955?
What we now know for sure is that the human brain doesn’t do well in a queue. Regardless of whether the line is real or virtual, we know that consumers experience waiting to be more unpleasant if they don’t know how long it will last, have nothing to do while they wait, see staff working on other stuff instead of serving the next in line, or witness somebody being allowed to jump the queue.
Disney’s great insight was that waiting is a highly subjective phenomenon and one of their great innovations was the invention of switchback queues. These made lines appear shorter and made customers feel they were very close to their fun ride. At the same time, Disney made sure those waiting were entertained and put serious focus on the service rate: the number of people who could be processed and put on their ride.
But it was a game of catch-up. The visitor numbers to Disneyland and the Disney Worlds kept soaring. Ther switchbacks soon clogged and visitors were again waiting more than 40 minutes for an eight-minute ride. In the early 1990s, Disney designed and market tested a concept called FastPass. Visitors bought pre-paid tickets to the rides and booked the time they needed to show up.
So instead of waiting for ages at Space Mountain the visitor could now wander around, do some shopping (ka-ching!) and not even be consciously aware that they were in a queue.
There’s no pleasing everyone
More recently, Disney has gone a generation further with its virtual queuing system. To book your rides you now need an app – and if there is over-demand, then your booking may not be a guarantee of a place. This works well for most people most of the time, but there are angry posts on social media from some highly grumpy customers.
No queuing system is going to please all the people all the time. But treating customers the way they get treated by some of our banks and bureaucracies takes us back to the dark ages. Think of the number of times the city council phone system has cycled you through Don’t Dream Its Over as you wait for a real person. The designers and maintainers of these systems are clearly out of touch with how customers think.
A simple audit of your organisation’s customer service operation needs to consider these measures:
- The arrival rate. This is the foundation of your system. Do customers arrive at a favourite time? Has your ad campaign generated more queries than you expected to handle?
- Wait times. This is the basic measure of satisfaction. The longer it becomes the more you need to invest in, or reprogram, your organisation’s front-desk or PABX phone system.
- Service rate. How quickly do you handle arriving customers and connect them to the right person? How do you ensure all calls reach their target?
Investing in the future
Beyond these tangible measures are the game-changing intangibles: the emotive experience of the customer caller who in a heartbeat can go from hope to anxiety.
The point is this: anyone joining a queue is investing in their future. They’re banking on a positive experience – maybe to get their query sorted, or to find out if a certain item is still available. We subconsciously write or invent a script portraying how the experience will go. It is against these inventions that the actual waiting experience is evaluated.
When you’re in a queue you are highly sensitised to the nuances and signals of bad queue management. You are alert to platitudes and non-apologies. Your warning lights flash whenever you are asked to choose from a menu of five options, and none of them reflect the nature of your call.
Marketers should take ownership, starting with the PABX phone systems and the pop-up chatbots. These are easy to program but too often you can hear the tin-snips and smell the soldering iron. Alas, the touchpoint of greeting customers has been put in the hands of the IT department.
Focus on the psychology of the queuing customer. Without that understanding your enterprise comes across as a Mickey Mouse organisation. Just not in a good way.
For more about the pyschology of queueing, check out David Andrews’ Why Does the Other Line Always Move Faster? The Myths and Misery, Secrets and Psychology of Waiting in Line.
The Boston Globe called this book a “Malcolm Gladwell-esque mash-up of social science research, history, and personal observations” about standing in line.
That same review made the useful observation that this book is small enough to throw in your bag and take out next time you’re standing in line.
This was first published in the 2024 September-October NZ Marketing Magazine issue. Subscribe here.
