“You do not want people to leave, but you also don’t want to make them wait,” he says. In reality, however, most companies are functioning between these two extremes. “But if your goal is to keep queues short, then you are better off doing the opposite, because the impatient people will leave anyway, and shorten the queue.” “If you want to minimize abandonment-that is, you don’t want anyone to leave-then you would try to first serve the most impatient customers,” he says. Then, the team studied how handling customer requests in different orders should affect three common measures of call-center success: queue length, abandonment (the rate at which customers got frustrated and hung up), and how accurate the call center could be with predicted wait times.Įach of these metrics requires a different strategy, Bassamboo explains. They assumed that customers entered the queue at a fixed rate, and also that requests were processed at a fixed rate. In other words, we all remember how long we have been waiting and how annoyed we are getting. “It is not a great assumption to work with when thinking of situations like call centers.” “But that is not reflective of real life,” Bassamboo says. For example, an extra 5 minutes of waiting is treated the same regardless of whether you have already waited 10 minutes or 30 minutes. Previous research on optimizing queue service typically assumed that a customers’ patience is “memory-less,” meaning that the amount of time they have already waited does not impact their decisions. “The moment you say you’re not doing that, the first question is, ‘Why not?’” Bassamboo says. Patience Has Its LimitsĪ first-come-first-served policy is the most obvious way to handle a queue. This method turns out to be more efficient at reducing queue lengths and keeping customers satisfied than a first-come-first-served policy. The key is to divide customers into groups based on how much patience they are likely to have, and then prioritize each group differently. Using data on customer wait times and the time required for the services they need, Bassamboo and a colleague devised a model that can help call centers schedule responses dynamically.
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