Waiting Time Fillers and Customer Reactions to Telephone Waiting

Nira Munichor, Tel Aviv University Anat Rafaeli, Technion Liad Weiss, Columbia University 1

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The Study of Waiting ƒ People wait … 82,300,000 entries of "waiting" in Google ƒ Few speak directly about waiting in a queue ƒ Little social science research ƒThe “waiting balance”: ƒ Unavoidable to most service operations ƒ Inevitable to most consumption experiences ƒ Produces negative responses

Can we mitigate negative reactions? 3

The Study of Waiting Paper in progress: Factors that influence customer reactions to waiting The Context Waiting Rules

Waiting Goal Product or Service

Queue Structure and Waiting Policies

Participant Properties Customer Attributes

Waiting Medium Cultural Environment Specific Waiting Experience Situational Factors Others’ Behaviors

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Time Fillers In Telephone Waiting ƒ Effective management of reactions

ƒ Relatively easy to re-design Please wait. I am temporarily out of motivation. 5

(c) Anat Rafaeli - http://Anat.Rafaeli.Net

Influence of Time Fillers Experiment 1

123 people called a lab Assigned to one of 3 conditions • Music • Apologies • Location information

Put on hold (108 s) Satisfaction from waiting 6

48

Time Filler Effects location-information > music, apologies 3.87

5 . 3 3

2.87

5 . 2

2.58

2

F(2,45)=10.71, p