Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
A More Efficient Way of Handling the Customer Queue
Many people become impatient when they are forced to wait in a queue or line, it’s just a fact of life. And things become even more heated when folks “jump the line” or otherwise force their way in front of someone who has already been waiting a while. The same holds true in the call center, and according to a new study, there may be a better way to deal with the call queue to diffuse potentially volatile situations.
Achal Bassamboo, professor of operations at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, collected data on customer wait times as well as the time required for them to access the services they sought. In most cases, call centers take calls on a first come, first served basis, but Bassamboo claims that may not be the most efficient way to handle impatient customers who have been waiting a long time.
“First-come-first-served is not always a great approach,” said Bassamboo. “Companies need to have a more dynamic policy that’s based on how much time a customer has already spent waiting in line.”
His findings are based on the simple theory that not all customers possess equal amounts of patience. In fact, some people are more willing to wait in line than others, especially if they know the service they are waiting on will be complex and time consuming. The study also found that individual customers’ levels of patience changed over the timespan that they were kept on hold.
By dividing customers into groups based on their likely “levels” of patience, and prioritizing those groups accordingly, call centers may be able to diffuse tempers and offer a better overall customer experience. This process is ultimately more efficient and reduces wait times and queue lengths, while also keeping customers more satisfied, according to the Kellogg School’s findings.
Typical first come, first served queue processing has been based on the assumption that the amount of time a customer has waited has no impact on their decisions. Bassamboo believes this is a poor assumption, and that a customer who has already been waiting 30 minutes may reach the limits of their patience if they are forced to wait for an additional five minutes.
To better understand the link between customer patience and positive outcomes, Bassamboo worked with colleague Ramandeep Singh from the University of Southern California to construct a model. The model links the amount of time a customer expects they will need to spend with a representative with the amount of patience they will have for waiting. Assuming customers enter a queue at a fixed rate, and that their requests are also processed at a fixed rate, the researchers examined the impacts of handling their requests in different orders.
Three important measures of a positive customer experience, queue length, abandonment, and accuracy of predicted wait times, were factored in. Each of those measures indicates a different way calls should be processed.
“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,” said Bassamboo. “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.”
Ultimately, the study found that the best method of handling calls was to create thresholds of customer patience that are based on the customer’s specific issue or request. By categorizing customers into multiple groups, they may be handled differently based on their specific needs. The most patient customers (those with the most complex needs) would be served first in an effort to clear them out and shorten waiting times. The most impatient customers would be served next, followed by those in the middle. While that order may seem counterintuitive, the study found that grouping customers this way improved queue lengths, abandonment rates and predicted wait times.
“If you choose the thresholds appropriately, you’ll get much better performance than doing it in the usual first-come-first-served way,” said Bassamboo. “Based on our results, this system pays off a lot in certain settings in terms of providing better service or becoming more lean. Implementing such policies can help companies’ bottom line, because you do not need to hire more people to get the same performance.”
Edited by Maurice Nagle