“Your Call is Important to Us”: The Business Psychology of Queuing

By Adrian Furnham

One sure way to disgruntle your customers is to oblige them to fritter away their valuable time in queues – whether in the real world, online, or on the phone. However, if there’s really no other way, there are strategies to take the sting out of queues, as Adrian Furnham reports.

We queue all the time: at traffic lights, in shops and surgeries, and government offices. Airlines, banks, and shops know how upset the modern consumer can become if asked to queue for even a short time. And now we queue online, being told we are nth in a queue and that the organisation values your custom – but not enough to employ more staff to reduce the queue.

Most of us have witnessed “queue rage”, which is physical and verbal abuse as a function of sometimes rather minor delays. It can get quite nasty, particularly if fuelled by drink.

People now tweet their frustration. There are occasional revolts of well-behaved, otherwise mild-mannered people, who have simply “had enough”. They shout, they sing, they rush the barricades to humiliate their tormentors. Some get into serious fights overwhelmed with frustration rage. Others simply leave and vow never again to darken the doors of that particular organisation.

Delay is often the most important factor influencing service evaluation. It is a serious problem for management, who know the cost of hiring people. So what do we know about the subject?

Ten Observations:

1. Occupied time feels shorter. Give people something to do and/or distract their attention. Make them walk round and round on maze-like paths. Give them television to watch, music to listen to, puzzles to solve.
2. Uncertainty makes waiting seem longer. Tell them (roughly) how long they have to wait and people are more accepting of the delay. The “guesstimations” need not be accurate; precision does not matter. Information takes away the ambiguity and gives a person the confidence that the system is still running.
3. Anxiety makes the wait seem longer. People worry and fret: “Will it ever come?”; “Will I make my next meeting?”; “Will I make the connection?”. Thus, explanations and reassurance work, but don’t overdo it.
4. Unanticipated and unexplained waits are worse. Try giving an explanation that sounds reasonable: weather, computer breakdown, etc.
5. Unfair waits are much more aggravating than equitable waits. People hate the “fast-trackers” who buy their way out; the cabin crew who get some privileged exit; the locals who have twice as many people manning the desks as the aliens. Being “all in it together”, suffering equally, helps.
6. Solo waits seem longer than group or social waits. The idea of a waiting room or one of those holding pens at airports helps people feel less bewildered or victimised.
7. Preprocess waits seem longer than in-process waits. Waits seem longer if you are waiting for your service to begin than if you’re already waiting as you’re being served. Thus, waiting in line at a bar normally seems worse than waiting for the bartender to make you your drinks.
8. People wait longer for more valuable services. Clearly, people wait longer for medical attention in A&E than to buy a pint of milk at their nearest corner shop. But different things are valuable to different people.
9. Individual difference in waiting makes a difference. The anxious, the impulsive, and the self-important don’t make good queuers. The rule-following introvert copes much better.
10. And, yes, there are cultural differences. Some countries are time-bound (Germany, Britain, Switzerland, Scandinavia), whereas others are time-blind (Spain, Portugal, Greece). Time-bound societies emphasise schedules, deadlines, time-waste, time-keeping – a fast pace of life. Time-blind societies are more relaxed and casual about time. Time-bound societies see time as linear, time-blind as cyclical. Time-bound societies centre work around clocks, schedules, delivery dates, agendas, deadlines.

There are other types of waiting: anticipatory waiting (waiting for something that is hoped for, for example waiting for Christmas through Advent); inefficiency-based waiting (waiting for slow management processes or due to human error); scarcity-based waiting (caused by lack of availability of resources, e.g., Black Friday queuing); time-delay-based waiting (natural or inevitable processes, e.g., defrosting your car windscreen); waiting caused deliberately by another party (deliberate withholding of information or other resources which causes delays).

Some data

On average, a British person spends over a fortnight a year in queues; just over a week (7.2 days) in physical queues, and about a week and a half (9.4 days) queuing online. Despite our time spent in them, Verge reports that we really do not like queuing at all. Time spent waiting in a queue is number 2 on both our least enjoyable activities (63% dislike) and on activity we see as a waste of time (72%) (Verge magazine report: 2023).

Direct Line group reported Opinium research that found that we spend 4.5 months over a life waiting in queues. Opinium’s research also explored what we do while we wait. The top five answers were as follows: 1. daydream; 2. scroll through social media; 3. read the news; 4. reply to messages; 5. complain / curse about waiting. Notably, the top three of these are all seeking to disassociate themselves from the present moment in some form or another. In a context as unpleasant as waiting around, we look to distance ourselves from our reality. Naturally, queues can also exist when calling call centres and seeking customer service. ICMI’s summary reports that 13 minutes is the maximum time, on average, that people are willing to wait on the phone. Fifty-seven per cent of US people have been so frustrated with customer service that they hung up without their query being solved. Fifty per cent of people have stopped mid-purchase due to bad customer service. And 75 per cent of people felt very annoyed when they could not contact someone on the phone. These feelings go on to affect brand perception and how much people are willing to spend, as well as resulting in bad reviews to friends and an almost immediate loss in sales.

Social Norms in Queuing

Queuing has rules, norms, and obligations. Anger, frustration, and upset occur when these norms are violated. Illegitimate intrusion sparks outrage, as it appears to violate the socially accepted norms of the queuing environment. It usually sparks a chorus of tutting, eye-rolling, and groaning in the direction of the queue-jumper.

Social justice in queues is defined and measured with adherence to the “first-in-first-out” principle, which holds that because I was here first, I get to be served first. First-order justice is maintained when the first-in-first-out principle is upheld. Second-order justice, however, states that people should wait an equal amount of time to you, regardless of its effect on your waiting. At restaurants, servers may decide to open a new seating area to accommodate diners. This means that people who have waited longer (those at the front of the queue) may be served at the same time as those who have just arrived. Whilst those who arrived first are still seated first, evidence demonstrates that second-order justice violations nevertheless reduce positive affect and increase negative affect.

The excuse given by queue-jumpers makes a (small) difference, as well as ameliorating their relationship with those in the queue.

Queuing as a loss

Time spent in a queue has an opportunity cost for all members, taking up time that could be used to do something else. The time spent is valued subjectively for each queuing member. For self-perceived high-status people, waiting in queues can be seen as submission; for productive people, queuing means they can’t get work done; and those who tightly schedule themselves and the more time-conscious may be more aware of the time they are losing. This could be why younger people are more tolerant of longer wait times, and why people were more likely to leave restaurant queues in the afternoon and on weekdays, typical work hours where customers’ time is likely to be more pressured.

What is the optimum length of time to queue for before we get itchy feet?

When we are in need of a service, for example shopping, posting a letter, or using the toilet, we appreciate that there is a psychological cost that we may incur in the process of obtaining that service.

In situations where the service is non-essential, the consumer will make trade-off judgements whilst they are in the queue. Consumers will engage in an economic analysis of the opportunity cost of waiting, the psychological cost that could be used elsewhere.  How much additional psychological cost, for example waiting time, hassle, financial cost of moving through the queue quicker, is the consumer willing to expend in order to complete the queue situation? Consumers decide to “renege” and abandon the queue if the additional cost needed exceeds the threshold of what the consumer is willing to “pay”.

These thresholds will vary depending on certain situational factors of the queue.  The optimal length of time we are willing to wait depends on several factors: the absolute time the consumer has been waiting; the number of people ahead of us in the queue; and the number of people behind us in the queue.

Time spent in the queue

The optimal amount of absolute time a consumer is willing to spend in a queue before reneging varies depending on the service they are waiting for. For instance, the average time people will queue for an ATM before reneging is three minutes, whilst people will queue for 59 minutes on average for a Paul Gauguin art exhibit.  Of course, these numbers may be different in different cultures and different times, as expectations and experiences of waiting have changed.

Disneyland and Disney World have been experimenting with queuing and customer satisfaction for decades. They found that, to alter how long a customer is willing to wait, it is most effective to influence the expectations of the customer. Disney resorts will always generously overestimate the waiting times for their attractions, meaning that customers come away grateful for getting through the queue in a much shorter time than they expected.

Consumers have been found to be consistently inaccurate at estimating how long they think they have been waiting. One study found that consumers retroactively estimate that they waited 78 per cent longer than they actually have. However, wait estimations dropped significantly to 22 per cent when consumers could see an electronic clock that gave an estimate for how long their wait would be.

Previous research has demonstrated how mood (e.g., frustration, boredom, anxiety) predicts a greater likelihood of abandoning a queue.  As time had no effect on the mood of high-importance queuers, it demonstrates the significance of goal-importance on reneging from a queue; the more important it is to get to the end of a queue, the less affected you are by queuing and the longer you are willing to wait.

Finally, consumers are also susceptible to the sunk-cost fallacy when waiting in line. As such, the time a consumer has been queuing influences the amount of time they are willing to wait. Consumers will feel that the psychological cost of waiting further in the queue is reasonable given the amount of time that they have already waited, despite having inaccurate perceptions of how long they have waited and how long it might take to reach the end of the queue.

Counterintuitively, there are conditions where time spent queuing can increase customer satisfaction. In cases where customers’ main motivation is quality (not convenience), queues for restaurants act as a proof of quality and increase customer satisfaction and demand. In familiar restaurants, however, there was a negative trend in perceived quality. While insignificant, this suggests that when quality is known, queues may be attributed to poor customer management, rather than good service quality.

Customers create expectations of wait time from the waiting environment, whether that is from crowdedness, visual estimates, or otherwise. As such, giving queuing customers a 25 per cent wait-time buffer may positively affect their experience when the actual wait time is shorter, in addition to protecting against negatively breaking customer expectations by exceeding the predictions.

Number of people in the queue

A key factor in deciding whether to remain or renege from a queue depends upon the number of people who are ahead of us in the queue. Consumers will estimate how long they expect to be waiting by the number of people ahead of them. When this number appears too high, consumers will either renege or refuse to join the queue in the first place; the latter is far harder to measure and could even have caused many papers to underestimate the negative effect that queuing has on business revenue.

However, the number behind us also influences our likelihood of reneging from the queue. Consumers will make social comparisons with others behind them, deriving some form of comfort from looking behind and realising that they do not have to wait as long as them. When people are feeling anxious and unhappy about their current status, downward comparisons (looking at those behind you) are more likely to occur over upward comparisons (looking at those ahead). As a result, individuals will feel a more positive and less negative affect when there more people behind them in the queue.

The number of people behind has a significant impact on how long it takes before queuers get itchy feet and renege. A longer queue behind us causes two psychological changes in the queuer: firstly, it acts as social validation that the queue is worth waiting for; secondly, it leads the consumer to expect a longer queue if they renege and rejoin at a later point in time.

What is the ideal amount of personal space?

Queues are, by definition, social in nature. Most queues involve the strategic and logical positioning of people who are trying to achieve the same goal in physical proximity to each other. The question is whether the amount of personal space we are given impacts our queuing experience.

There are social norms about the interpersonal distance that should be maintained in social environments. Personal comfort when waiting is also affected by the environmental space provided. As queuers feel more crowded, their discomfort grows. This evidence is further supported by the distinction that people make between preprocess and in-process crowding.

When we are stood closer to others, these evaluations are made more quickly and with greater impact, affecting our chances of leaving the queue.

 What is the ideal queuing environment?

1. Retail distractions: Having distractions like a TV reduces the amount of time that consumers feel they have waited, and make it more palatable. But the nature of a distractor does make a difference.
2. Music: Music influences both the mood of the queuer as well as their perception of time. Fast music is associated with positive emotions (happiness and excitement), whilst slow music is associated with feelings of sadness. Familiar music (e.g., contemporary pop music) has been recommended as the most appropriate for waiting situations, since unfamiliar music has been noted to create the perception that time is slowing down.
3. Scent: Certain scents, even in fairly low concentrations, can affect people’s moods. Concentrations so weak that they are below the threshold of consciousness still can affect people’s moods subconsciously. Some research suggest that scents such as vanilla and lavender seem more effective in reducing wait anxiety than scents of mango, lemon, magnolia, and orange.
4. Colour: Colour researchers generally have categorised colours as being either warm (e.g., red, orange, yellow) or cool (e.g., blue, green). In real-life settings, it has been observed that the passage of time tends to be overestimated in a room painted with warm colours, and underestimated in a cool-coloured room.
5. Lighting: Light level has been found to predict the comfort experienced by individuals, with increased (decreased) comfort in relatively low (high) levels of light. It seems that people overestimated time duration under conditions of higher illumination compared to under lower illumination, and estimated longer time duration under higher-intensity lights compared to under lower-intensity lights.
6. Employee visibility: The patience of queuers has also been known to fluctuate depending on the visibility of employees – in particular, whether the queuers perceive the employees to be working hard to serve all those who are queuing.

Conclusion

Changes in technology, especially the self-service machinery available widely now in supermarkets and travel places (airports, railway stations), mean that people may be even less tolerant of queues. Indeed, the development of biometric markers has made identification of individuals much faster, often significantly reducing waiting time at country borders. Thus, expectations change.

We know that queuing behaviour is a function of many factors: what people are queuing for and their choices available; the length of the queue; the behaviour of people in that queue; and distractions and environmental factors. For both consumers and providers, “time is money” and both want to minimise waiting in queues. Hence, experimentation with new devices and strategies that minimise time spent in queues.

There are, of course, many areas of future research, such as looking at how to get people to evaluate queues differently, trying to understand when customers renege, and the optimal number of paid staff to prevent loss from queues being abandoned.

This article relies heavily on an earlier report: Furnham, A., Treglown, L., & Horne, G. (2020).

About the Author

Adrian Furnham is an honorary Professor at Birkbeck Business School in London. He spends his time in queues watching and chatting to his fellow sufferers.

References

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