Queue patience: Understanding the psychology of customer waiting times

By J. N. Halm

The sight is all too familiar in businesses across the globe. A customer joins a queue, waits for a few minutes, glances around with growing impatience, checks their watch or phone, and then simply walks away.

This act of abandoning a queue before being served—known as reneging—represents more than just an inconvenience for the individual customer. It is not that the customer is an impatient soul. It signals a fundamental breakdown in the service experience and often translates directly into lost revenue for the business.

For service organisations, understanding why customers renege from queues has become increasingly critical in today’s fast-paced world where customer expectations continue to rise. In a world in which a minute spent doing nothing feels like an eternity, waiting a long time in a slow-moving queue can feel like torture for customers. The traditional approach has been to focus on reducing actual wait times or providing distractions to make waiting more bearable. Televisions in customer reception areas, if you catch my drift.

However, recent research published in the September 2024 online edition of the Production & Operations Management journal reveals a more nuanced understanding of customer psychology in queuing situations that could revolutionise how businesses manage their waiting areas. The study was titled “How Observed Queue Length and Service Times Drive Reneging Behavior in Queues”.

The concept at the heart of this breakthrough is what researchers term the “relative progress effect”—a behavioural phenomenon that demonstrates how the perception of progress through a queue can be just as important as the actual time spent waiting. This discovery challenges conventional wisdom about queue management and opens new possibilities for reducing customer abandonment without necessarily reducing actual service times.

Understanding the Relative Progress Effect

The relative progress effect occurs when customers observe a series of fast service completions early in their wait, followed by slower service times that result in the same total waiting time as a queue progressing at a steady rate. What makes this phenomenon remarkable is that, despite identical total wait times, customers who experience this pattern are significantly less likely to abandon the queue.

The psychology behind this effect lies in how humans process and evaluate progress. When customers witness rapid initial movement in a queue, they form an expectation about service speed and develop a sense of momentum. More importantly, they observe a greater depletion of the original queue length, creating the perception that they have made substantial progress toward being served.

Consider a practical example: Customer A enters a queue of ten people and watches the first five customers get served quickly in the first ten minutes, followed by slower service for the remaining customers, resulting in a total wait of thirty minutes. Customer B enters a similar ten-person queue that moves at a steady pace, also resulting in a thirty-minute total wait.

Despite identical waiting times, Customer A is more likely to remain in the queue because they have experienced the psychological benefit of seeing rapid initial progress. In other words, it is all about the optics. A queue that looks like it is moving fast does the trick, regardless of whether it is actually moving fast.

This effect taps into fundamental aspects of human psychology, particularly our tendency to evaluate experiences based on relative rather than absolute measures. The customer who witnesses fast initial service develops a reference point that makes subsequent slower service seem more acceptable, while also feeling that they have already invested in a process that was initially rewarding.

The Science behind Queue Psychology

The research involved both laboratory and online experiments that meticulously tracked customer behaviour in controlled queue scenarios. Using sophisticated behavioural analysis, researchers were able to isolate the relative progress effect from other factors that might influence queue abandonment, such as actual wait times, queue length, or service quality.

One of the most significant findings was that the relative progress effect could enable customers to tolerate longer queues and longer durations compared to benchmark queues without this effect. This suggests that the psychological impact of perceived progress can overcome traditional barriers to patience, such as queue length or anticipated wait time.

The implications become even more profound when viewed through the lens of simulation analysis. When researchers modelled entire queue systems where multiple individuals experience the relative progress effect, they discovered that individual-level behavioural changes lead to systematic improvements in overall queue performance. This means that strategies designed to create relative progress effects do not just help individual customers—they improve the entire queuing system by reducing overall renege rates.

Practical Applications for Service Organisations

The discovery of the relative progress effect offers service organisations a new toolkit for managing customer experience during waiting periods. Unlike traditional approaches that focus solely on reducing actual wait times—often requiring significant operational changes or increased staffing—strategies based on relative progress can be implemented with careful scheduling and resource allocation.

Service managers can deliberately structure their operations to create periods of faster service early in peak times, followed by steadier service rates. This might involve deploying additional staff during the initial phase of busy periods, opening express service windows for quick transactions, or prioritising simpler service requests early in the queue formation.

Restaurants, for instance, could seat early arrivals more quickly during busy periods, even if subsequent seating takes longer. Banking institutions might process simple transactions rapidly when queues begin forming, creating visible progress that encourages patience among customers with more complex needs. Retail environments could open additional checkout lanes briefly during peak shopping times to create initial momentum.

Technology and Queue Management

Modern technology offers additional opportunities to leverage the relative progress effect. Digital queue management systems can provide real-time updates on queue progress, emphasising rapid initial movement. Mobile applications can notify customers about faster-than-expected early progress, reinforcing the psychological benefits of the relative progress effect.

Furthermore, businesses can use data analytics to identify natural patterns in their service delivery and deliberately structure these patterns to maximise the relative progress effect. By analysing historical service times and customer behaviour, organisations can predict when to deploy additional resources for maximum psychological impact.

The Broader Implications

The relative progress effect reveals something fundamental about customer psychology that extends beyond queue management. It demonstrates how customer satisfaction is often more about perception than reality, and how understanding these perceptions can lead to more effective service design.

This research aligns with broader trends in service management that recognise the importance of emotional and psychological factors in customer experience. Just as the concept of “service with a smile” acknowledges that customer perception matters as much as service delivery, the relative progress effect shows that how customers experience waiting can be managed through understanding psychological principles.

Moreover, the finding that individual-level behavioural effects can improve system-wide performance suggests that investments in understanding customer psychology can yield returns that extend beyond individual customer satisfaction to operational efficiency.

Moving Forward

Service organisations seeking to reduce renege behaviour should consider implementing practices that create relative progress effects as part of a comprehensive queue management strategy. This does not replace the need for efficient operations, but it provides an additional tool that can improve customer experience without necessarily requiring major operational overhauls.

The key lies in understanding that customer patience is not simply about how long they wait, but about how they experience that wait. By creating early momentum and visible progress, businesses can tap into psychological principles that naturally extend customer tolerance and reduce abandonment rates.

As competition for customer loyalty intensifies across all service industries, understanding and applying insights from queue psychology becomes not just an operational consideration but a competitive advantage. When customers feel they are making progress, even in the simple act of waiting, they are more likely to complete their service journey—and that completion often translates directly into business success.

The post Queue patience: Understanding the psychology of customer waiting times appeared first on The Business & Financial Times.

Read Full Story