Line It Up

I’ve spent a lot of time in this space talking about how important it is to stay on the good side of your customers, not annoy them, and so on; I’ve even written at length about the importance of not asking your customers to wait in long lines in order to make a purchase, especially if there are unused cash registers sitting idle and available personnel who are standing around, doing whatever, and not lifting a finger to help people check out. But, I must admit, I’ve never broken the problem down into its component parts; to me, an excessively long wait to make a purchase is just an undifferentiated annoyance, and all I’m interested in is leaving as soon as possible. But now it turns out that the time spent waiting in line may not be the most important part of this issue…

According to a story reported this week in The Wall Street Journal, ongoing research at MIT indicates that what really annoys people isn’t so much how long they’ve been waiting in line – people have poor internal senses of time, anyway – but rather the feeling of injustice when someone who got in line after they did is served first. Like when you’re waiting in line at the supermarket and the line next to yours moves three times faster (three people check out before the idiot in front of you can finish writing out their check). This turns out to be the basis for all of those single-line systems – like the one in most banks, for example – where the next person in line goes to the next available check stand, teller window, or whatever. This eliminates the perception of people getting ahead of you in line, and is apparently more effective even that just opening more check stands…

The implications for any retail or customer service operation are staggering. Granted, there’s not going to be much that a small business can do about this situation; you’ve only got so many feet of sales floor or operations space, and so many people you can put on a register. But large retailers like department stores and supermarkets could certainly adopt such a system, and so could most fast-food operations. The so-called “Big Box” operations would have to modify the system a bit to accommodate customers pushing flatbed carts and forklifts and so on, but something like this would be great for “hypermarket” operations like Meijer and Super Wal-Mart, not to mention K-Mart and Target stores. How much faster such a layout would make these stores is highly debatable, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, because what’s actually important isn’t how long the wait is, but how fairly your customer believe your handling of the process is…

Now, if your company is not in the retail sector, you may not find this research to be especially interesting. If your business model does not involve people standing in line and waiting to have interactions with your personnel, you might think that these suggestions can’t help you. Let me suggest, however, that they key finding here isn’t about lines or routing them, but about the people waiting in them. Is there some way that your company could improve your customers’ perception of how fairly you treat them? Granted, it might take something more complex than a single, serpentine line and a sign that says “please wait here for next available register,” but can you think of anything that might help convince people that they really are getting served ahead of the people who got in line after they did? It might be worth considering…