When Providing Wait Times, It Pays to Underpromise and Overdeliver

Virtual queues, or systems that allow you to hold your place without physically standing in line, have become commonplace in restaurants, call centers, and many other businesses — and how you build those systems can have a major impact on the customer’s experience. In this piece, the author shares key takeaways from over a decade’s worth of research on how companies can optimize their virtual queuing systems. Specifically, she suggests that providing wait time estimates can reduce customers’ average wait time, and that providing pessimistic estimates (i.e., telling customers they will have to wait longer than they actually will) can improve the customer experience. In addition, the research shows that providing more frequent progress updates also improves the customer experience, and that customers who wait for longer than expected will take longer when their turn finally arrives (suggesting that pessimistic estimates can also help businesses to increase throughput).