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An analysis of customer satisfaction with waiting times in a two‐stage service process
Author(s) -
Davis Mark M.,
Maggard Michael J.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
journal of operations management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.649
H-Index - 191
eISSN - 1873-1317
pISSN - 0272-6963
DOI - 10.1016/0272-6963(90)90158-a
Subject(s) - customer satisfaction , customer advocacy , customer retention , computer science , process management , customer to customer , service quality , voice of the customer , customer service assurance , service level objective , customer intelligence , business , service (business) , marketing , service provider , service design
A purely operational approach to providing customer service measures the speed of the service in terms of how long the customer actually waits prior to being served. A more appropriate method. perhaps, is to deal directly with the issue of customer service by measuring customer satisfaction with the wait. In this paper a model is developed which integrates the marketing perspective of customer satisfaction and the operations management perspective of customer waiting time. With this model, the goal of the service manager is to provide an acceptable level of customer satisfaction in lieu of a maximum acceptable average waiting time, which is the current practice. This new approach to defining customer service raises several interesting managerial issues in the design and staffing of a two‐stage (or, for that matter, a multi‐stage) process. For example, is a customer equally satisfied waiting the same amount of time before each stage in the process? If not, what type of strategy does the service manager employ in assigning workers to each of the stages? In order to address these issues, a major portion of this paper focuses on the definition and measurement of customer satisfaction. The application of the model to a real world situation is illustrated using empirical data collected in a two‐stage fast food operation. The results indicate that the speedy acknowledgement of customer arrivals into the system, that is, the prompt taking of customer orders, is more important to the customers than is the time waiting for their orders to be processed. In other words, a customer's wait prior to entering the first stage of the system impacts on customer satisfaction much more than the wait prior to entering stage two. The conclusion from this analysis is that in a sequential, multi‐stage process, management should design and staff the system so that the shortest wait for the customer occurs prior to the first stage.