A Cost-Based Model for Improving Customer Waiting Times

The effective management of a service organization requires measuring system performance on many attributes. Customer waiting time is inherent to nearly all service operations and represents a system attribute that is of high concern to both the customers who engage service and the managers of the service operation who are responsible for providing services. Effective performance measures of all system attributes are required to improve service quality. In this paper we present a cost-based, performance model for evaluating the expected cost of untimely customer waiting times for services within a service organization. The present worth of the expected costs due to untimely waiting that accrue over a finite time horizon provide management with input for justifying financial investment to support a continuous improvement program to improve service quality through the reduction of the variability in customer waiting time.