Chapter Objectives

• Emphasize the importance of providing fast service as a competitive advantage to companies.
• Show the relationship between customer expectations, customer perceptions, and customer satisfaction as they pertain to waiting time.
• Identify the various factors that can affect customer satisfaction with waiting time and provide a framework for showing managers which of these factors are under their control.
• Demonstrate how service managers can design their operations and train their employees to provide faster service without incurring any additional costs.
• Illustrate how technology can assist companies in providing faster service to their customers.

Supplement Objectives

• Introduce the major characteristics that exist in waiting lines and describe how they can impact a customer's waiting time.
• Identify the various constraints and/or conditions that waiting line theory and its associated equations require for the results to be valid.
• Present waiting line theory in the form of a set of equations that represent various types of waiting line configurations that can be encountered.