In a 1981 hit that appeared in VH1’s Top 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs, the UK punk rock band The Clash asked, “Should I stay or should I go?” The question posed in their song is likely to be asked as often today as it was upon its release 30 years ago—and not just pertaining to matters of the heart, but to matters of business, too.
Every day millions of customers ask themselves, “Should I stay or should I go?” when finding themselves waiting in line for a service and not knowing how long their wait is likely to be. Shoppers may switch from one line to another in checkouts hoping to pick a faster-moving one. Web users might refresh their browsers in the hope that a chosen download will run faster. Customers contacting a telephone helpline may abandon a current call and call back later in the hope that the wait time will be shorter. We might be living in the fastest-moving, most information-saturated environment ever, but we still spend a considerable amount of our time waiting in line (or online).
Noting that the average American citizen can spend upwards of two years of his or her life waiting in line, researchers Narayan Janakiraman, Robert Meyer, and Stephen Hoch sought to identify the factors that will typically persuade people to stay in line, and what will convince them to abandon the wait completely. Their findings point to several small but important changes that any business or customer service organization can make that could lead to big improvements in customer retention, satisfaction, and service scores.
At the core of this research is the simple intuition that “a queue worth joining is a queue worth persisting in” is advice that is rarely taken. For example, studies have found that as many as a third of callers who are held in line when they contact a call center will hang up and dial again primarily as a result of pure impatience. Tellingly, few people ever benefit from such a strategy because they typically call back at some time in the future and their total cumulative wait time becomes much longer.
When viewed through the lens of persuasion science, deciding “Should I stay or should I go?” pits two fundamental human motivations against each other. On one hand the longer people wait in a queue, the more likely they are to focus their attention on alternative activities they could be accomplishing instead of waiting. Not attending to these alternative activities could be viewed as a “loss” and—given that a fundamental motivation that we all have is to avoid losing—people waiting in line might be motivated to abandon the wait simply to avoid any further loss.
However things are rarely as straightforward as they seem. A case could also be made that people who join a queue have made an active commitment, and therefore the principle of consistency might be activated, causing them to stay put. As each minute of waiting time passes it is possible that their motivation to stay in line actually increases the closer they get to their goal.
So in the context of this tension between avoiding loss and maintaining consistency, what do people typically do? In their studies Janakiraman and his colleagues find that most people make arguably the worst decision of all by abandoning their waits somewhere in the middle. No doubt that this less-than-optimal decision will likely be accompanied by feelings of annoyance, frustration, and displeasure—hardly a desirable situation if the company that these potential customers are waiting to do business with is your company.
This prompts a question: What can be done to mitigate these feelings and to reduce the number of customers who hang up before speaking with your organization? Some obvious answers would be to hire and train more phone staff or to reduce call wait times by analyzing demand and capacity and then managing it more efficiently. While all important, these seem like pretty big and costly endeavors. Given that this book is primarily concerned with deploying the smallest and least resource-intensive strategies, what else could be done? In their studies, which included several laboratory experiments as well as field data from a call center in India, Janakiraman and his colleagues tested an easily implemented SMALL BIG that showed good results: Simply providing those in line with distractions and other basic activities for them to engage in while waiting led to a significant reduction in dropped calls. Sounds fairly straightforward, but it works.
We wonder whether this might also provide one of those opportunities in business to turn what is a largely frustrating experience for most people into a positive, and to even create future loyalty. Financial institutions could provide customers waiting on phones with simple tips on money management via their automated voice system or, for customers in bank offices, with activities for kids to teach them about money. A restaurant hostess, rather than leaving those placemats that double as coloring activities for children on the tables, might hand them out to families that are waiting in line to be seated. Embassies experiencing long lines of visa applicants could provide useful distractions for people in the form of information sheets containing common phrases, translations, and insights on local customs such as tipping (or queuing!) that they will find helpful when they arrive.
On the subject of distractions we are reminded of two wonderful examples. The first was related to us by a reader of our INSIDE INFLUENCE blog who recounted a story of a customer who, on calling his cell phone provider, was told by the customer service agent that her system was running slow and in order to save him from waiting, she would call him back later. Having already waited some time to get through, this customer wasn’t going to give up the connection so easily and instead insisted that he stay on the line and wait. “Very well, sir,” replied the customer service agent, “if that’s the case then perhaps you would tell me your favorite song.” The customer was completely puzzled by such a random question but answered anyway. Imagine his sheer astonishment when, having replied “‘New York, New York’ by Frank Sinatra,” the customer service agent began singing it to him.
The second example comes from our UK editor who told us that after calling the Cats Protection Agency he was put on hold, but rather than hearing music, he instead heard the soothing sounds of cats purring.
So maybe the SMALL BIG here is for companies to allow people to personalize their choice of on-hold music while waiting. Our choice?
The Clash of course!