Wait or No Wait? Examining the Effect of Virtual Queuing on Customer Satisfaction (DSI-SRP)
This DSI-SRP fellowship funded Ao Qu to work in the laboratory of Professor Kejia Hu in the Owen Graduate School of Management during the summer of 2020. Ao anticipates graduating in May 2022 with a majors in Math and Economics and a minor in Scientific Computing.
The project funded by this fellowship aimed to understand how long wait times affect customers’ behaviors and firms’ financial performance. Long waiting times for services cause abandoning and switching behavior in customers, which negatively affects firms’ financial performance. Many firms adopt practices to reduce customers’ perceived waiting time. In this research project, via empirical evidence from 1.2 million online customer reviews of more than 4,000 U.S. restaurants, Ao and Professor Hu examined the impact of the practice of virtual queuing (VQ), a service that allows customers to join the waitlist remotely, on customer satisfaction. To process and label the textual review data, Ao employed data analysis and machine learning techniques that she learned from workshops hosted by DSI in the summer of 2019. The results were exciting and Ao and Professor Hu are nearing completion of a journal paper, which they plan to submit to Management Science, a top journal in the field of operations management, in summer 2021. They found that VQ significantly reduces customers’ complaints about pre-process waiting and increases their overall satisfaction but does not increase their in-process waiting complaints. In addition, they found that when providers adopt VQ, the positive effects are relatively immediate, not lagged. Further, the VQ effects are amplified if providers are perceived to offer low value or have high substitutability. The findings of their study urge providers to adopt VQ from the beginning stage of the service process to improve the efficiency of their operations. In this way, they can better satisfy customers’ needs, reduce their complaints, and achieve enhanced financial performance.
In addition to receiving support through a DSI-SRP fellowship, this project was supported and facilitated by the DSI Data Science Team through their regular summer workshops and demo sessions.