Benefits of providing amenities to impatient waiting customers

摘要

This paper proposes an OR modelling approach to study the effect of managing queue reneging by providing amenities to improve customers' queueing experience. We evaluate quantitatively the changes in the servers' utilization and customers' satisfaction when the size and quality of the amenities are varied. We find that when the size of the amenities is increased to cover more and more customers, the incremental return in benefits will eventually diminish. So is the case when the quality of the amenities is improved to higher and higher standards for systems with sufficiently heavy workload. However, for systems with light workload, the models show that improving the quality of the amenities has an increasing incremental return in benefits.