Jockeying, Balking and Reneging

Wondering what those terms are and what they have to do with those long queues that we spoke about in our previous medium post? So were we when we started off with some secondary and background research on queuing. It was to our surprise(or maybe not) that these three words are actually associated with queuing theory. Ever shied away from a line because its other end was just not visible? You just balked the queue, right there! Reneging was when you decided to quit because you lost patience due to the endless wait and Jockeying refers to when an impatient customer changes queues because they think their line is longer (aren’t we all guilty of this?). We love these fancy words and yes, the team will never talk about queues the same way!

Broadening the scope of our secondary research, we also looked into some analogous domains, where long queues most certainly existed and were also a lot more accessible, like grocery stores and restaurants. Taking a deeper dive into the psychology of waiting we discovered the differences between occupied & unoccupied wait time along with actual & perceived wait time and how each of these impacted a customer’s experience in line. With a combined knowledge of the two, we set off to do some Primary Research and observe a few lines ourselves!

The observations along with the secondary research engendered our fully-functional fool-proof pretotype. We gave our customers the option to either pick a buzzer (with which they could come directly for processing when it went off) or to stand in line with a finite known waiting time.

While the pretotype was a lot of fun to conduct it also confirmed most of the findings from our secondary research and we are currently looking into scaling this idea over a bigger set of participants.

Stay tuned for our Primary Research findings at the Pittsburgh Airport next week! Till then this is Team Flight Crew signing off.