Recently, Professor Zhang Jianghua from School of Management of Shandong University, in collaboration with Zhang Ruijie from China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Han Xiaohua from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS), Wang Rowan from Southern University of Science and Technology (SUST), and Zhang Yinghao from University of Cincinnati (U.S.), published a paper on the research result, “Please don't make me wait! Influence of customers’ waiting preference and no-show behavior on appointment systems”, in the 6th issue of Production and Operations Management in 2023. Professor Zhang Jianghua is the co-author and co-corresponding author, and Shandong University is the corresponding author affiliation. This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
In reality, appointment systems are widely used in many service organizations. The simplest and most common model is the equal-spaced (ES) appointment system, in which successive arrivals are made at equal intervals. However, inconsistencies in the average waiting time of customers are often observed in such systems, and customers in the later appointment status are expected to wait longer, which in turn leads to a greater likelihood of them abandoning the appointment, resulting in missed appointments. To address this problem, the paper investigates a novel equal-waiting (EW) appointment system in which customers’ expected waiting time is approximately equal. Through a series of controlled laboratory experiments, the paper finds that the EW system increases the attractiveness of later appointments and that customers who are willing to accept these appointments are more likely to keep an appointment. At the same time, the paper incorporates individual-level preferences and missed appointments into the model in order to assess their impact on system performance. The paper finds that EW systems can significantly increase customer show-up rates and improve system utilization compared to traditional ES systems. The paper’s research provides a behavioral basis for analyzing customer behavior in queuing environments and contributes to advancing behavioral queuing theory by incorporating individual behavior into queuing models.
Production and Operations Management is the journal of the International Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) and one of the UTD24 journals, FT50 journals and ABS 4-star journals, which is the top international journal in the field of operations management.
