Queue Configurations and Servers’ Customer Orientation : An Experimental Investigation

Contrary to traditional queueing theory, recent field studies in health care and call centers indicate that pooling queues may not lead to operational efficiencies relative to dedicated queues. We use a series of three experiments to examine the conditions under which this may be the case and to test servers’ customer orientation as a behavioral mechanism that may explain why. We find that in contexts where servers may build more of a human connection to their customers, dedicated queues outperform pooled queues with respect to speed without sacrificing quality; we find no difference in performance in contexts where they are less likely to build a connection to their customers. This effect of queue configuration on performance is mediated by the servers’ level of customer orientation, which we measure along two dimensions. Specifically, the servers’ cognitive awareness of customers in queue partially mediates the effect while their psychological ownership of customers in queue partially suppresses it. We also examine whether higher levels of customer orientation and performance persist across changes in the queue configuration. We find that higher levels of customer orientation persist across a change in queue configuration, but this is not the case for shorter processing times. In other words, the gains in customer orientation when servers go from being in a pooled queue to a dedicated queue outweigh the losses in customer orientation when they experience the queue configurations in the opposite order, but the same does not hold for operational performance