Examples of our work

Modelling work conducted on research undertaken to understand the factors influencing the time customers spent queuing at a national bank.

Examples of our Work - Finance, Investment and Insurance Market Research

Background

The client was a research agency who had collected extensive data for their client, a national bank, to determine the length of time customers spent waiting to be served. Data was available for many different branches of the bank over all opening hours and all months of the year.

Our client commissioned PCP to undertake a statistical analysis to determine how the length of time queuing was affected by factors such as time of day, day of week and number of staff serving

Objectives

• To identify the factors influencing queuing time so that queues could be kept to a minimum by allocating an appropriate number of staff to serve on the till.

Methodology

A statistical model was created using the data provided by the research agency. Data used included tens of thousands of observations produced by the research agency, showing queuing time and the circumstances applying at the time of the observation.

Outcome

The analysis succeeded in “explaining” a large part of the variation in queuing time using a mixture of local factors such as pay-days, market days, levels of income and number of staff servicing the tills and more general factors such as day of week, time of day, seasonality and the state of the economy.

Recommendations were made as to the optimal number of staff to employ on the till at any particular time using different assumptions about what represented an “acceptable” time for a customer to queue