Summary
Situation: After increasing staff capacity, we counterintuitively experienced longer customer wait times.
Task: Identify how to reduce customer wait times while still maximizing the number of customers at the location.
Action: Analyzed data from both a software tool and a data collection project to determine actual visit durations.
Result: Discovered that almost all appointments were twice as long as scheduled. Recommended extending most appointment durations with a gap between customers.
Details
At a company where I once worked, we faced an unexpected challenge after hiring additional customer-facing staff. While the goal was to handle more customers while maintaining high-quality service, we noticed that customer wait times had paradoxically increased. I was tasked with investigating this issue.
Initially, every appointment type at the office was allotted 30 minutes in the appointment management tool. I extracted appointment reports and analyzed the check-in and check-out times across staff and appointment types to identify the root cause.
The data revealed that, despite the intended 30-minute duration, appointments were actually taking twice as long. Unfortunately, we lacked detailed insights into the entire customer journey to identify specific inefficiencies. Consequently, the best recommendation I could make at the time was to extend the visit durations.
Subsequently, we embarked on a comprehensive data collection project to gather the missing details of the customer visit flow. You can read about that project here.