Bonnie McGeer delved into the matter in a 2005 article in American Banker. It turns out the answer is five.*

• Five minutes is the maximum acceptable wait time.
• Five minutes is the maximum acceptable transaction time.
• And five is the maximum acceptable number of people in a queue.

Technology, training and branch design can certainly help improve performance on these metrics. But what if you’ve done everything you can do and the queues, transactions and wait times are still too long?

Then it’s time to work on perception. Customers’ perception of wait times and queue lengths might be just as important as the actual wait.

In our work with an number of large U.S. and European banks, we’ve discovered that the proper placement of digital media helped reduce perceived wait time by as much as 62%.

The concept is simple enough: keep customers occupied and they’re more likely to forgive the long wait. If you can entertain them, you’re doing even better. The true win (a “home run,” as we like to say in the U.S.) is to turn the queue into an opportunity to engage and educate customers — and prompt inquiries — in an entertaining way.

*McGeer credits Brickstream as the source of this data.

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Update: I found this on Paul Flannigan’s Experiate blog, which seems to confirm our own observations:

“The role of Digital Signage in any environment impacts not only the shopping behaviors, but also the psychological effects of the time spent in the store. In a recent study, 45% of all customers interviewed had a perceived wait time of five minutes less than those interviewed in a store without a digital signage network. In the same study, 68% of all customers interviewed prefer to shop at a store with digital signage.”

Photo credit: upton