Expectations: ITIL and the airport

In delivering IT services, you often find yourself working in the area of expectations. More precisely setting expectations. The starting point for expectation setting in this article is in an airport. In Houston.

In Houston airport, executives were puzzled about complaints in the baggage handling area. Even after having optimized the baggage claim process, so passengers only waited 8 minutes, they still complained. By deep diving into the study material, they learned an important lesson. What happened next was an act of brilliance.

Houston airport chose to move the arrival gates away from the baggage claim area. So instead walking 1 minute and waiting 7 minutes for the baggage, passengers now walked 6 times as long to the baggage claim area. The percentage waiting time dropped from 88% to a minimum. The amount of complaints similarly dropped to almost zero.

The psychology of waiting

The phenomena above is from the area of operations management. More specifically the area of queuing theory and the psychology of queues. The psychology of waiting is an amount of factors that impacts the experience of waiting.

These factors are actively used by the military during training. In military training, a crisis has to be simulated. However, the time frame is often smaller than in real situations. Therefore, the military require factors to increase the stress level in a short timeframe. If you have done military service, I am sure you can remember some of them. For example, soldiers are asked to wait, but no for how long; or walk, but not for how long.

This is somewhat the same reason you find mirrors in elevators. People were in the start of the former century complaining about waiting time in the elevators. By installing mirrors, the wait became occupied and did not feel as long.

Expectation setting in IT Service Management

The area is expectation setting during queuing. In IT Service Management and in ITIL, we often use expectation setting many places. This is done indirectly in all the processes as they all have interactions and hence the possibility of creating af history of expectations. The past experience presents expectations to the future. From a user point of view, the indirect expectations are created in the processes that interact with end-users. Those are predominantly in

• Incident Management
• Request Fulfillment
• Access Management
• Service Reporting
• Service Desk (a function, not a process)

However, more directly expectations are molded in the proceses of:

• Service Level Management

In this area, the SLA – Service Level Agreements – are created from requirements and maintained. They ultimately define the baseline for setting the expectations at the users. However, SLAs and the Service Level Agreements are often kept at a management level, which makes it hard for users to grasp this baseline.

After a very long introduction: What can we learn from this in IT Service Management? The short version is: In the areas of queuing in IT Service Management, we can with relatively few means make sure that the end-user or customer experience is improved eventhough the seemingly same service is delivered.

Which leads to the next question: Where in IT Service Management to we work with queueing? Each time we wait for support, i.e. while waiting for Service Desk in the phone, by chat or through mail – or each time a case is recorded and not solved whether it is an Incident, Service Request, Problem, Change or similar.

I have tried to present some ideas to counter the dissatisfaction related to queuing. If you have more, please share them:

• When creating a case, make sure that the creator or user know what the expected close date is. This means that the terms and targets defined in the SLA is now visible to the user.
• If the case goes into pending or similar, make sure that the requestor knows that the SLA clock has stopped until he has reacted with information on the current SLA level and amount of time left on the SLA clock.
• When waiting in phone queue, make a small questionnaire or quiz which could have questions that only can be answered from information from the company’s webpage. The speak could start by “start the questionnaire now and finish when call is over. Just stay on the line”. The same could be done in relation to a starting chat session.

This is an example, where IT Service Management can learn from the solutions from the area of Operations Management.

Wanna’ read more?

Article from NY times on waiting, mirrors and the airport
Houston airport moves baggage to improve customer satisfaction