The effect of post-sending delays on the behaviour and attitudes of telephone users

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Abstract
It is likely that the introduction of new techniques will alter the distribution of post-sending delays encountered on telephone systems. A study of the effects of the delays on the behaviour and attitudes of telephone users was therefore undertaken. An analysis of service observations showed that users wait longer than necessary before abandoning and that they hold longer on long-distance calls than local ones. It was shown experimentally that the duration of a delay affected the probability of premature call abandonment but not the efficiency of subsequent tone recognition. Three further experiments confirmed that customers can discriminate between delays which differ in duration by 2 s and that they react to them on the basis of their experience of local and long distance calls outside the laboratory. Impatience appeared usually to be caused by uncertainty as to the fate of the call, rather than by the length of the delay itself, although many subscribers reported that the length of a delay could sometimes be a source of annoyance even if it were no longer than they expected. Impatience typically remained low after ten seconds, and the delay might not be noticed, but any increase in the mean duration of delays seems likely to have a marked adverse effect on customers' attitude to the service. Resources could advantageously be devoted to reducing the variance of delays, rather than their mean, and especially to the prevention of occasional long delays. A comfort tone or announcement would help to reduce uncertainty if a delay exceeds normal length. There is no evidence that infrequent telephone users are more tolerant of delays than frequent users. No difference was found between ratings of delays with dial telephones and keyphones.

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