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

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 somet...