Location analysis based waiting time optimisation

Customer satisfaction is very important to keep customer retention for any food and retail stores. Waiting time has been found is one of the most important factors to influence customers’ shopping experience and purchase termination rate and customers’ perceptions of retailer service offerings. Increasing customer retention can be achieved by avoiding long waiting time queuing at the checkouts. This paper investigates the current different types of sensor-based technologies in location detection to capture the customers’ behavior and then provides a fundamental optimization mechanism to avoid the long waiting time economically. Various approaches to identify a person’s location are compared in terms of principle and operation. Each makes its contribution to controlling the resources in a better way depending on the expected number of customers at checkout. Through an experiment on a supermarket, this paper contributes value to the improvement of operational resource planning, overcapacity avoiding while not increasing or reducing queues and waiting time of customers. The recommendation that waiting time is perceived by customers as a factor of lower service quality to business managers is given finally.