At QLESS, we have been helping customer-facing teams optimize their operations for nearly two decades. For this paper, we analyzed data from 11 million service interactions across DMVs, healthcare, higher education, and retail. One issue we saw time and time again is the out sized impact that a small number of customers have on the service time.
In fact, we typically see that half of a team's active service time is spent helping just 9-16% of customers! With the other half of their time, teams are able to serve the other 84-91%.
The fact that some customers take much longer to resolve than others is consistent with our intuition, although the amount of time they take up can be surprising. Buried in this reality is the truly counter-intuitive insight.
The more time that is spent helping a customer, the more additional time they are likely to need; continuing to service a customer extends the remaining service time instead of reducing it.
By the time an interaction reaches the average service time, it’s already on track to take twice as long as average or more.
To uncover the roots of this paradox, let’s look at some actual operational data. This chart shows how much total time goes to serving all customers at a DMV:
The dark green area shows, for a given service duration, what percent of customers require at least that much time. The light green area shows what percent of employee capacity - measured in time spent working - goes to those customers.
The vast majority of customers are served quickly with little effort... in fact, half of the customers are served in less than four minutes, leaving a select few consume the lion's share of resources.
While 91% of customers at this DMV have been helped in less than 12 minutes, half of employee effort will end up going to the other 9% of time-consuming customers who are still going.
Half of this DMV’s service time goes to serving less than one tenth of customers! Across industries, it’s customary to see 10-20% of customers using half of your workforce’s time. Here’s how service time breaks down in DMV, education, retail, and healthcare:
What's even more bizarre is what happens when you lean in to help a difficult customer.
Suppose a team member has been helping a customer for 10 minutes, and you know from experience that this service takes an average of 15 minutes. How much more time will the service take? 5 more minutes, right? Unbelievably, the answer is another 15 minutes! This is one of the most bizarre and counterintuitive facts about running a service center.
The longer a service interaction lasts, the more additional time it's expected to require for completion.
Spending another minute helping these outlier customers doesn't add just one more minute to the expected time - it actually increases the likelihood of needing even more time. It's as if these interactions have their own gravity, pulling in more and more resources the longer they persist.
To illustrate this, imagine you're untangling a ball of yarn. At first, you make quick progress, easily loosening the outer layers. But as you continue, you find that each strand you pull affects multiple others, creating new knots even as you work to undo existing ones. The deeper you go, the more complex the problem becomes, and the more time each subsequent action requires.
This compounding effect stems from several factors that emerge as the customer is served:
This compounding effect stems from several factors that emerge as the customer is served:
As time passes, it becomes clear that critical information or documentation is missing.
Simple solutions have been exhausted, leaving only complex ones.
Both the customer and the service team member may become increasingly stressed, hampering effective problem-solving.
The sinking feeling that you’re getting further away from resolution even as you work with a challenging service interaction isn’t just a feeling - it’s a reality proven out by the data. The good news is that these long haul customers are a ripe opportunity for massive improvements in efficiency!
The DMV we worked with in this example typically spends half their time on 270 “easy” interactions (3.5 minutes each), and the other half of their time on 30 “hard” interactions (31 minutes each).
Reducing these hard interactions to 20 minutes would save about 5 hours of dedicated service time per week—the average output of a full time employee. This translates to increased productivity without hiring and leaves you with a calmer waiting room, more relaxed staff, and ultimately happier customers overall.
QLESS Service Intelligence with Live Insights lets managers spot delays in real-time, allocate resources better, and clear bottlenecks with up-to-the-minute service metrics.
QLESS Service Intelligence makes quick work of understanding historical transaction data - allowing you to quickly identify and drill down to problem transactions.
Start serving customers before they arrive with automated, customized notifications. Send reminders with appointment instructions so they’re always prepared
Harness QLESS Service Intelligence Customer Insights to analyze CSAT trends. Deep dive into CSAT scores with dynamic filtering to fine-tune operations and keep customers satisfied.
The paradox of service - that long interactions tend to spiral into longer interactions - is not an insurmountable obstacle. It's a leverage point that can be used to dramatically improve service operations, once properly understood.
By focusing on the small percentage of interactions that consume a disproportionate amount of resources, you can unlock significant improvements in efficiency and customer satisfaction. This isn't about working faster or pushing staff harder; it's about working smarter, understanding the true nature of service interactions, and designing systems that address the root causes of time-intensive cases.
In a world where customer expectations are constantly rising, and resources are often constrained, this insight offers a path to delivering better service without increasing costs. It's a paradigm shift that challenges our intuitions but offers immense rewards for those willing to embrace it.
The question now is not whether we can afford to change our approach to service, but whether we can afford not to.
