Impact of customer impatience on a production service system

In this paper, we explore the impact of customer impatience on the performance of a production service system that consists of one production inventory subsystem and one service subsystem. It is inevitable that the un-storability of service makes customers wait in the production service system. Waiting for service easily leads to impatient behaviors. The impact of two kinds of impatient behaviors balk and reneging on the production service system performance is examined. The problem is formulated as a Markov system, then the stationary probability of the system is derived to conduct the performance evaluation. The results show that customer impatience has the different impact patterns on the two subsystems (i.e. production inventory subsystem and service subsystem) of the production service system. Specifically, customer impatience leads to the performance improvement of one subsystem along with the performance deterioration of the other subsystem. Meanwhile, service capacity plays an important role in the influence extent of customer impatience on the system performance. In addition, lower customer impatience does not necessarily improve system profit. Therefore, the management of the production service system with impatient customers will be more intractable. Some managerial insights and suggestions are proposed.