Increasing the intensity of customer involvement in a service process

The intensity of self-service technologies is increasing in supermarkets, banking, insurance, flight check-in, etc. This trend is mostly due to advances in digitalisation and automation. A major decision in designing a hybrid-service system is to determine the number of servers (e.g., cashiers) and the number of self-service stations to be included in the checkout system. These decisions affect both the level of service given to the customer as measured by amount of time that the customer spends in the system, and the organisational operational cost. This article, using waiting line theory, examines considerations such as customer arrival pattern, service time, operational cost, learning, and forgetting, that should be taken into account when designing a checkout system. The article presents various examples that use quantitative methods to evaluate the impact of possible configurations of cashier and self-service stations.