Indians across the country are getting increasingly frustrated and losing their patience with the serpentine queues for banking, ticketing and bill payments.

'Bank' queues have been identified as the single-biggest queue problem by 84 per cent of the respondents to a just-released NCR Corporation Queue Frustration survey conducted by ACNielsen. They spend close to an hour waiting in queues.

This is closely followed by 'ticketing' queues at 80 per cent and 'bill payment' queues at 27 per cent.

The survey covered 1,782 working men and women in the age group of 25-45 years across major cities in India including Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore.

The survey also reveals that 26 per cent of the all-India respondents had little patience with service providers too, having switched to another service provider offering better self-service solutions.

The survey also reveals that waiting in queues goes much beyond frustration as 60 per cent of respondents got really angry, 23 per cent respondents admit to have cancelled or rescheduled important business plans, 22 per cent of respondents had an argument, and 20 per cent have pushed in line as a result of queue frustration.

Despite many organisations attempting to deal with queuing problems, the issue continues to affect customer retention as consumers remain prepared to walk away from organisations where they experience problems with queues.

The survey indicates that consumers want businesses to create an area with another line as a way to reduce waiting time. The survey also notes that strategic integration of self-service solutions with smarter staff deployment can be an option to reduce queues and improve overall service.

As a measure to counter queue frustration, 46 per cent of all-India respondents suggested more self-service solutions, 45 per cent of the respondents wanted more workers and 35 per cent wanted the waiting time to be displayed.

Almost 48 per cent of the respondents said additional lines could be the solution to reduce queue frustration.

Deployment of self-service solution frees up staff to deliver on these demands. Such best practices can be shared and applied across sectors such as banking, travel (rail ticketing) and retail.