Customer reception: the cost of switching between requests
In customer reception, interruptions are often treated as a feature of the job rather than an organisational choice. The management question is specific: should internal requests interrupt an ongoing customer interaction, or should that interaction be protected until it is complete?
What the literature establishes
Joshua S. Rubinstein, David E. Meyer and Jeffrey E. Evans (2001, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance) demonstrated a time cost of task switching in controlled experiments, influenced notably by rule complexity. Moving from one activity to another requires reconfiguring cognitive control; it is not simply a matter of placing two operations side by side. These findings provide grounds for questioning the accumulation of channels in customer reception, without directly quantifying its cost in service settings.
Attention does not always follow the task switch
Sophie Leroy (2009, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) describes a complementary mechanism: some attention can remain attached to the previous task, particularly when it is unfinished, and impair performance on the next one. Returning to a customer after opening an internal message therefore does not guarantee that attention has fully returned along with eye contact. This application to customer reception is a working hypothesis, not a finding directly established at service counters.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that all interruptions should be eliminated. That would confuse a cognitive cost with an operational assessment: an urgent alert or information essential to handling the request may justify an interruption. The useful decision concerns which requests can wait, and who is responsible for receiving those that cannot. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
These studies measure neither satisfaction among service users in Berne nor error rates in multichannel reception. Experimental tasks do not reproduce the full range of interactions, language requirements and urgent situations encountered in practice. Counting interruptions is not enough either: interruptions that advance the request must be distinguished from those that divert attention without supplying useful information.
A practical check in Berne
Within SHR's « Accueil client » programme, a field exercise could be offered to a federal administration service, a public health organisation, a telecoms team or a precision manufacturing site in Berne: compare similar time slots with and without deferral of non-urgent internal requests. For each condition, divide the number of interactions in which previously supplied information has to be requested again by the total number of observed interactions, keeping staffing and request types comparable. Record aggregate counts only, without customer content, and also track waiting times to check that an improvement does not merely shift the cost to the queue. A lower proportion, without worse waiting times, would justify extending the trial, not yet establishing a universal rule. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Bern
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