Wait.
Wait some more. How about waiting for five minutes and 13 seconds before you get service?
That may not sound like a long time, but that wait period placed Baltimore as the worst of 25 cities in customer service, according to a recently released survey by the Mystery Shopping Providers Association.
In other words, Baltimore customers had the longest wait periods overall.
The results were based on a national surveygeared to measure the average amount of time people spend waiting in line at the grocery store, to see a bank teller, to purchase clothes or get fast food, according to the release announcing the results.
The 2006 Wait Time Survey got responses from more than 10,000 mystery shoppers. The results help determine if a customer would return to the business for service, which the survey dubbed a return ratio.
“Baltimore had the worst return ratio of the 25 U.S. cities surveyed, at 77.3 percent,” said John Swinburn, executive director of the association, which is based in New York.
“This means that only 77.3 percent of shoppers would return to the same location in Baltimore based on the wait time.”
Baltimore scored poorly in grocery store waits ? 24th out 25 cities ? and fine dining, where the city was dead last.
But a closer look at specific business categories revealed that Baltimore ranks high in some areas.
In banking, for instance, Baltimore came in third place. The average wait for a bank teller in Baltimore is one minute, 50 seconds. That compares to Pittsburgh, the worst city, with a six minute and 50 second wait to see a teller.
The quick bank service didn?t surprise Ann Clair, managing director of relationship sales culture at Provident Bank in Baltimore.
She said Provident uses a electronic tracking system that determines how much time a customer spends at a teller for any transaction.
The information can be used to schedule tellers almost by the hour. For example, many Provident banks are busy on Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays, and thus, branch managers hire part-time tellers to work those days.
The bank also schedules lunch breaks for about 10:30 a.m. so that tellers are available during the lunch crunch.
“The banking industry is extremely competitive in Baltimore and what does differentiate one bank from another is customer service,” Clair said.
