Patent ID: 7778937

Claim:
An automated method for managing personal service transactions, comprising: continuously collecting and storing current service information in real-time with regard to service transactions provided to customers at a service establishment, processing the current service information to determine a current service throughput data for each unit time period in a given day and storing current service throughput data; processing the stored current service throughput data collected over a period of days, months and years to determine historical service throughput data; and in response to a customer request to obtain a service, providing the customer with an estimate of a waiting time for obtaining access to the service based on the customer's position in a waiting list queue, wherein providing an estimate of the waiting time comprises estimating a first waiting time using the stored current service throughput data for a previous unit time period, estimating a second waiting time based on the stored historical service throughput data and estimating the waiting time based on a weighted percentage of the first and second estimated waiting time values, wherein the estimated first waiting time is computed by employing the relation TA h =(MT s *C*K)/N where TA h is the estimated first waiting time, MT s is the average time in which a service transaction is completed during the previous unit time period, C is a current number of customers in the waiting list queue, K estimates a number of customers that fail to respond to a call to engage in a corresponding service transaction, and N is a total number of agents available to perform service transactions, and wherein said automated method is implemented in and executed by a computing device employing at least one storage device.