Washington, Feb 5 (IANS) Time flies when you're with friends, but minutes seem like hours when you await your turn at the ticket counter.

Our ideas of 'time' are highly subjective and can depend on a stimulus - or the lack of one - in our environment.

Now Dan Zakay, psychology professor at Tel Aviv University (TAU) has empirical evidence to show businesses how to use waiting time to their best advantage.

'Billions of dollars are at stake when customers are waiting, be it on the phone, at an Internet e-commerce site, or in a department store,' he says.

'If people feel they're waiting too long, they'll hang up or walk away and spend their money elsewhere.'

His recent research, suggests that businesses can often keep those customers from leaving with a few simple strategies. Zakay asked his subjects to estimate and subjectively describe intervals of time.

In the first group, 50 participants were placed in a waiting room with nothing to do, while in another participants were allowed to watch cartoons and TV as they waited the same amount of time.

Those in the second group reported they had a much shorter wait; at least 50 percent less than those who had nothing to do.

Over the years, Zakay has been measuring the difference between objective and subjective time through a battery of various cognitive experiments.

There is a consistent difference in how we 'feel' time, he says, and some of this basic understanding of the cognitive processes that measure time may prove to be a boon to business sales.

'When people are waiting in line, they have already committed to buying something, but because they don't like to wait, that commitment can change,' Zakay explains.

'The value of waiting, so to speak, is worth billions of dollars. Clients are easy to lose and hard to keep, especially when customers call in to buy something.'

The question of how consumers 'feel' time is very important to making the initial sale and turning them into repeat customers, says Zakay, according to a university release.

His models can be used to manipulate people's perceptions so that they feel they're waiting a shorter period of time.

These findings were published in NeuroQuantology.