Achieving your biggest business goals might not happen the way you anticipated. The road to success often comes by thinking outside the box. Are you relating your business goals to your queuing strategy? Perhaps the queue is exactly where you have the opportunity to meet your goals, and do an even better job of satisfying customers at the same time.
Here are 4 business goals that can be met with the right queue management solutions:
Business Goal #1: Increase agent productivity
Managers and customers grow equally frustrated at the sight of unproductive service agents, especially when there are customers waiting to be served. Agent productivity is also negatively impacted by agents who sit on the outskirts of a long line, out of the immediate line of sight of waiting customers.
Think of the long service desks at an airport, for example, where an open agent might sit waiting several seconds or even longer for the next customer in line to notice they are available. What’s worse is knowing that some employees will use this idle time to purposely “slack off” in between customers.
Solution: A call-forward queuing system working with your single-line queue increases agent productivity and reduces undesirable downtime. A call-forward system can automatically monitor station activity, and through studies, we have found that this makes those “outlier” stations more productive. Those stations actually increase their transactions per hour to be more in line with stations closer to the queue.
Business Goal #2: Disperse waiting crowds
A long line or crowded waiting area may make you look popular, but from a customer standpoint, the thought of entering a throng of people with no end in sight is rarely appealing. You want to stay a beloved business that brings in the crowds without losing your existing customers or intimidating potential new patrons.
Solution: The virtual queue eliminates the waiting line, and disperses groups of people. With an on-site kiosk check-in or mobile queuing option, your customers can “get in line” and then do whatever they want wherever they choose while they wait for service. Your virtual queue can be equipped with text message notifications notifying customers about their impending turn with a service agent.
No one needs to hang around hoping to snag a sales rep or argue that they were next in line. The proof is in the virtual registration, a technology that makes businesses more streamlined and makes customers happier.
Business Goal #3: Keep wait times in check
For some reason, you experience customer overflow at unexpected times. You think you know when the number of patrons in your business will exceed the norm, but then you’re surprised again. You pay attention to the queue but it still gets out of control and you don’t have the staff to accommodate it – or, you have too much staff at the ready and not enough customers to keep them busy.
Solution: Intelligent queue management systems do the hard work of people counting and footfall analytics. Find out when people arrive, when they leave, when your place of business is busy, and when it’s slow. Install sensor-equipped stanchions that count people as they enter, move through, and leave your queue.
Be notified via text or email in real time about an uptick in the number of customers or a queue that has fallen shy of preset parameters. And do a better job of planning staffing schedules thanks to accurate historical data that shows patterns of when traffic increases and decreases.
Business Goal #4: Boost impulse sales
There is always room to improve the bottom line, and encouraging impulse sales is a sure way to make this happen. But are your efforts working as well as they could be? Is the merchandise displayed properly? Are you leveraging the opportunity to keep customers shopping even while they wait in line?
Solution: A queue is only as good as its organization, and so is in-queue merchandising. If you want to really encourage the people waiting in your queue to continue their shopping while they wait, make the merchandise on display as appealing as possible.
Think about your customer and what height is the right height for the products – should they be hung from a rack, displayed on a table, or up for grabs in a display bowl or basket? Are you catering to adults and children? Have you provided digital screens to provide more information about impulse items that will encourage the customer to pick it up at the last minute?
The right in-queue merchandising configuration is the difference between a last-minute sale and a “Thanks, this is all I need right now.” Today’s queuing solutions offer businesses of all shapes and sizes, retail or service-oriented, options for improving business results. Consider your biggest business goals, and then think about how they can be served by improving your queue.
Ready to talk business? Contact a Lavi expert for advice about your unique queuing needs.
