Every retailer, from the smallest coffee shop to the largest brick-and-mortar store, has the potential to benefit from intelligent queue management. Powerful queuing analytics delivered through an intelligent queue management system can allow you to track customer flow, service levels, and queue lengths. Queue management technology eliminates guessing about the effectiveness of your queue, instead providing valuable insight to help improve operations and, most importantly, the customer experience. Here are five key benefits of intelligent queue management that can help improve retail queues:
Benefit #1: Count the number of customers in each queue.
Knowing the number of customers in your queue at any given time is probably the most basic yet powerful metric for managing current queue conditions and forecasting what queues will be like in an hour, at the same time next week, or even in a year. With access to real-time and historical data concerning queue counts, you can identify and anticipate peak times and reassign service agents to help at busy times or close down unneeded registers to keep staff productive with other tasks.
Benefit #2: Measure average waiting times of customers.
How long is it taking for customers to get through the waiting line? Too long? Not long enough? With an intelligent queue management system you can measure average wait times against abandonment rates and front-end merchandise purchases to find just the right balance between wait times, customer satisfaction, and profitability.
Benefit #3: Monitor customer arrival rates.
Has your waiting line just been inundated with a large flux of traffic? Or have service rates just taken a sharp downturn? Knowing the ups and downs of customer flow in your waiting lines is invaluable, especially for retailers. An intelligent queue management system can keep an eye on your queues so you can act quickly to handle unexpectedly lengthy (or short) queues.
Benefit #4: Assess service point utilization.
If you are staffing checkout queues throughout your store to serve customers, you want to know that these queues are actually being utilized. Your service points become more transparent with the assistance of a queue management system, and you can quickly see which service stations are open so that customers can be redirected to open cashiers or underutilized queues in order to keep lines moving and keep a positive customer experience on track.
Benefit #5: Receive real-time alerts to head off problems before they escalate.
No manager wants to find out about queuing issues after they are already causing problems. With an intelligent queue management system in place, you can make use of powerful web-style dashboards that recognize when a queue has fallen out of compliance. Service alerts can be sent directly from a queue management system to a manager via email or text, providing real-time and actionable information to address issues accordingly before they become a problem. An intelligent queue management system for a retail environment can offer numerous benefits to the business, the managers, service agents, and customers.
