Americans spend roughly 912 days waiting in line over the course of a lifetime. That’s two and a half years! Perhaps worse than the time lost waiting in line, are the feelings of stress, boredom, and annoyance that make the wait especially frustrating.
As a business, customers waiting in line can be a clear sign of success. It means you have plenty of customers to serve. So it’s not necessarily your goal to eliminate the waiting line completely, but rather to optimize wait times and deliver a better experience for customers who await service.
We’ve learned a lot about queue management over our 35-year history of helping companies across industries with solutions to cut wait times and improve the customer experience. Here are five pro tips to help you improve:
1. Call customers forward electronically.
Professional queue managers know that one of the most overlooked aspects of queuing is the call forward process. The efficiency with which you call the next customer to the next available cashier or service station can have a compounding impact on overall wait times, staff productivity, and customer satisfaction.
Wireless electronic queuing technology that uses digital signage and station lights can streamline the way agents hail customers. The result is a more efficient hailing process that increases customer flow and drives down average wait times.
2. Occupy (and profit) with in-queue merchandising.
The time your customers spend waiting in line could become your time to generate higher profits. When you bring merchandising into the queue, wasted space becomes a virtual profit center that can drive impulse sales and, keep your customers occupied and less focused on the wait, making the wait time feel shorter. Look for a merchandising system that is versatile, lightweight, and long-lasting to give you the flexibility you need to display your merchandise effectively while maximizing your floor space and your investment. Learn more with our Guide to In-Queue Merchandising
3. Inform and entertain with digital signage.
There are endless ways to use digital signage displays to hail customers from their spot in line and communicate with those who remain in the queue. Digital monitors can be programmed to display promotions, information, videos, advertising stills, and other types of media to keep waiting guests distracted and entertained. Notably, between-queue messaging can decrease perceived wait times up to 40 percent and, for retail environments, can increase impulse sales at checkout by as much as 400 percent.
4. Mind your queue formation.
Studies show that people tend to overestimate the time they spend standing in line. When the line feels unfair to customers, their wait time feels even longer and perceived unfairness can ruin an otherwise positive experience. Consider fairness and productivity when planning your queue formation. A single line queue leading to multiple servers automatically instills fairness by enforcing a first-come first-served process. A single line can also reduce actual wait times by up to 30%.
5. Put analytics to work.
Without insight into “queue performance indicators” such as wait times, arrival and service rates, and other traffic trends, businesses are left to hope customers won’t complain or walk away. Queue analytics allows you to proactively monitor your queues. And today, there are affordable solutions for people-counting, service-time monitoring, and real-time queue analytics to help you catch problems before they get out of control. With historical and real-time analytics and established alerts, you can anticipate heavy traffic flow to the queue and immediately deploy staff when wait times are approaching an acceptable limit.
Your queues influence how your customers feel about your business and whether they will return. How will you employ these pro tips to create a better experience in the weeks and months ahead?
