At the end of each year, we review our most popular blog articles from the past 12 months. Looking at what our readers were drawn to tells us a lot about where your challenges were this year and where you might be looking for help in the year ahead. This year’s top articles centered on avoiding lost business as a result of your customer waiting lines. Everything from tips to make your wait times shorter to strategies for evaluating the impact of wait times on customer satisfaction.
Here is a round up of our top 7 articles based on the number of times each article was visited.
1. How to Prevent Balking, Jockeying and Reneging in Your Waiting Lines
What happens when there is an upset in the balance of customers waiting and service capacity? Long lines form, customer frustrations rise, and customers can exhibit 3 common reactions. They may decide that the queue is too long and leave, or balk. They may enter the queue, but become impatient and leave, behavior known as reneging. Or, as it often happens in supermarkets, a customer may move, or jockey, from a seemingly longer queue to a shorter one or the one with customers whose shopping carts are lightly loaded.
This article looks at each of these responses and offers strategies you can use to prevent customer loss and frustration.
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2. 4 Clear Cut Ways to Keep Wait Times and Service Rates on Track
Customers will only wait so long. And service agents can only work so fast. So, what’s the formula for keeping wait times in check and service rates moving along at a productive rate? Even knowing that customers arrive at often unpredictable rates and transaction times can rise and fall in often unpredictable ways, you can optimize your success with the right analytics at your fingertips. When it comes to queuing, footfall analytics can provide the insight you need. This article explores 4 ways you can use insights from footfall analytics to achieve the right combination of acceptable wait times and productive service rates.
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3. 8 Ways to Design a Queue so Your Customers Don’t Walk Out
The sight of an unsightly queue can turn even the most faithful of customers on their heels to head for the exit. In fact, a study by Visa Contactless found 89% of people have left a shop or business because of an excessive queue. If your waiting lines aren’t worthy, you stand to lose immediate sales and long-term customer loyalty. So, what’s the answer?
If waiting in line is a reality of your business, there are ways to design your queues to maximize productivity and customer enjoyment. This article offers 8 suggestions.
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4. Queuing for the Entertainment Industry: 4 Ways to Keep Guests Engaged
Event venues, sports stadiums, museums, performance centers, theme parks, and other entertainment businesses have a high bar to reach when it comes to the guest experience and a high price to pay for a poor one. When a guest’s experience is bogged down by poorly-managed crowds, slow-moving queues, or a disorganized flow of foot traffic, the negative reviews can have far-reaching consequences.
You want to be known for the experience you create, regardless of the crowds. So, how can you improve? This article highlights 4 ways to keep your guests engaged even during the not-so-fun times of waiting in line or navigating through a crowded environment.
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5. 5 Crucial Questions to Evaluate the Health of Your Queue Management System
There are as many ways to manage queues as there are reasons to optimize the efficiency of your queuing system. Everything from a pen and paper check in process at a doctor’s office, to a single line queue at a pharmacy, to a more automated virtual queuing system at the DMV can help serve people more efficiently. But how can you be sure the queue management system you’ve chosen is the optimal solution for your unique business?
When you consider customers are likely to abandon a queue after only 2 or 3 minutes if it's not moving fast enough, it pays to get it right. This article features 5 questions to help you evaluate the health of your existing queue management system.
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6. 3 Queuing Practices You Should be Implementing ASAP
Queue management is something just about every business must address. Whether you consider queue management critical to success or just a necessary evil, chances are, your customers want to see you improve. And if you don’t, chances are, your competitors will. To stay ahead of the game, here a few key practices you should implement ASAP.
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7. 3 Key Components of Any Successful Crowd Control Strategy
Crowd control is a loaded concept. It can involve everything from “controlling” crowds at a small community parade to crowd control at a large stadium. At either end of the spectrum, there are some basics to cover. Here we look at 3 components of a successful crowd control strategy when it comes to equipment.
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BONUS: 5 Pro Tips for a Better Waiting Line Experience
Number 8 on our list of top blogs from 2017 is this one. 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. This article features five pro tips to help you improve.
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