Your queue has a story to tell. Are you listening?
Below the surface of your waiting lines lives a world of data that can offer powerful insights into the trends, patterns, and opportunities that can be used to optimize operations. By extracting this key information, you can benchmark wait times, service rates, customer flow, and other KPI events to improve performance and meet your business goals.
To drive your queue operations, here are some metrics you should track:
1. How long are customers waiting in line?
Waiting in long lines is known to directly impact customer satisfaction and even loyalty. Customers will actively avoid going to businesses where they’ve previously experienced a long wait in line. So, it’s worthwhile to measure and monitor your wait times to determine exactly how long your customers are willing to wait.
From there, you can decide whether the current average wait is acceptable, or steps should be taken to decrease wait times. Continually monitoring this data will allow you to observe any changes to keep the waiting experience positive for customers.
2. How long does it take to serve each customer?
The waiting experience is defined from the moment a customer stands in line to the time they walk out the door. How long a customer spends in service, therefore, directly adds to their overall wait, as well as that of those in line behind them.
Breaking down the total wait into its individual components can clue you into what aspects of the waiting experience take longer than others. Specifically, you can benchmark transactions per time period to optimize service delivery and operational efficiency to serve customers faster without compromising on service quality.
3. What do your traffic trends look like?
There are specific times of the year when you can expect your business to experience a surge of customers, such as Black Friday for retailers. These events tend to be fairly predictable.
But, what about the less predictable traffic trends? This refers to your standard, day-to-day foot traffic trends. While it’s feasible to simply observe when customer volume seems greater than usual, what exactly is the usual in terms of total customers? More than that, what are the specific trends as to when business is likely to be slow and when can you expect the biggest crowds? This information is critical to optimizing your labor schedule to ensure you have just the right amount of staff on hand to meet customer volume and deliver exceptional service.
These are just the basics; there are so many foot traffic performance metrics for your business to keep an eye on. Learn more about queue analytics and people counting tools that use real-time and historical data to keep your business moving forward – one line at a time.
