Can a wait-in-line app improve the customer experience? Waiting in line can be such a hassle. Standing in a slow-moving queue with a bunch of strangers in some doctor's office, DMV building, or retail store is a grating experience. And wait times are by no means short. The average wait in line time at a doctor's office is over 18 minutes. At the DMV, the average wait time is 44 minutes before people receive service. Doesn't it feel like there has to be a better way?
Luckily, there is. We live in a world of limitless technological possibilities. We've photographed black holes and created an entire metaverse. Long queues should be a relic of the past at this point. And with the help of a wait-in-line app, long lines of customers congesting a store are no longer needed. Now we can add you to the list, and you can proceed on with your day instead of waiting. Waitlist technology has completely altered physical lines, and it is time for businesses to adapt.
A wait-in-line app is a mobile solution that allows people to check into lines remotely from their mobile phone. Customers can simply click onto the app on their cell phone, join the line from wherever they are, and receive updates and information about the line's progress. A waitlist app empowers customers with limitless freedom to wait as they please.
A wait-in-line app can have many features that help businesses improve efficiency and the customer experience. QLESS is the industry leader here, offering a full suite of features utilized by thousands of businesses across industries.
Let's dive into what exactly a wait-in-line mobile application offers businesses.
Customers are what drives your business. In every industry, keeping the customer in mind leads to success. Conversely, poor customer service and a lack of investment in customer happiness can cost businesses. The data surrounding this is apparent. According to CallMinder, $35.3 billion is lost by US businesses every year from customer churn due to avoidable customer experience issues.
How customers are treated is a significant indicator of whether they will stick around. Long lines and extended processing times are not exactly likely to endear a business to customers. Research from Zendesk showed that nearly 60% of people look at wait times as the most frustrating customer experience. Companies can't overlook this aspect of guest service.
So how can businesses trim their wait and ensure positive customer experiences? A virtual queuing app. These apps provide positive customer journeys by empowering customers to check in from anywhere they please. The software seamlessly manages the queue to ensure that the line moves at a drastically improved pace, and customers get reminders on their wait times throughout.
Wait times and physical queues are both aspects of business that customers universally loathe. No one wants to stand in a long line or sit in a crowded waiting room. No one wants to spend 30 minutes waiting for an appointment they had scheduled long ago. With QLESS and other waiting line apps, businesses can completely change this aspect of the customer experience.
When customers emerge from long lines, they often aren't in the best mood. That means staff at businesses with long waits often deal with irate customers. Navigating customer service situations with irritable customers takes a toll on staff and can lead to an unhappy work environment. But a customer journey management app reduces this problem while helping increase staff productivity.
Queue software has a range of applications, but one of the most critical aspects of the software is how it can increase staff productivity. You're probably wondering how an intelligent waitlist app boosts staff productivity, but the answer is simple. QLESS helps organize and structure staff's day-to-day for a more seamless workflow without constant disturbances.
QLESS has been shown to boost staff productivity by up to 90%. It uses machine learning and smart software to organize lines according to several factors. It can be automated to oversee the line for you, or staff can choose to control it themselves. The lines can be sorted by appointment type, employee they are seeing, and whether they are walk-ins or scheduled.
This saves staff from the burden of managing a line and having to organize and structure their entire day. Instead, customer flow is a smoother, seamless process, and staff can focus more on their work. A wait-in-line app enables a business to process additional customers faster.
Boosting staff productivity is essential, and creating a positive work environment is just as crucial. Staff deal with calmer customers, have a more organized day and can work without interruptions.
Aligning with the unique needs of your customers is important for businesses. Every consumer will have a different preferred communication style, and much of it is generational. For example, millennials and generation X are shown to prefer phone messaging and text to face-to-face communication or calls. Meanwhile, baby boomers prefer face-to-face interactions. Meeting your customers' communication needs is essential.
Smartphone technology is widespread across North America. 85% of Americans own a smartphone right now, meaning the vast majority of people that enter a business will have their smartphones with them. That is part of what makes a customer line management app such a simple solution to integrate. Everyone already has smartphone technology. Offering your customers a mobile-friendly experience will align with their pre-established tendencies. For Android users, QLESS has a 4.6 out of 5 star rating over 3,800 reviews on Google Play. Not to be outdone, it totes an impressive 4.9 out of 5 star ranking in the App Store with over nine thousand rankings.
Customer queue management software also helps with customer communication. These mobile platforms have bi-directional communication features that enable customers and staff to message back and forth. Staff can email customers, update them about their appointments, explain any delays, and offer assistance. QLESS also has simplified appointment scheduling features. It is a tool that helps businesses provide exceptional customer service.
For appointments, customers can send messages to staff about schedule changes, additional information, or tell them they're running late. Staff can send appointment reminders and ensure their no-show percentage remains low.
A customer queue app is a powerful customer service solution that aligns with the mobile tendencies of modern consumers. It enables accessible communication between staff and customers. Customers whose communication needs are met are happy customers, and a smart queue app makes this possible.
Every business has certain perceptions about themselves and the experience their customers have while they are at their store or office. These perceptions sometimes don’t align with reality. One of the best ways for a business to know whether they are providing a good customer experience is to use data and business intelligence. Data and analytics remove some of the subjectivity and give a company a concrete look at the experience they are offering their customers.
A wait-in-line app is a highly valuable tool for collecting data on some of the defining processes of the customer experience. Without software like this, there is no way for a business to keep track of things like how long the average customer is spending in line, at what time of day the line is the longest, and what appointment types tend to cause the longest waits. But with a waiting line management system, all that valuable information is at your fingertips.
QLESS comes with business intelligence features that amplify its value to enterprises. QLESS offers a dashboard full of data and analytics on critical processes, indicating details on median wait times, the number of customers served a day, appointment no-show percentage, and much more. These details can all be viewed on a virtual dashboard with charts and raw statistics. They can also be segmented according to dates, times, and appointment types.
This is one of the most helpful features of the app, as it provides businesses with a valuable asset that is difficult to acquire. Many companies are struggling to become data-driven. According to a survey by the Harvard Business Review, 52% of respondents said their business is not yet able to compete on data and analytics. Acquiring good data into business processes isn’t easy.
A waiting line management solution offers enterprises high-quality data that provides essential insights into their processes. This is objective, high-value information, and businesses can use it to make necessary adjustments to their processes that improve the customer journey.
The idea of waiting in line as a frustrating issue isn’t a new thing. Humans have been waiting in line for products and services as long as there have been products and services. In fact, waiting in line is such a significant phenomenon that it has become a source of academic study. Researchers worldwide have created a field of study centered on how humans react to long physical queues, and the findings are quite interesting.
The most quoted publication in the field of queue psychology is David Maister’s “The Psychology of Waiting in Lines.” This used several experiments and studies to determine how people respond to long physical queues. Maister ended up with several primary takeaways.
To summarize, some of Maister’s main takeaways conclude that occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time, uncertain wait times feel longer than finite wait times, and anxiety makes waits feel longer. These are all principles that resonate with the lived experience of the average customer. Standing in a line without any distractions or a clear end in sight while the anxiety slowly mounts can lead to waits that feel like forever.
QLESS and other virtual queue app solutions utilize these principles to completely change the line experience for the better. Customers can choose to wait wherever they want, so their wait times will likely be occupied. There is a clear and accurate indicator that shows how long to expect the line to be, so the wait time is finite. And there is reduced waiting anxiety because customers don’t have to stand around in a significant physical queue.
The stress and fatigue of standing in a long line aren’t a necessity. The product features of queue management platforms use queue psychology to provide customers with the optimal waiting experience.
While many businesses invest in solutions to improve the customer journey, ensuring those investments are paying off is also important. The best way to do this is to ask the people these initiatives are supposed to be helping: your customers. The most valuable resource for information on your business performance is the people your product and service are supposed to be oriented toward.
Utilizing the information your customer base can provide is an important way to learn how your business is performing and what you can do to improve. But many companies struggle to get in touch with their customers, create surveys and rating systems, and organize all the information.
QLESS has features that simplify this process. Because customers are already using this app for their queuing, there is familiarity, and businesses can use it as a way to contact their customers. QLESS has a feedback feature that enables businesses to send a customer survey and receive customer reviews.
The process is straightforward. Businesses can send a pulse survey via SMS or through the application right after the customer has visited. Customers are much more likely to respond to surveys or review requests right after their appointment. From there, businesses can look over the reviews for common threads and identify roadblocks that negatively impact the customer experience. The reviews also can be repurposed for marketing and lead generation.
Having first-hand insights into customers’ feelings about their experience in your store, office, or restaurant goes a long way. A customer satisfaction survey will show businesses if they are living up to the demands and expectations of their customers and, if not, where they need to improve. Your customer journey processes should be guided by the people they are intended for. Using insights from the people who frequent your business will ensure the best results.
A business in today’s world needs to be flexible. Commerce moves a million miles an hour with conflicting customer needs and demands, and many businesses struggle to keep up. That is mostly because of the rigid systems they have in place, from their appointment scheduling to their long physical waits in front of overburdened front desk staff. Implementing the flexible features of a queue management system can help businesses become more agile.
This will improve the customer journey because there won’t be the same delays arising under a typical system. As mentioned, virtual queuing has line management features that can blend walk-ins and appointments and arrange people into lines according to appointment type. Businesses can automate or control these features, but they enable rapid response.
When a customer is late or misses their appointment, there is often a significant waiting period. Businesses must wait a certain amount before they can cancel the appointment, and there is often some lag. With QLESS, a business can simply message the customer to check in on their status, alter the virtual line by bumping them back several spots, or remove them from the line.
There isn’t the same waiting period as there would be under a more rigid system. Queuing software is designed to match the rapid pace that modern business moves. Having complete control over the line helps ensure that there aren’t unnecessary obstructions to customer flow. The ability to communicate with customers also helps here. Staff can message individual customers that are running late, message the customer next in line to ensure they’re ready, and send updates to the entire line at once.
With flexible line management features, businesses can quickly respond to situational changes without the same delay in the customer journey. The more agile a business is, the more capable it is of rolling with the moment-to-moment shifts common in any appointment-based industry.
The past several years have forever altered how consumers interact with businesses. While the pandemic has mostly subsided and many restrictions have been dropped, the changes in shoppers’ preferences and tendencies will likely remain. E-commerce and virtual shopping are all the rage, and people tend to want to limit their physical interactions in stores. Accommodating that preference is important.
Even as we move past the pandemic, global anxiety trends will take some time to return to normal. Over a year after the pandemic and global lockdowns had started, Deloitte found that only 53% of global consumers felt safe doing in-store shopping. For most businesses, pivoting to a fully online shop isn’t a realistic option, but a queueing system can help ease the concerns of COVID-cautious customers.
A queue management system helps remove much of the physical congestion in doctor’s offices, government buildings, retail centers, and more. Rather than have a long physical queue of people crowding up limited space, businesses can use a virtual queue, so customers can wait wherever they please. This will ease the minds of many customers who may still feel uncomfortable.
There are still a lot of customers feeling the lingering effects of the pandemic. According to the World Health Organization, there has been a 25% global increase in anxiety and depression. A virtual queue is a way to offer those customers that still don’t feel comfortable spending long periods in a room with strangers a way to avoid that. And since walk-ins can be blended with appointments, it is completely up to your customers which option they choose.
While hopefully, the worst days of the pandemic are behind us, offering a solution designed to reduce physical congestion and accommodate consumers’ shopping preferences is still important. The trend of combining digital technology with the shopping experience for a blended customer journey will continue, and offering a pathway for COVID-anxious customers ensures all customers are accounted for.
Queues are a problem that exists across industries. Whether you are going for a license renewal, a busy restaurant, a walk-in clinic, an academic advisement appointment, or any number of retail businesses, chances are you will find yourself waiting in line. A wait-in-line app is a helpful tool for businesses because it is so flexible and can impact various industries.
From retail shops and educational institutions to healthcare businesses and logistics companies, a queue management app is an effective solution. QLESS has been used by large academic institutions like Texas A&M, well-known retail companies like Office Depot, and government offices run by major cities like San Antonio and Orlando. A queue app can be an asset in almost any industry with a wide range of applications.
There are many different industries where dissatisfaction with the customer service experience is high. Industries like airlines, retail, and higher education are all struggling to meet the unique needs of their customer base. Only 56% of students at four-year public and private higher education institutions are happy with their experience. The travel industry is inundated by surging demand they can't handle. And retail is losing customers to e-commerce every day.
Making a change to a wait-in-line app can help in all these industries. Queues and long wait times are serious problems, but if businesses take decisive action, they can stand out from competitors and ensure customer satisfaction.
Most businesses accept that lines are an inevitable problem because they aren't aware that technology exists that can eliminate this issue. Long lines are a significant deterrent to providing your customers the experience they deserve, regardless of your industry. Implementing a flexible solution to solve this problem is a decision that can lead to a more efficient business that retains its customers.
A wait-in-line app allows customers to enter a virtual queue from their phones. They can join the line from wherever they are, checking wait times on the app to make sure they aren't late. From there, customers can arrive at the place of business when it is time for their appointment, avoiding a wait altogether. This means businesses can exist without any need for physical queues.
A wait-in-line app helps a business in several ways. It improves the customer experience, boosts staff productivity and happiness, and aligns with consumers' mobile tendencies. It is a flexible solution that can be implemented in any industry where queues are holding back service speeds. Customers deserve better than long lines, and with QLESS, businesses can offer them the rapid pace and queue-free experience they deserve.
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