Impactful Ways Queuing Software Helps Business Reduce Customer Complaints
Introduction
Today’s consumers have options. In nearly every industry, competition is heavy, with consumers able to pick from products and services from a vast marketplace. Standing out in this environment doesn’t just require businesses to offer quality products or services. Enterprises must find a way to deliver quality customer experiences, connect with consumers, and separate themselves from the competition. This is why, according to Zendesk, 63% of companies are prioritizing the customer experience more.
A significant component of the customer experience isn’t just creating positive experiences; it is avoiding negative ones. Many studies show people remember negative events more accurately than positive ones, and one negative experience with your business can leave a lasting impression. Reducing the negativity customers associate with your business will lead to better customer retention and improved results. That is why limiting customer complaints is incredibly important.
One of the ways enterprises are trying to keep customers happy and limit complaints is by implementing queuing software and virtual queuing into their processes. This is a way of combatting long waits and unpleasant waiting experiences. Waits and the waiting experience are something customers despise, with data from Synqera showing that 73% of customers stated that waiting at checkout lines is their least favorite aspect of the shopping experience.
But virtual queues don’t just reduce customer complaints by transforming the waiting process. They are tools with a broad range of applications that can help reduce complaints and increase customer satisfaction. QLess is a queuing software with applications across industries ranging from government and healthcare to education and retail. Below, we’ll explore what exactly queuing software is before diving into how it can help organizations reduce their volume of customer complaints.
How Does Queuing Software Work?
The first step to understanding how queuing software can impact customer complaints is to understand what it is and how it works. Virtual queues are a customer flow solution that moves one of the most impactful parts of the customer experience to digital means. Instead of customers needing to stand around in physical queues, which can be frustrating and unpleasant, customers can join virtual lineups directly from their phones.
Queue management software is essentially a virtual lineup customers can enter from their phone, computer, or an on-site kiosk. Customers with scheduled appointments will have a link sent to them, while walk-in customers, if allowed by the business, can access a link through an app or website. Once they click the link, they’ll be entered into a virtual lineup, where they can see how many customers are ahead of them. They’ll have a highly accurate projection of the actual wait time, be able to monitor the progress of the lineup, and receive updates as the virtual line moves. Eventually, when it is their turn at the front of the line, they can go to the front desk or checkout counter and receive the service they are there for.
Queuing software can be accessed in several different ways by customers, whether it is through their mobile phone or desktop computer. The QLess queue management software uses AI technology and automation to virtually manage the lineup for businesses according to pre-configured policies, like customers that are five minutes late are moved out of line, or no walk-ins are allowed. It can also be manually controlled or edited by staff. It uses machine learning algorithms to project waiting times and has API integration to effectively co-exist with businesses’ existing tech solutions.
How Queuing Software Reduces Customer Complaints
The benefits of queue flow software are significant for many businesses, whether they are appointment-based or not. A queue management system helps enterprises create smoother customer journeys while providing significant back-end benefits. If you are an enterprise hoping to reduce the number of customer complaints you receive, let’s look at how queuing software can help while also increasing customer loyalty.
Improved Waiting Experience
One of the biggest causes of dissatisfied customers is an unpleasant waiting experience. Unpleasant waits are common for businesses across industries, as keeping up with demand can be difficult. While waits are somewhat inevitable, they don’t have to be the source of frustration they often are. We’ve all stood in long lines or sat in crowded waiting rooms and felt ourselves slowly growing frustrated with the business we are at as confusion over wait times and an unpleasant waiting environment sap our morale. But with queueing software, this doesn’t have to be the case.
An online queue system transforms the waiting experience by completely removing the need for customers to wait in person. With remote check-in features, customers can enter the virtual queue without being physically present, monitor the wait and receive real-time updates, and enter the office only when they are at the front of the line. Instead of a crowded waiting room or physical queue, customers can wait at a local cafe, a nearby park, or any other place they choose. The customer gains significantly more control and independence over the wait, creating a drastically better experience for customers.
Queuing software also removes the confusion of the wait with the features that project the waiting time. One of the worst aspects of waiting in line is the confusion and uncertainty, as there is no clear end in sight. QLess confronts this problem head-on by projecting highly accurate wait lengths for customers, and this is something consumers love. According to a QLess study of 250 US adults, 57.2% said they were more likely to patronize a business if they had early insights into wait times.
The waiting experience doesn’t need to be one of uncertainty and stress. With a virtual customer queue, businesses can empower customers to wait where they please while adding transparency to the process with projected waiting times. It creates a smoother, more independent experience and leads to happier customers.
Reduced Wait Times
People are busy, and the typical person’s patience for waiting is in short supply. Waiting in line is something the average person will actively try to avoid if possible, and in many cases, if the lineup is too long, the customer won’t stick around. According to a separate QLess survey of 250 US adults, 60.5% of consumers have abandoned a purchase or appointment due to a long line and either gone somewhere else or never returned. Customers are unwilling to spend substantial lengths of time in a lineup, with the same QLess survey showing that 54.4% of people would only be willing to wait between 0-5 minutes for something non-essential.
Even if the waiting experience is made positive by virtual queuing, it is still important for enterprises to cut down on their average wait times to truly create an exceptional customer experience. Queuing software can help in this regard, empowering enterprises to streamline their waiting process by giving them calendar management features that have been found to elevate staff productivity by up to 90%.
The QLess smart calendar is a feature that coincides with the queue management system. It allows enterprises to access smart calendars that show the entire appointment schedule for the day. That calendar can be edited by staff and is color-coded and organized. This gives staff greater insight into their day, as they can see with clarity what their next several hours will look like. Increased workflow visibility leads to better-prepared staff, which will, in turn, lead to more productive staff. This will lead to faster lines, as staff can work through their day faster.
Similarly, the queue management system will increase speed by automating the lineup process. The queuing software adjusts the lineup according to the pre-configured policies of the staff, removing human error and ensuring the lineup is run efficiently. These two features help reduce wait times, leading to decreased walkaways and fewer customer issues.
Simplified Communication and Personalization
The main thing consumers expect from customer service is strong communication. One of the most alienating things a business can do to its customers is make them feel unimportant. That is why personalization has become something customers have come to expect. According to data from McKinsey, 71% of customers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when that doesn’t happen. If you want to have happy customers, remaining connected to them through communication and personalization is important. But many organizations struggle to offer this at scale.
To help enterprises offer excellent customer service with improved personalization, QLess has bi-directional communication features that enable back-and-forth conversation. This will go a long way toward decreasing customer complaints by ensuring customers feel their conversation needs are met. They can simply message the staff through the QLess platform if they have questions. Whether they are running late, want to provide an update for their appointment, or are confused about the process, the communication features enable customers to have their voices heard.
These features also allow enterprises to add personalization to their customer experience. Greeting every customer who enters and ensuring their communication needs are met isn’t easy, particularly for large businesses with many customers. But with QLess, enterprises can send automated greetings when customers check into lines, schedule messages to send at different intervals, and ensure consumers feel attended to.
The more personalized the experience is, the happier your customers will be. According to Startup Bonsai, 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that offers a tailored experience. Conversely, if you aren’t offering a personalized experience and provide poor communication, you’ll see an influx of customer complaints. QLess empowers enterprises with scalable communication features that ensure customers feel important and like more than a number.
Implement Changes Based on Customer Feedback
Part of making customers feel important isn’t just communicating with them. It is factoring their input into your customer experience processes. To become the most customer-friendly enterprise possible, you must consult the very people you are trying to connect with. Collecting customer feedback and implementing it into your operations is a great way to overcome flaws in the customer journey that may have been overlooked and reduce the number of customer complaints you receive.
QLess has customer feedback tools attached to its queuing software, allowing enterprises to collect and analyze customer feedback from the people who frequent their business. Enterprises create a survey, asking pertinent questions that they believe will help them create more positive customer results going forward. When customers exit their appointment, the survey is automatically sent to customers via SMS. Businesses can ask consumers what they thought about the customer wait times, how the staff treated them, and what they liked or didn’t like about their appointment. They can then store that information and compare it to other responses to see if there are trends.
The more you understand what your customers dislike, the better equipped you are to solve that. If customers repeatedly voice complaints about specific aspects of your enterprise, it is clear there is a problem. Having a tool that allows organizations to collect, store, and analyze that information will go a long way.
Customers typically like to voice their thoughts on their experiences, so businesses should ensure they are voicing it to them rather than others. According to Salesforce, 62% of customers will share negative experiences with others. While customer feedback features won’t necessarily stop customers from sharing those negative experiences, they will ensure enterprises are looped into what customers think of them and can make the necessary tweaks to ensure customers are happy going forward.
Customer Experience Data Leading to Increased Efficiency
Similar to how the subjective insights of customer feedback allow businesses to make informed decisions, the same is true with the information provided by business intelligence. Data and analytics into the customer experience give enterprises transparency into the customer journey and help quantify problems and performance. This is extremely valuable because it allows enterprises to spot bottlenecks and recurring problems in their customer experience that might have been overlooked and then help them set benchmarks and track if solutions are working.
Business intelligence is a massive, growing industry that enterprises in industries across sectors are investing in heavily. Business intelligence enables organizations to make data-driven decisions, directly improving performance. According to Dataprot, enterprises with CEOs that make data-driven decisions are 77% likelier to succeed. Spotting flaws in your organization will help enterprises identify their biggest issues and, ideally, prevent potential problems before they grow into issues that cause customer complaints.
Collecting data on the customer experience has posed a challenge to enterprises for a while now, but the QLess business intelligence features enable organizations to collect and sort data on several key metrics. The queuing software and smart calendar automatically track information, allowing enterprises to know their median wait time, employee utilization, appointment no-show percentage, the number of customers served daily, and more. This information is shown in visually informative charts and can be segmented according to date, time, appointment type, and employee that handled the appointments.
Having clear insights into your enterprise’s customer journey performance through data will enable them to create a more seamless experience. Spotting flaws like high average wait times at specific times of the day or for specific appointment types will help enterprises solve these problems. Customers often complain for a good reason, and if you are identifying weaknesses in your operation through data and coming up with solutions to solve them, you will find it easier to create a positive customer experience.
Cut Back on Crowds and Congestion
For businesses, the past few years have been a whirlwind of adjustments. Altering operations to respond to the pandemic and the fallout from the pandemic has required a significant amount of flexibility and learning on the fly. While the worst days of the pandemic seem to be behind us, many consumers are still fairly tentative around crowds and congested indoor spaces. In the age of social distancing, it is only natural that many customers will complain about being made to wait in crowded waiting areas. In fact, according to a QLess survey of 250 adults, 59.4% associate congested waiting areas with unsafe conditions.
Enterprises have responded to this problem by moving seats in waiting rooms further apart, having a masks-on policy, or having markets on the lineup that shows the proper space apart for customers. But this might not be enough for some consumers. If you want to ensure that the average person feels completely at ease waiting for your business’ product or service, the best solution is eliminating the need for an in-person wait altogether.
The QLess queuing system allows consumers to join lineups remotely and only enter a building when it is time for their appointment or checkout. While some customers won’t mind waiting in waiting rooms, others will feel unhappy sitting in a congested area. For those customers, the option is given to wait independently. This will dramatically improve the queuing experience for concerned customers and reduce customer complaints centered around crowds and congestion.
The pandemic triggered a 25% increase in anxiety and depression worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and simply moving on isn’t easy for many. Using virtual queue management software is an important service to customers businesses can offer that will enable consumers to avoid congested waiting areas that are now associated with unsafe conditions.
Accommodate Differing Customer Needs
One thing that is incredibly important for enterprises is that they are not exclusionary with any of the solutions they implement. That is why some organizations are tentative about a technology-based solution like QLess. There is always the concern that they will end up alienating their customers who aren’t familiar with technology or are unable to use typical software solutions due to disabilities. According to the CDC, one in four US adults has a disability, so implementing solutions that don’t alienate customers with differing needs is important.
QLess is software that has been designed to accommodate customers of all kinds. The queue management and appointment scheduling features have ADA Compliance options that can help those who struggle to use technology or those with disabilities to have a more positive experience. These features include things like a text-to-speech reader, text size adjustments, dyslexia-friendly font, and instructive tooltips that give users insight into how to use the queue software and appointment scheduling.
Ensuring that all customers can benefit from the software implemented is essential. It is also worth noting that QLess can be implemented alongside a non-virtual line strategy. Organizations can have one line for QLess and another for customers who prefer waiting in a physical queue to a virtual one. It is a transformative solution that will benefit customers, but if it is their preference not to use it, enterprises can accommodate that preference.
Customers all have their unique preferences. A common customer complaint is that enterprises are too rigid and that their processes don’t meet the individual needs of consumers. But QLess and other queuing software are designed to benefit customers’ unique and different requirements. With ADA-compliant features and the ability for customers to opt out, QLess is a flexible solution that won’t alienate a customer base.
Conclusion
Competing in the modern marketplace requires enterprises to orient their business around the customer experience. Earning customer loyalty determines an enterprise’s survival, which requires a standout customer journey. However, enterprises often find their customer experience processes derailed by customer complaints. Customer complaints can be hugely harmful to a business, negatively impacting its reputation if the complaints are public and making retention difficult. One of the best ways to reduce the number of customer complaints businesses receive is to implement queuing software.
A virtual queue system like QLess has several standout aspects that will make it an excellent option for businesses hoping to reduce complaints and increase satisfaction. The remote join features transform the waiting experience, and the queue software and calendar reduce waiting time. With customer feedback and business intelligence, enterprises gain valuable insights that help them address problem areas and remove bottlenecks. QLess also reduces congestion and has features designed to meet the needs of different customers, as well as communication and personalization options.
All told, QLess’ queuing software is a solution that creates a more efficient, transparent, and overall pleasant customer journey. There’s a reason QLess is used in industries like education, healthcare, and retail. It is a flexible software that addresses some of the most common customer issues, leading to happier customers and improved business processes.