For all customer facing environments the long waiting lines, crowd formation, and unexpected workload could be a great problem. Think of a customer, who visited a business, bank or a public office to avail an important service, there are long waiting lines, the customer will get confused about which line they should be in or whether their queue is moving or not and on top of that they have no clue of how long it could take them to reach to the service counter, even if there is a waiting area, that might be full too, and mostly during the peak hours some people might not find an appropriate space to sit comfortably, how frustrating it could be for a customer? The customers are always impatient, that doesn’t mean you should take this problem lightly, but the question is how much resources a business can spare for the queuing process. Surely appointing more employee for the task will help, but what about the cost? Obviously if you will hire more staff for the queuing the cost will rise. Apart from the cost, the quality is the most important aspect of the queuing process. The quality here means the customer experience and customer satisfaction. Adding more staff wouldn’t have huge impact on waiting time neither it could improve the customer experience much. That is why businesses need an electronic queuing system.
What is an Electronic Queuing System?
An electronic queuing system is a digital tool that is used to improve the queue management process. The queue management system or electronic queuing system is a technological solution based on hardware and software components. These components work together to provide a highly structure and very efficient framework for the queuing process. Businesses can have many different software and hardware components to meet their needs, however in a most basic queuing system these are the essential components:
Electronic Queuing System – Hardware
- Ticket Dispensing Machine or Interactive Self-Service Ticket Dispensing Kiosk
- Counter Plates where the counter numbers and the ticket number is displayed
- Digital Signage Screens where the live queuing information are displayed
- Audio Announcement System for customer calling (usually it is multilingual)
Electronic Queuing System – Software
- Core Server Side Application which is hosted on a server or cloud
- Agent Dashboard where the agents manage queues and customer calling
- Administrative Dashboard where the management can access the backend of the system
- Customer UI (user interface) where customers interact with the system for signup
These are the basic components that are essential to setup an electronic queuing system. However, there are penalty of more software and hardware add-on which can be used to offer more innovative features and help businesses to further improve the efficiency and efficacy of the queuing process.
What are the Benefits of an Electronic Queuing System?
A good quality high-performance electronic queuing system is a great tool to maximize the efficiency, performance and productivity of the customer facing environments which can significantly improve customer experience and help businesses attaining higher customer satisfaction. The electronic queuing system doesn’t only improve customer flow and organize your queues but it can offer a penalty of other benefits which are mostly less obvious. In this blog we will list the key benefits of electronic queuing system which can greatly help businesses improve their customer facing environments.
Benefits of Electronic Queuing System: 1. Reduce Wait Time
The customer wait time is a serious issue in queuing process. This is one of the most impactful factor which negatively impact your customer experience. Long waiting time cause frustration, stress and unhappiness. When a customer reached to a counter unhappy and stressed, it become significantly harder for the service agents to satisfy them. An electronic queuing system help reducing the customer wait time by improving the customer flow, organizing the queues, and improving the service agent’s performance. It completely automated the process, since customers knows that everything is computer-controlled they don’t have any doubts or concerns, they also get regular updates on the digital signage and via announcement system hence they know the queues are moving. Furthermore the electronic queuing system can also provide an estimated wait time on the bases of historic data and real-time inputs from the system. This also help reducing the stress and improve customer experience. The reduction in customer wait time also have huge impact on all other aspects of queuing process which also help maximizing customer satisfaction.
Benefits of Electronic Queuing System: 2. Offer Virtual Queuing
The virtual queuing is not a new phenomenon, however, the modern electronic queuing system offers a tons of features which can greatly improve customer experience and also the efficiency of the process. The virtual queuing allow customers to sign-up for the virtual queues remotely. This means that the electronic queuing system integrates multiple digital channels which allow customer and visitors to interact with the system such as Email, SMS, Online Customer Portals, Corporate Website, WhatsApp, Queue Management System Mobile Applications, QR Code, etc. These features will allow customers and visitors to sign-up for the queue without being physically present at the business premises. Furthermore the customers are also provided with an estimated wait time, which is usually 96% accurate and calculated by the AI (artificial intelligence) based smart algorithms on the bases of historic data, current customer flow and employee efficiency.Moreover the system also keep updating customers and sending to them alerts and notifications. This help reducing the wait time to literally none and raise customer satisfaction.
Benefits of Electronic Queuing System: 3. Improve Service Quality
There are multiple factor that are improved by an electronic queuing system which help improving the service quality. For example, the employee who don’t have to worry about customer queries, complaints or visibly large number of people in waiting line, are tend to perform better. As they can focus on the primary tasks without any worry or interruption. Furthermore when the customers are provided with excellent waiting experience and short waiting time they tend to arrive at counters in a more calm mental state which help both employees and customers to quickly resolve issues and it also raise the tolerance and understanding of the customers and help improving their experience, consequently the service quality get improved. A good customer-agent interaction also help improving the service quality and customer satisfaction. An electronic queuing system can also collect important information about the customers and provide it to the agents even before they arrive at the counter, which also help service agents to deliver a bit more personalized customer experience. All such factors help improving the service quality and customer satisfaction.
Benefits of Electronic Queuing System: 4. Higher Employee Satisfaction
Employee satisfaction plays a crucial role in service quality and customer happiness. Happy and satisfied employees tend to perform well and deliver quality work. No employee will be happy to deal with frustrated, anxious and annoyed customers, this will decrease their morale which will eventually reduce their productivity and efficiency. An electronic queuing system help solving this problem, it enhances customer experience at all touch points, reduce customer wait time, and with the virtual queuing it offers a highly satisfactory customer experience. Furthermore the employees start getting tired and stressed under heavy workload. Especially in manual queuing environment the employees with have to deal with several other problems which are not part of their job, thence their focus on primary tasks reduced. However, the electronic queuing system help eliminating all those problems and factors that distract employees and it also help reducing employee workload by automatically routing customers to other counters with shorter queues to balance the workload which can significantly improve employee happiness and satisfaction.
Benefits of Electronic Queuing System: 5. Attain Customer Loyalty
The customer wait time and experience are the two main reasons of higher customer churn which means the customer who enter to your premises but left without making a transaction. The customer churn is almost opposite to customer loyalty. Reducing the customer wait time might look just a small thing, but it has significant impact on everything. Reducing the customer time to a few minutes could have huge impact on customer happiness. Studies have revealed that on an average a customer can wait for up to 9 minutes, after that every second will add to their unhappiness and frustration. This time differs from industry to industry but reducing just a few minutes in wait time could make a huge difference. The virtual queuing is a great tool to drastically reduce the wait time. Furthermore the automation, welcoming interaction with the self-service kiosk, the information displaying on the digital signage, the audio announcements, the mobile notification and quicker service delivery all contribute to customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers are tend to be more loyal to the brand. The customer loyalty is considered to be the foundation of growth, development and progress. That is why it is important to increase customer loyalty but offering them best experience and high quality service.
Benefits of Electronic Queuing System: 6. Improve Employee Performance
Performance management is strategically very important business function. Businesses are proactively monitoring, measuring and improving their performance. For that they have adopted various methods and practices. Most of the modern performance management methods are heavily relying on collecting in-depth performance data and developing highly accurate monitoring mechanisms. An electronic queuing system is a highly efficient digital tool which is built on smart software engine and autonomous algorithms to drive efficiency and productivity. It can provide a wealth of business intelligence data, the employee performance management data is one of the key component of its data collection function. It can provide various employee KPIs which can directly be fed to a third-party performance management system or managers can utilize the in-built analytical tools to evaluate the performance of individual employee, teams and the entire branch. It can accurately calculate the average number of customers served in a single shift, the average service delivery time for each individual service, the active and inactive time, the time spend on pre and post service tasks, etc. and much more which help management evaluate the employee performance and take informed decision related to HR, employee development and training, etc. This performance data help management to improve employee performance in long term.
Benefits of Electronic Queuing System: 7. Collect Business Intelligence Data
The modern day businesses heavily rely on IT (information technology) and the data is the lifeblood of the digital technologies. Businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE have transformed the marketplace by implementing high-tech solutions and utilizing digital platforms. Studies have revealed the businesses who based their strategies and planning upon real data instead of speculation and guess work are tend to be more productive and successful. That is why it is crucial to collect business intelligence data. The electronic queuing system can collect a variety of statistical and system usage data along with employee performance data. It also help management understand various trends and customer behavior which help them make informed decision. The management can also perform various analysis using in-built analytical tools to produce actionable reports which can be used in decision making and strategy building processes. It will also help management to evaluate their strategies and polices on the bases of the data and provide them features to compare the performance of different branches. This data help management understand customers, flaws in their process, and it highlight the areas of improvement. That is why the business intelligence data is crucial for a business.
Benefits of Electronic Queuing System: 8. Reduce the Operational Cost
The electronic queuing system is not only effective in enhancing the customer experience and raising their satisfaction but it can significantly reduce the operation cost of a service center. The manual queue management is very inefficient, it require businesses to put a lot of resources which is expensive, it is not only appoint employees, it is the hiring cost, the continuous salaries, and other employee retention expenses and on top of that despite investing huge financial and human resources the manual queuing process still remains inefficient and ineffective. That is why businesses are rapidly adopting to electronic queuing systems. An electronic queuing system can reduce the need of human resources, as the entire customer journey is managed fully autonomously. It is this automation and ability to monitor performance and evaluate the key factors of the process which makes electronic queuing systems the best companion of modern businesses and a best tool to branch digitalization. In small and medium sized customer service centers an electronic queuing system can reduce the need of employee to up to 60%, which is huge, and in larger service centers it can even reduce it further. Above all the electronic queuing system is a one-time investment there is no reoccurring cost and its maintenance requirements are near to none with a longer lifecycle which significantly increase its ROI and help reducing the operational cost.
See More: How to Avoid Long Queues at Your Events
Conclusion
The least thing a customer want when they visit a public office, customer service center or a business is the long queues and crowded waiting areas. No one likes waiting, everyone wants to get everything done quickly so they can move to the next thing. Whether it is a visit to a service center, or a bank or a public office, it is always out of routine, people have to stuff it into their daily schedules that is why everyone wants to get it done very quickly. The waiting is one aspect of customer experience there are several other things that impact customer happiness. Every business wants its customers to be happy and satisfied, because the satisfied customers are tend to be more loyal and the customer loyalty is the foundation of long-term success. An electronic queuing system not only help reducing the customer wait time, but it also help improving their waiting experience, communication and it increases their engagement. Furthermore it also help improving employee satisfaction and their performance which results in better customer experience and high-quality services. The service quality and customer experience will determine the level of their happiness. An electronic queuing system is very cost-efficient solution and it also help significantly reduce the operation cost of the service center.
The electronic queuing system can provide a great wealth or valuable business intelligence data which help businesses improve employee performance and service quality, it also help them identify the areas of improvement and help them to gradually improve their policies, strategies and processes. In this blog we have covered the key advantages of deploying an electronic queue management system in your customer facing environment. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to design a tailor-made electronic queuing system exclusively for your business, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
Check out this: How Customer Experience Help Boosting Website Conversions?