The customer flow management is always challenging, whether you are a small business or large enterprise, your customer facing offices and service centers have huge impact on your brand’s reputation and your business’s perception in the public. Poorly managed customer service center not only increase customer churn rate and make your customers unhappy but also harm your business’s reputation and overall brand image. The customer flow management is monitoring and dealing with customer queues across a customer facing environment.
No matter if you are a small grocery store or a large-scale customer service center with tens of service counters, the biggest challenge is to maintain a smooth and continuous customer flow and ensure a satisfactory experience. When businesses start failing to deliver an optimum level of satisfaction and smooth customer journey will start losing customers rapidly. Especially in Dubai and anywhere in UAE where customers have a lot of options, it is easier and much convenient to switch rather waiting for your service provider to make improvements. That is why the customer flow management has a significant role in business’s success and growth.
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What is Customer Flow Management?
The customer flow management is the management of customer journey for the businesses who offer in-store or in-branch services, where the customers have to come and visit the business to avail a service or to make a business transaction. The customer flow management includes everything from customer entering in the premises and till leaving the premises after a successful service delivery. It encompasses the entire customer journey and offering great service and interaction at each touch point. The customer flow management means improving the customer experience, minimizing the friction, monitoring customer flow and the entire journey, and ensuring your customers left happily.
It also includes guiding your customers and visitors through each step, monitoring their behavior, and ensuring a quicker and smoother service delivery experience. All this requires a systematic and well-structured management framework which is nearly impossible to achieve with manual and traditional queue management practices. That is why a queue management system is the best companion to optimize the customer flow management and achieving the ultimate level of customer satisfaction.
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What is a Queue Management System?
A queue management system, queuing system or customer flow management system all referred to a digital solution which help businesses streamline customer flow, improve management and organize the entire customer journey to achieve higher productivity and customer satisfaction. A queue management system is a software based solution with several integrated hardware components. The queue management system software engine is based on AI (artificial intelligence) and smart algorithms which help businesses to implement their queuing policy as well as help them monitor the customer journey and collecting valuable business intelligence data which is vital to improve strategies and relevant business processes.
A traditional queue management system includes a server side software application with multiple dashboards for service agents, managers, head-office/senior management, and intuitive customer facing UIs (user interface). Typically a ticket dispensing device or interactive kiosk is used to dispense the tickets for the queue along with a customer calling system and digital signage screen which displays live queuing information and multimedia content. The more modern queue management systems can have a variety of hardware and software features such as virtual queuing and various peripherals to collect customer data and get user inputs.
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How Queue Management System Improves Customer Flow Management?
Different businesses have different needs and different queuing policies. Every business offers multiple services, even businesses who belongs to same industry could have different priorities and different queuing strategies despite offering the same services. Hence the queue management system and the customer flow management could differ from case to case. However, there are some universal benefits of implementing a queue management system which help all types and sizes of businesses to improve their customer flow management and strengthen their administrative capabilities.
Here are some key advantages of implementing a digital queue management system which help improving the customer flow management.
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Queue Management System Reduce the Physical Waiting Lines
The customer flow management depends on how the physical waiting lines are constructed. The physical waiting lines should be constructed carefully to avoid overlapping, congestion or crowd formation in the waiting area, which disrupt the natural flow of customer and cause many problems. Furthermore the physical space and shape of the premises should be considered carefully while designing your queuing policy. Commonly any business in Dubai or anywhere in UAE offers multiple services in their customer service centers, some of the services have more customers than the others, the waiting areas or the available space is not always even and along with that the management should also consider the customers who might be navigating their way through the premises which could cause disturbance.
Let say the counters with the longer queues should be allotted more space in front, and the rest of the traffic should be routed to avoid overlapping. Apart from that, the queue management system software itself can be a great support to avoid long waiting lines. All modern queue management systems allow virtual queues, which means even if a customer is signed-up for a waiting line, they are not required to stand in physical waiting line, and instead they can wait comfortably in the designated waiting areas. This help reducing the size of the physical queues and avoid congestion in the waiting areas.
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Queue Management System Helps in Crowd Prevention
Offering customers a comfortable waiting environment can greatly improve their experience. But crowded waiting areas are always concerning for the customers. Think from a customer’s point of view, if you go to a bank branch and see full waiting areas, the first thing you will think about would be that it will take too long to get the service, this negative feeling can have a great impact on your overall experience. Furthermore most of the people who are in the waiting areas might want to go outside, which means they must guess if there are 10 more customers ahead of them, it might take 20 to 25 more minutes to their turn, in such cases the chances are customers might end up losing their position in the queue. Hence next time they will never do such thing. Therefore a proper communication mechanism is necessary.
The modern queue management systems uses integrated SMS notification and alert system and keep sending messages to the customer and updating them about the queuing status and estimated time remaining to their turn. This gives confidence to customers and more customers enjoy their waiting time while doing something else of their interest which improves their waiting experience. The communication is not limited to SMS, even the queue management system smartphone applications, customer portals, WhatsApp and various other communication channels can be used to keep your customer informed. All these features help preventing crowd formation and reduce customer churn rate.
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Queue Management System Improves Employee Performance
A digital queue management system is a very powerful tool, it not only offer several employee performance monitoring KPIs but it also help improving employee satisfaction and increase their productivity. A queue management system can take a lot of workload off of the employees with its incredible ability to digitalize and automate several processes and steps. Furthermore the queue management system has in-built smart algorithms and AI which enable it to capture and analyze data from each and every touch points, which enables it to evenly distribute the workload among all employees. It has capabilities to take decisions in real-time and balance the workload of the employees which increase employee satisfaction.
Furthermore it offers a variety of tools which help employee in service delivery tasks, pre and post service tasks and provide them more control. The enhanced employee experience results in better service quality. The queue management system free employees from worrying about the line management and other such problems caused by unorganized and manually managed queues which increase their productivity and performance. Resultantly it significantly reduce the customer waiting time and improve service quality.
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Queue Management System Reduces the Customer Wait Time
The queue management systems are proven to be highly effective in reducing the customer wait time and improving their waiting experience. It offer customers more freedom and control over their journey and at the same time it helps improving employee satisfaction and performance which results in significant reduction in customer waiting time. When the customers are not tethered to a physical waiting line, they are free to wait in the waiting area or enjoy their time outside, this has huge impact on the perceived wait time. When it comes to customer flow management, there are two time factors that businesses should consider, one is the actual wait time and the other is the perceived wait time. The actual wait time is the actual time that a customer must have to wait for.
However, the perceived wait time is the wait time that the customers think in their minds. Think of a traffic congestion, when you are stuck in the traffic, your brain always tricks you in believing that your track is moving slower than the adjacent tracks, the same phenomenon is applicable here too. When customers are in physical waiting lines, or they are stuck in the waiting area they get bored and the sense of time is changed, in such conditions people think the time is moving slow or a lot of time has passed. The queue management system allow customers to wait freely even outside and provide them with regular updates and alerts, furthermore the customers who are sitting in the waiting areas can be engaged with regular and very frequent audio announcements, queuing information displayed on the signage along with the multimedia content. That is how a queue management system help reducing the actual wait time, perceived wait time and negative psychological impact of waiting which results in more satisfactory customer experience.
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Queue Management System Collects Valuable Business Intelligence Data
A digital queue management system is capable of collecting a wealth of business intelligence data which help businesses monitor their queues, and allow them to analyze their current queuing policy. With the help of queuing data and other statistical data that is collected by a queue management system businesses can evaluate their processes and customer journey which help them highlighting the flaws and areas of improvement and give them a chance to improve their strategy and queuing policy. Businesses can continuously analyze this data and make regular tweaks to achieve the higher performance and efficiency. The queue management system also helps tracking the customer churn and provide valuable information which help management understanding the causes of customer churn.
The queue management system also closely monitor employee performance and highlight the needs of training and help management in resource planning and for several HR decisions. Furthermore the queue management system provides insight to customer behavior and help businesses understand customer preferences which is important to align their processes with customers’ needs. A digital queue management system can also collect customer feedback directly from customers using multiple integrated communication channels and on-premises touch screens, tablet devices and interactive kiosks which further provide deeper insight to customer behavior, needs and problems and help businesses improve their processes and strategies which results in better customer flow management.
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Conclusion
Businesses who offer in-store or in-branch services face many challenges in customer flow management. The optimization of customer flow and well-managed queues are crucial for customer satisfaction. Unhappy customers tend to switch service provider and also hurt brand’s reputation which could jeopardize the growth of the business. That is why businesses not only in Dubai but all around the UAE invest millions in customer experience. A digital queue management system is a perfect companion to eliminate customer flow management problems and to enhance the productivity, performance and efficiency of the customer service centers.
Queue management systems are known for their ability to significantly reduce the customer waiting time, but that is not all, a digital queue management system help businesses implement their queuing policies, enhance customer experience, improve employee efficiency and collects valuable business intelligence data which help businesses to further improve their strategies, polices, and processes.
In this blog we have discussed how a digital queue management system can help businesses in improving customer flow management and attaining higher customer satisfaction. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to design and implement a customized queue management system 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.
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