Today, customers are demanding more and more in their shopping experience. And this demand makes maintaining repetitive business hard, even for the big global companies. With increasing competition, increasing costs, and with the rise of multi-channel shopping, attracting customers, obtaining their loyalty to the firm becomes a problem that each department should keep in mind. To increase the efficiency of every procedure in a store, to increase the sell number, to stand out from the crowd, and to improve the consumer experience in the store, offering competitive advantage is a matter to think through. This idea can seem like an unrealizable duty at first glance, but with the use of technology, simple changes that have the most profound effects upon the consumers can be realized effectively.
The waiting period on the checkout lines is an essential problem for the shoppers. A study conducted by Adyen in 2018, showed that the long waiting lines could cause customers to give up on buying, and the lost sales resulting in this way amounts up to nearly £14.3 billion. In another study, 70% of the retailers tell their observation that the customers waiting in line for 5 minutes or more leave the store without buying anything.
For customers, waiting in the long queues during their store visit negatively affects their purchase experience and leads to many results. These results can be explained as follows.
Waiting in the queues of the store causes the potential sale to lose as well as damage the company’s reputation. It causes the store to fall back in the next shopping preferences of customers.
Also, the formation of long queues within the store reduces the efficiency of the store and limits the available space.
Technology comes into play in solving these problems. The gains to be achieved with the developed queue management systems can be listed as follows:
- By analyzing waiting times and checkout densities, store managers are instantly informed in case of a crowd intensity, which facilitates instant staff allocation.
- There are various waiting times, such as the multiple-server queueing system, single- server queueing system. Different types of waiting lines can be tried in store and see which one is more efficient.
- Queue management system’s metrics data can show the patterns in customer behaviors and customer traffic daily or hourly. With this information, retail management has the ability to predict customer traffic.
- By knowing checkout density patterns, hourly and daily staff allocations can be set.
- Less waiting times in queue lead to an increment in customer satisfaction.
- Customer behaviors can be examined to give campaigns at products sold around the checkout area.
Briefly, using the queue management system, waiting times in queue can be decreased. It leads to customer satisfaction and happiness. Customers go to store more often, and their basket sizes increase. Besides, store revenue and profitability increases.
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