How To Wait Time Impact Customer Satisfaction

Customers spend a striking amount of time waiting in lines for their turn to be served. These waiting experiences are generally negative and in fact, it is one of the factors that most impact a customer’s shopping experience to the point that it can overthrow all your attempts to deliver a product or service of excellent quality. know about Customer Satisfaction

To properly handle these waiting experiences, many businesses have established a variety of programs to reduce the actual duration of the wait. Some notable measures taken are –

• Use previous year’s sales data to prepare in advance your staffing requirements at distinct times of the year.
• Incorporate systems for managing queues that help the customer, such as implementing a Line management system for managing queues.
• Try to make the wait more bearable at your premises by avoiding stressors and promoting the presence of alternatives that entertain customers. For instance, providing free wifi access to your customers, magazines in waiting rooms.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at a few ways in which long waiting times have a negative impact. But first, let us understand the meaning of Customer Satisfaction and its importance on your business.

What is Customer Satisfaction and why is it important?

In simple words, Customer satisfaction defines how products or services rendered by a company meet their expectations. Customer satisfaction is one of the most significant factors of consumer purchase decisions and loyalty.

Top-notch customer service can win your customer’s hearts and provide you with an edge over your competitors. Currently, when social media play such an influential role in making decisions it’s important to keep an eye on the kind of customer service you deliver. 

Negative Impact of Waiting time

Frequent Customer walk-away

When customers look at a waiting line and decide the better approach is to drop their items on the nearest shelf, and walk away silently. Not good for your business! First impressions are always important in all business. Customers crave a comfortable and convenient experience while they shop, but what they don’t need is their valuable time wasted in waiting.

As per the Customer Service Statistics report “After a satisfactory customer experience, 69% would suggest the business to others, and 50% would return more often”

Thus, having proper waiting management system is vital for decreasing walkaways.

Customers With Complaints and Unhappy Feedbacks

Many businesses accept queueing as a natural part of their day. The key is to know when you have reached from ‘acceptable’ to “damaging” your business image and customer experience. Most customers will put up with a short wait for service if they come during peak hours but when you start to listen to complaints or murmured grumbling in the line, dissatisfaction is increasing. In the current social media era, this dissatisfaction can be openly broadcast before the customer has even been served! If you have ever seen a customer jump out of line to leave your service centre, your queues have begun to fail your business.

Stressed-out staff

Long queues are not only bad for customer experience, but it also affects your staff. They get very stressed when customers yell collectively and thus fail to deliver efficient customer service and support. With the right queue tool, identify which services your customers will need and ensure that customers are routed to staff with the right training to help.

How Queue Management Technology Can Help?

If you found yourself agreeing along to one or more of these signs, your business is at least periodically getting jammed with customers and you don’t have the answers in place to smoothly control the situation.  

Luckily, with the queue management system, you can fix each of these issues. The system can help you track the data on peak overcrowding times letting you know when to open new channels and when to help customers locate the right queue.

Queue Management can also be used to connect directly with customers on their mobile phones to give them an idea of how long the wait time will be and which channel to route for when it’s their turn to be served. They no longer require to physically stand in line for the service. 

This will help your business to overall improve customer experience and discover what is required from the staff in terms of training and development.

Conclusion

Investing in increasing customer satisfaction might not increase your revenue instantly but it does help you develop loyal customers who would spend more over their lifetime. And let’s not forget that word of mouth marketing is the best form of marketing for any business. Hence, think about it!

(To the Editor – I’m sorry, really couldn’t find the meta description and meta title blog. Writing it here so you can add – Customer satisfaction defines how products or services rendered by a company meet their expectations. Top-notch customer service can win your customer’s hearts and provide you with an edge over your competitors.)