Hello world! It's been a while since I posted on our blog. We've been pretty busy cranking out new features for you, and building a world-class support organization. But I wanted to share some thoughts about QLess Support with you today.
Hello world! It's been a while since I posted on our blog. We've been pretty busy cranking out new features for you, and building a world-class support organization. But I wanted to share some thoughts about QLess Support with you today.
Johnson County's DMV is closing their offices for a week starting tomorrow, so there's a rush on their two offices today. As I write this, they have 925 customers waiting in their virtual queues for service. The lobby at each office can accommodate abut 120 people. Imagine, for a moment, if Johnson County did not offer QLess service, to allow customers to use their cell phone to manage their spot in line. Imagine how crowded both offices would be. Imagine yourself crowded into a standing-room-only environment, waiting for 4 hours for service. Then imagine that someone at Johnson County asked you for feedback on your waiting experience. Ok, now you have your non-QLess base-line. :) QLess sent each customer that queued by phone at Johnson County today the following SMS once they were done with their transaction:
Check out this great customer feedback from QLess users at the Johnson County DMV.
Check out this very well-done video explaining how QLess is saving families at Washington Square Mall this year from having to stand in line to see Santa.
We all see waiting as a painstaking activity that decreases consumer productivity and morale while hurting customer service and margins. Often times however, the repercussions of waiting are far more unfortunate. Without sharing a commentary on world politics, waiting in line poses serious health and security concerns. In this recent story from Lahore, people waiting to retrieve their pension funds, are forced to endure conditions unsuitable for anyone and the toil of waiting in line to collect this benefit yields the most unpleasant of all results. Government services worldwide can benefit from making the experience of a customer collecting benefits, renewing licenses, filing documents and the like far less strenuous with QLess. The world would certainly be a better place if we alleviate these types of situations.
We keep telling you how QLess is revolutionizing the way people wait in line – or rather don’t wait in line. So it probably comes as no surprise that our unique usage of SMS to rid the world of its lines has been recognized as a first place winner in Clickatell’s recent awards. Thanks Clickatell! We’re excited to be part of a solution that is transforming how people to business and customers get their time back to be more productive.
Just wanted to share a Letter to the Editor of a newspaper that was forwarded to us here at QLess. We've redacted the pieces that identify which DMV is involved, so as not to exacerbate the situation. But it's great to hear that concerned citizens, when faced with long waits imposed on them by their local government, are speaking out and telling them to get QLess to respect their time!
One of our favorite customers, Datz Tampa, recently shared the following customer feedback with us.
We recently reached a great milestone and wanted to share. Last month, Jennifer Lin, a student at the University of Texas at Dallas, used QLess and her cell phone to hold her spot in the virtual Enrollment Management queue. 21 minutes later, she was able to show up and drop a class. In addition to the 21 minutes of her life that Jennifer got back by using QLess, we've now saved our total user base over 24 years of waiting in line!
Earlier today, Charles Marrelli, Director of Experience Design at QLess, was a guest on the Colin McEnroe Show to discuss our solution to the problem of waiting in line. He was joined by a panel including Dr. Ken Chelst, professor of Operations Research at Wayne State University; Sara Frias, Marketing Director at Lake Compounce; and Melody Curry, Commissioner of the Connecticut DMV. Dr. Chelst, a foremost authority on queuing theory, said that QLess "sounds like a brilliant strategy".
QLess has some new fans over at In Line Waiting, a blog where, in their words, "you can read and share funny stories and practical tips on ridiculously long lines and the bizarre people and situations that go hand-in-hand with them." The staff there discovered QLess last month, and then invited us to write a guest post on their site. So head over to read Alex's post there: Santa Goes QLess, Restores Mom's Sanity to find out all about how QLess and Santa are teaming up this holiday season to give the gift of time back to otherwise-weary kids and parents, and the gift of more customers and more revenue to the photography company, mall management, and our sponsor, AT&T.
Will Ross has posted an elegant and disturbing poem about waiting for service at the Sprint store at 72nd and Dodge in Omaha, Nebraska. He doesn't indicate how long his wait actually was, other than noting that he didn't start taking notes and working on his poem until he'd been waiting for 35 minutes.
One of the cashiers at the Johnson County DMV shared this story with us this week, and we thought it was a great example of how QLess turns a mundane experience like waiting at the DMV into something as exciting as birthday cake! :)
On a recent weekend, I was in Las Vegas, and my wife and I were playing poker at the Monte Carlo. It was about 9:30 pm, and we started talking about getting hungry, and figuring out if we knew any place close by to get some Mexican food and a decent margartia. The dealer overheard us and recommended Diablo's Cantina which was right on the corner of the hotel, with an outside door facing The Strip. So we cashed out and headed to dinner, arriving about 10:00.
Just found this gem in a recent discussion on reddit.com:
"I worked at Target in high school, and in the 'training' before we started, they had about 15 new hires in a conference room, and they had us stand up and told us to sit down once we thought 1 minute had elapsed. They told us not to count though, but just to sit down when it felt like a minute. I swear, this one woman sat down after 15-20 seconds. Almost everyone had sat down, and it was down to just me and one other person, and they sat down, and then I felt awkward standing by myself and so I waited a bit and sat down. Turns out I sat down at like 48 seconds. The point was to show how people think things last longer in situations where they are waiting."
The Johnson County DMV is now using QLess Web Services to display the current wait times at both of their DMV locations on their home page. They're also using QLess Kiosk to let customers enter the virtual line from home!
Adam Ostrow gives QLess a nice write-up that's on the front page of Mashable as I write this. Check out QLess Changes the Way You Wait in Line.
Customers at The Boiling Crab are already giving QLess some great reviews. Eddie C. from Cerritos writes in his 5-star review:
Congratulations to the newest member of the QLess family, The Boiling Crab on being featured in the LA Times!
Yesterday was the tail-end of a weekend with record-setting heat here in L.A. What a great day to stand in a line of 1000 people at the airport, waiting to get through security.
Following in the footsteps of last month's "An almost-perfect trip to Disneyland", now Valleyfair in Minnesota is making news by changing their policy to make guests with disabilities wait in long lines for rides. The park used to let disabled guests skip the lines, but this policy was being abused. I just had a friend tell me a couple weeks ago how her boyfriend would always put on a fake cast, and rent a wheel-chair whenever he went to a theme park, just so he could skip the lines. So it's easy to imagine how badly out of control this policy was getting, and what drove Valleyfair to this decision.
A new study conducted on behalf of Capital One finds that, when faced with a long checkout line, 24% of consumers say that they abandon their purchases, and walk out of the store. Capital One is trying to promote their PayPass product, to reduce the transaction time at checkout. But rather than hurrying customers through the checkout process, why not let them continue shopping while they're waiting to checkout, instead of standing in an infuriating line?
Sarah Barnes from Austin writes about their family trip to Disneyland, where an almost-perfect day was marred by two unfortunate (and unnecessary) problems. First, her daughter Meredith, who has special needs, had a lot of trouble standing in Disney's famously-long lines, becoming anxious to the point of tears. Second, when requesting a special pass from the park, to help them avoid the lines, she was forced to justify Meredith's need for it to the park staff, by explaining her condition in agonizing detail. Of course, once she convinced them, she found that the "special pass" wouldn't actually help them avoid the lines.
CBS 3 in Philadelphia confirms that coaster pagers are filthy and dangerous.
I'm happy to announce that qless.com has received its first big overhaul. The site encapsulates just over 1 year's worth of thoughts and efforts on trying to eliminate standing in line. Check it out at http://qless.com
QLess reached a milestone this week with its first trade-show appearance at G2E, the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. It was a great time, and a fully-decked-out booth, complete with a touch-screen kiosk, provided by our friends at SeePoint, a Funny Money Machine, provided by our friends at Unique Activities, and a beautiful spokesmodel.
Hello world! It's my first blog post. So bear with me... :)
