The Best Uses For a Queue Management System in a Bank

Introduction

Banks offer vital financial services integral to the running of our economy. However, no one would describe the feeling of attending a bank appointment as an enjoyable process. It is not meant to be fun, but there are flaws in the banking customer experience that pose some significant difficulties. Accessing bank resources should be easy and seamless, with limited friction. However, this isn’t always the case.

There are often long waits at banks that cause customers significant amounts of frustration. Whether customers are waiting for a financial advisement appointment, have walked in to replace a card, or are discussing loans, there is typically a substantial wait. According to one study, the average wait time at banks is more than 20-minutes.

This can often create a difficult customer journey. Financials are sensitive topics, and if customers wait long for these important appointments, they aren’t likely to be happy. Dealing with frustrated customers is difficult for employees, and the negative queuing experiences are a drain on customers’ spirits.

However, just because the status quo isn’t working out doesn’t mean banks are out of options. Long lines and frustrated customers are a problem, but there is a solution. Queue management systems present a way for banks to modernize their customer journey processes and create a smoother in-store experience.

Virtual queue software allows customers to check into lines for appointments or walk-ins on their phone. They can select an appointment type and communicate back and forth with staff. Customers can view the actual wait time on their phone and enter the bank whenever it is nearing their turn in line. It is a more free and individually gratifying experience with advantages for banks.

Let’s look at some of the best uses for queue management technology and see how it can create a more efficient banking experience.

Improve the Waiting Experience

Standing in a long physical queue or sitting in a stale waiting room is never a fun experience. The vast majority of people are very unhappy waiting in lines; it is one of the most common customer complaints across industries. According to a Synqera survey, 73% of participants said that waiting in line for check out is their least favorite aspect of the shopping experience.

It is pretty clear what people don’t like about long lines. Long lines are frustrating, a waste of time, and an impersonal experience. But specific aspects of the queuing process cause the most customer complaints. Research indicates several crucial aspects of the waiting experience that are the most disheartening. The two most critical takeaways are that unoccupied waits feel longer than occupied waits and that unknown wait times feel longer than known, finite wait times.

This is where a queuing system for banks can make a significant impact. A queuing solution for banks uses the established psychology of customer behavior to create a more palatable waiting experience. For starters, customers can check into the wait remotely. They can sit on their couch and work, watch a TV show, or read a good book while the line moves on. Their wait time is occupied. They can also monitor the known, finite wait time with QLess, so they know precisely when it is time to go. An SMS message to their mobile phone will notify them when it is time for their appointment to begin.

Waits are inevitable in almost every industry. Supply and demand are never going to line up perfectly. However, the waiting experience doesn’t have to be painful. A digital queue takes what could be a frustrating experience and transforms it. Customers can check in from wherever they are and monitor the wait in line app to see when it is time to go and enter the retail bank when their appointment is set to begin. It is a friction-free waiting experience.

Separate Yourself From the Competition

There are a lot of banks in America. That is a simple fact. In every industry, there is heavy competition, and banking is no different. There are more than 4,200 commercial banks across the country, according to Statista. Complacency regarding customer retention can cause a bank to lose out on customers. The optimum way to ensure that a bank stands out from its competition is to focus on the customer experience.

The customer experience isn’t just a retention strategy but a growth strategy. Customer satisfaction has a direct impact on a business’s financial performance. According to Alice POS, companies that deliver a better customer experience obtain revenue from 4%-8% above their market. The more customer-centric your business is, the better you are likely to perform. A lot of that comes down to customer service.

According to Forbes, 96% of customers will leave your business due to poor customer service. A lot of this comes down to the friendliness of the staff and the smoothness of your processes. The friendliness of your team comes down to training and culture, but the smoothness of your operations can be controlled through a customer journey management software like QLess.

QLess has been found to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by up to 99%. The easy-to-use interface and additional freedom customers experience goes a long way toward earning their trust and loyalty. The physical congestion inside the bank is removed, creating a more pleasant service environment.

The business world is increasingly competitive, and customers expect a lot out of businesses. They demand convenience, fast service, and friendly staff. Meeting these customer expectations isn’t easy, but with virtual queuing software, businesses can streamline the waiting process to offer better customer service and create more loyal customers.

Create Business Flexibility

Queue management software isn’t just designed to ease the customer experience. It is also intended to help businesses with a powerful tool that can increase operational efficiency and shorten service times. This increases banks’ capacity to take on customers and allows them to get more done in less time. One of the ways queue management software can do this is by providing flexible calendar management features that allow banks to have complete control over their day-to-day.

A queue management software like QLess with customer flow features gives banks a tool that will enable them to be much more agile. Missed appointments, late customers, and changes to employee availability are par for the course in every business. The ability to effectively respond to these changes in a manner that doesn’t impact service times is important.

QLess has flexible calendar management features that can be automated or custom-controlled. Banks can set priorities and rules and automate the line to run itself. They can prioritize customers with appointments in the line over walk-ins, set limits for how late a customer can be before they’re moved out of the queue, and have specific appointment types filtered to specific employees.

This creates a fast-moving process where changes can be made on the fly. If a customer doesn’t show up for their appointment, the entire line is organized virtually, and they can simply be removed. If there are a bunch of walk-ins, the system supports hybrid queues, so all customers will be serviced promptly. There are also bi-directional communication features where customers can talk back and forth with staff to provide updates to ensure everyone is on the same page.

There are a lot of bottlenecks that occur in the day-to-day life of a bank. Being able to address these bottlenecks quickly while still providing a positive customer experience is crucial. It is made far simpler with a bank queue management system.

Access Data on the Customer Experience

If you want to improve your quality of service, one of the more helpful tools available is data. Data reveals to businesses the objective truths about their operations. It gives them tangible numbers that explain vague concepts like long waits or slow transaction times. These numbers can serve as valuable insights into financial organizations’ customer experience and staff productivity. With online queue software, businesses now have the tool to collect that data.

QLess has business intelligence features that provide high-value insights into several aspects of a bank’s customer journey. The software will monitor and report the average wait time, transaction time, number of customers serviced daily, appointment no-show percentage, and more. The data can be segmented according to time of day, day of the week, or the employee handling the appointment. It is then presented in easy-to-understand dashboards with visual graphs and charts.

The data from these reports empower banks to make important decisions with additional knowledge. Business intelligence is a valuable resource that heavily impacts a company’s bottom line. According to a Forrester report, data-driven businesses are growing at an average rate of more than 30% annually. Data helps businesses make sound decisions and peel back any biases from their perception of their processes.

Empowered with the data features from QLess, banks can look at their customer experience and see where they may be coming up short. If there are bad wait times around certain times of the day or with certain employees, they can implement the changes necessary to change that. If there is a high no-show percentage or they don’t have the customer intake they want, they can also make additional changes.

Data is objective, and if banks collect real-time queue data on their customer experience, it’ll help them solve some major problems. This will enable more high-quality service and a more successful operation.

Increase Accessibility of Resources

Banks provide a service to customers that is completely essential. Banks are customers’ primary contact points with the financial world, and people rely on banks for everything from loans and withdrawals to financial advice and mortgage refinancing. With this in mind, ensuring that banks’ physical locations accommodate people of all backgrounds is incredibly important.

The service quality of a bank is predicated on its ability to provide an effective and positive experience for customers of all backgrounds, and accessibility is a big part of this. The Americans with Disabilities Act became law in 1990, and more than 30 years later, it is still an important part of everyday life. It is a law intended to combat discrimination against people with disabilities in all aspects of public life.

Ensuring that a bank complies with this landmark civil rights law is essential, and any solution implemented should keep it in mind. Queue management software like QLess provides banks with an impactful solution that increases the accessibility of a bank’s crucial resources.

QLess has several important features that make it an excellent asset for a bank trying to become more accessible. The QLess software has several important features that work either on the mobile app or a self-service kiosk. QLess has a text-to-speech screen reader, dyslexia-friendly font, adjustable text sizes and screen brightness, helpful user tooltips to walk users through the process, and more. It is a flexible solution that can be altered to fit individual needs.

A bank can gain customer loyalty by ensuring its services are easy to use for everyone. Every bank should have features that ensure they are inclusive to people of all needs, and with QLess, they can implement a solution that makes them drastically more accessible.

Streamline Staff’s Workflows

Frontline staff face a significant challenge in their daily lives. Organizing customer flow is an extremely difficult task for staff to handle. While banks aren’t typically thought of as a disorderly environment, the wait times can get extended due to human error. Long waits lead to a lineup filled with disgruntled customers, making the staff’s job much harder. This feedback loop leads to a difficult and stressful job for the bank’s frontline staff.

In this regard, a customer interaction management platform like QLess can be a difference-maker. QLess has been found to boost staff productivity by up to 90% and can also make their job a lot less stressful of an experience.

Rather than handle the flow of people themselves, the bank’s staff will now have a tool that does it for them. The flexible calendar management features of QLess offer complex solutions to problems that staff will often face in their day-to-day life. The automating features of the virtual queue will make it so staff doesn’t have to worry about checking customers in. They can oversee the process with the customizable calendar and queue and move customers in and out of their appointments from their phones or computers.

Customers will be notified via SMS when it is time for their appointment, and staff can monitor the calendar and queue to see exactly what they have to do. They don’t have to spend time organizing the line of customers or worry about blending walk-ins with customers in the queue. Instead, they can focus on providing the service.

QLess will increase banks’ ability to intake customers, as staff can spend more time focusing on the service and less on organizing lines. These features automate customer flow to ensure staff has the easiest, most organized experience possible.

Reduce Walkaways and Appointment No-Shows

There are several problems that appointment-based businesses like banks will often have. Staff will allot time for an appointment, wait patiently for the customer, and the customer never comes. This is known as an appointment no-show. Another common problem comes when customers enter a bank, see a massive line of customers, and simply leave rather than wait. This is known as a walkaway. Both walkaways and no-shows are missed opportunities for businesses, but an effective queue management system can reduce these issues.

Appointment no-shows are a common part of every appointment-based industry, but that doesn’t mean they should be accepted. No-shows are a waste of staff’s time and a lost opportunity. QLess can change this by offering communication features that allow staff to message back and forth with customers. Staff can send automated messages of appointment reminders, reach out to customers through customized chats before their arrival times, and remain in contact with customers before arrival. This will reduce the rate of no-shows.

With walkaways, the biggest problem is the intimidating nature of large physical queues. Customers enter the building, see a mass of people with no certain end to the wait in sight, and decide they’re better off leaving. However, this won’t be the case if digital queuing solutions are implemented. There won’t be large, disorganized queues. Instead, just a virtual line where the actual waiting time is displayed for the customer.

If the queuing environment is improved, walkaways will be less of a problem. This will ensure that banks don’t suffer from missed opportunities as prospective customers leave instead of engaging with their services.

Both walkaways and no-shows are problems many businesses have dealt with for years without having the means to address them. Implementing a waiting line management platform can go a long way toward resolving these issues. Better communication and less daunting physical queues will ensure that customers show up, stick around, and engage with a bank’s services.

Better Customer Engagement

One of the most important things a modern business can do is engage with its customers. According to Instapage, 77% of consumers prefer to choose, recommend, or pay more for a brand that offers a personalized service or experience. People don’t just want personalization and communication from the businesses they frequent; they expect it. This poses a unique challenge, particularly for large banks with many customers. Ensuring everyone feels seen and engaged isn’t easy.

To provide a higher level of service, businesses need to focus on communication and engagement to personalize the banking experience. The bi-directional communication features of QLess give businesses a tool that allows them to scale their communication abilities upward. Businesses can send mass messages to groups of people in line, scheduled for appointments at certain times, or who’ve booked certain appointment types. They can also send customized messages to greet new customers or thank existing ones.

The more your customers hear from you, the better rapport you can establish. Another advantage QLess and digital queuing systems can provide is the ability to gain insights into your customers’ subjective experiences. With a pulse survey feature, businesses can send mass surveys to customers right after their appointment concludes. The answers to these surveys are stored on the platform and can offer helpful insights into your customers’ thoughts.

From these surveys, businesses can learn how customers feel about their banking experience, whether it was a communicative enough process, and how the staff performed. These surveys can auto-send at set times to ensure the maximum number of customers answer them. With insights from surveys, banks can work to hear out the complaints of their customers and offer a higher-quality experience.

The more communicative you are with your customers, the more engaged they will be. If you ensure that you provide clear channels of communication where you can message customers, and they can message you, you’ll create a more personalized experience. Adding surveys to learn how your customers feel about your bank will give you insights to make tweaks that improve customer service.

Conclusion

Banks offer a critical service that is fundamentally important to the average person. However, accessing these services can sometimes be a hassle. With many banks, long customer wait times and an impersonal experience are all par for the course, as banks struggle to provide exceptional service to every customer. The importance of excellent customer service and a positive experience can’t be overstated, especially with 17% of account holders switching their primary financial institution in the last 12 months.

Your customers have options, so ensuring the entire customer journey is smooth, efficient, and pleasant will be pivotal to retaining them. A virtual queue management system enables banks to offer customers exceptional service while cutting wait times and improving employee productivity.

A queue management system has features that give customers heightened independence and enhanced communication. With high-quality data, a flexible calendar system that lightens staff’s load, and software designed to reduce walkaways and no-shows, banks can implement an enterprise-grade solution that streamlines processes and makes life easier for staff and customers.

Long physical queues don’t need to be accepted as a standard cost of doing business. Banks can add to their customer experience with a virtual queue solution while increasing their ability to take on more clients.