Service has always been key to the customer’s journey, it is more often than not the area the customer measures their entire experience on: Whether it is waiting in line to buy a ticket or to purchase a gift or even their weekly groceries.
By understanding pinch points and predicting staffing requirements at the checkout before a queue has developed, provides for greater customer loyalty, increased basket size and increased repeat visits.
CountWise provide comprehensive real-time monitoring of service times, queue length, individual wait times and store arrival rates, add together additional data streams such as journey times and historic trends and we can deliver an advanced warning of the need to open or close checkouts with a high degree of accuracy.
Following implementation many of our clients report a sharp drop in customer abandonment from queue and from within store (abandoned baskets).
In addition, within grocery type environments we are able to identify with a high degree of accuracy, shopper type as they enter the store; this includes Trolley, groups and singles. By understanding the type of customers, we are able to predict the arrival rate at the correct type of service desk. Presenting a just in time service policy, provides a reduction of staffing cost but maintenance and refinement of company KPI’s.
CountWise is not restricted to simple parallel or linear queues, having gained much of our experiences with express, self-service and unstructured queuing (cloud formed).
Monitoring service levels is not restricted to checkouts, many other areas of customer service benefit; Example: Monitoring service points such as Deli or fresh fish counters in real time provide real-time alerts when queues are about to exceed KPI’s. In turn alerts can be communicated to staff otherwise engaged to come forward to provide short term assistance, therefore reducing customer frustrations.
In addition, the solution can monitor the number of staff behind the counter, this would allow the understanding of the number of customers walking away from counters when they perceive that no members of staff are available or insufficient to meet their waiting time expectations.
Typically real-time information and predictive scheduling is available via a dashboard, on a PC, tablet or smartphone.
In addition queue length can be communicated online through social media to meet customer’s needs, these could for example be cinema or post office queues, airport wait time to go through security.
Service level monitoring is both a real-time and an historic measurement, both parts need to be available The real-time and predictive delivery allows for local management to work proactively, while the drill down allows head office and regional management greater understanding of where their attention is better focused, both in the short and long term.
Have targets that need to be met on a daily bases, closer matching of staffing to customer needs in a real-time generates greater services levels, better customer harmonization and closer management of KPI’s.
Should need to have a clear understanding of which stores are performing and which are not. By highlighting any concerns, these can be addressed quickly and with minimum resources.
Need to see the whole picture, there is a requirement to drill down from portfolio level to individual stores and dates. Having this information at their fingertips allow strategies to be better implemented and observed.
Additional integration of other data sets such as staff scheduling and POS data greater enhance the understanding but also the management and future strategy of the business.