5th Joy of a Retail Spring – Profit from Queue Management

An effective and efficient queuing strategy has many benefits from minimising abandonment, increasing loss prevention, stimulating incremental impulse sales, loyalty building and customer service engagement.

 

5th-joy-of-retail-spring-more-perfomance-from-queues

Failure to control and maximise the queuing opportunities means a retailer will never find that “sweet spot” of happy customers willing to queue and engage whilst delivering additional impulse sales

  • what is the “sweat spot” for queue waiting time linked to impulse sales?
  • how do I minimise abandonment yet expose impulse product?
  • what should the relationship be between service time & waiting time?
  • should service time relate to queue length and items per basket?
  • are my customers queuing where I think they should be?

This is how we help… Queue Performance Analytics

“How do I improve the efficiency and experience of my store queuing systems whilst increasing incremental impulse sales?” 

Overview:

The use of video analytics combined with traditional POS data to monitor customer behaviour and impulse purchasing during queuing

  • analysis of queuing patterns and queuing hot spots
  • analysis of relationships between queuing times, serving times, queue abandonment and sales per transaction
  • analysis of incremental sales linked to queuing time, serving time and impulse product location and display
  • analysis of queuing behaviour by time of day, day of week

Benefits:

  • identify the best queue management strategy for location of queues, type of impulse merchandisers, categories of impulse product and placement of impulse merchandisers
  • Identify the “sweet spot” to generate the maximum impulse purchases , from minimum queue abandonments and optimum waiting time
  • Identify the best management of service time related to loyalty communication and impulse sales, dependent on queue length, waiting time and items per basket

Process:

  • Interviews with HQ and store personnel to understand the queuing issues
  • Interviews with buying & merchandising teams to understand impulse assortment commercial issues
  • Interviews with marketing & store ops to understand the loyalty service process
  • Visits to pilot stores and planning of video camera locations
  • Study of activity patterns and sales patterns through till systems
  • Analysis of the relationship between all queuing KPIs and incremental sales

Aggressive actions (from a potentially long list):

  • change and modify the impulse display products
  • change the process for opening new tills
  • change the customer service “conversation”
  • change the physical queuing layout

 

5As-audits-analysis-answers-aggressive-actions

 

For more information on how queue performance analytics can help…

tim radley - CEO, VM-unleashed.ltd

 

Please get in touch. We’ll be happy to help & advise…

+44 (0)7967 609849
tim.radley@vm-unleashed.com

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *