23/04/2021
Customer queues: a time sink
How much time do we spend in queues? Half an hour a week? An hour?
I hope youโre sitting down.
Turns out, Americans spend a staggering 37 billion hours waiting in line each year. Yes, thatโs billion with a capital B.
Divided by the US population, this gives us slightly over 113 hours per person per year spent in queues. This number includes elderly, infants and bed-ridden people.
The queuing situation isnโt much better overseas, either. According to the How Long Does It Take To Lose Your Customer report, the average Brit now spends one year, two weeks and a day of their lives stuck in shop queues.
As the length of time spent in queues grows longer, the customersโ patience grows shorter:
25% would only wait a maximum of two minutes
59% would wait no longer than four minutes
73% would abandon their purchase if they had to queue for more than five minutes.
The impact of a lack of queue management on brand loyalty
Slow-moving queues cause not only shopper frustration but may also affect brand loyalty:
74% would shop in a competitorโs store if they perceive the queue time to be quicker
70% would be less likely to return to shop again if they had experienced long waits, researchers found.
Being able to complete a purchase quickly has a significant effect on how customers view a retailer. 56% of consumers say fast payment and reduced queuing is critical to โpositively influencing their perception of a retail brandโ.
Raj Parmar, Head of Mobile Solutions at Box Technologies, explained the results of their research:
โTodayโs shopper increasingly expects service to be instantaneous and, as a predominant cause of abandoned purchases, retailers canโt afford to ignore the cost โ both to revenues and the impact on brand loyalty โ of lengthy queues in-store.โ
This reflects what we at have been saying for years: Creating a frictionless customer journey play a big part in converting casual shoppers into loyal customers.
