Queue management is quietly transforming the way we carry out daily activities such as shopping and visiting leisure facilities.
Back in 1999, Britain's leading supermarket, Tesco, was seeking ways to differentiate itself from the competition. Customer service was a key area for improvement: if people enjoyed shopping at Tesco more than at competing stores, management argued, they would become loyal customers.
One in Front
Research showed that time spent in checkout queues was the leading cause of customer dissatisfaction. Tesco decided to do something about it. The One in Front programme meant that, if staff spotted a queue of more than two shoppers, they would open a new till.
The theory was fine. In practice, however, the policy of continual 'firefighting' was difficult to implement successfully. In particular, predicting busy times in advance, and having staff members ready to take on the extra work, was impossible.
At the time, Tesco was working with Irisys on another project. An Irisys scientist was talking with a senior manager about customer service, and noted that ceiling-mounted infrared sensors at store entrances and tills could accurately count visitor numbers. Combine these with algorithms concerning average time spent in-store, he reasoned, and Tesco should be able to predict busy periods well in advance. Staff could be deployed before queues ever built up.
Rapid return on investment
This was the birth of the queue management industry. Today, many of the world's leading retailers and leisure facilities have implemented Irisys solutions, and many more are in the process of doing so. Demonstrable return on investment is very rapid: customers strongly favour locations where they don't have to waste time in queues. Staff deployment is also much more accurate, leading to major gains in productivity and lower costs.
Sir Terry Leahy, then chief executive of Tesco, said that the system was a key factor in the company’s half year pre-tax profits rising ten per cent to over £1 billion. “We have heat seeking cameras that sense the number of customers entering a store and predict the checkouts that need to be open in an hour," he explained. "We can monitor and manage the service customers get much more precisely — by customer, by store and by the minute."
In fact, the infrared sensors are a relatively small part of the solution. The key is in the hugely complex algorithms that predict behaviour. Over the past decade, and after counting hundreds of millions of customers, the sophisticated software has been continually fine-tuned. It can now factor in elements such as weather, local demographics, and many hundreds of other variables.
"Thanks to this, a quarter of a million more customers every week don’t have to queue,” Leahy concluded. Worldwide, Irisys queue management systems push that figure into the billions.
What to know more? Read the Tesco Case Study and Morrisons Case Study.
Watch videos and read more about about how Queue Management and other Irisys products can be used in retail, supermarkets, leisure and the banking and finance sectors.