This is a story about customer retention when faced with queuing.
If you are like me then I really don’t like waiting or queues. I think it’s a key area for how businesses deal with, what is effectively, a pent-up demand and capacity issue. It’s a bit like phoning a company and getting voicemail or some waiting message….something I wrote about last month in Voicemail is rubbish.
As a way of showing you how one company does this, I thought I’d share this story about a local restaurant, a favourite of ours, in Brighton and how they deal with waiting customers. Local restaurant Bill’s in Brighton is a hugely popular restaurant, especially on a Saturday and Sunday, where they have queues of people (sometimes out the door) waiting to eat. What they find works for them is three things:
This works for a number of reasons:
This makes their customer experience extremely ‘sticky’. It’s not 100% reliable but works a lot of the time. I estimate they have a 70-80% success rate in getting people to queue, specially given that there is a new competitor next door.
So, if you have peak demand issues or customers that you have trouble dealing when times get busy ask yourself this:
Please comment and send your stories. I’d love to hear them.
Thanks to thebittenword.com for the photo.
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Customer retention: How do you make your customer waiting experience sticky? @ http://bit.ly/cZH9qr