In total the British spend around ten working days per year queuing. New queue-busting software sets out to slash waiting times, improve service and cut administration The British, famous for their disciplined approach to queuing, waste a combined 403,000 years every year waiting for things according to Populus research for KANA, developers of queue-busting software.
The research finds every British adult wastes more than 10 hours a year waiting for phone service alone.
Kenny Bain, senior vice president and general manager for KANA, said: “The British are famously stoical about queuing, but the question we need to ask in an age of sophisticated technology is ‘why wait?‘.”
KANA software is in use by more than 900 organisations in the private and public sectors worldwide and a new version launched this week sets out to reduce waiting times, cut administration and avoid duplication at call centres, on the Internet, on mobile devices and across social media. The new software enables customer details to be passed across several communications channels rather than being restricted to one. The growing antipathy to queuing in the real world – and the increasing importance of telephone-based and Web-based service – is confirmed by the research. Queues at banks, post offices, etc, waste an average of seven hours of our lives every year.
Forrester Research has found that 66 percent of customers say valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. Forrester calculates that a 10-percentage-point improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than £500 million in revenue. Tweet a problem to an organisation using KANA Enterprise and it will tweet a solution back. The software also acts as the eyes and ears of the organisation, identifying problems on mobile chat, monitoring social networks, providing real-time analysis and managing proactive communications to audiences as big or as small as the provider wishes to target.
Where we spend our time queuing (hours per year):
Shops & other retail outlets 13.5
Public transport 10.7
Travelling in vehicles 23.5
Entertainment venues 10
Phone lines/call centres 9.6
Post Offices/banks/cash points 6.5
Work canteens/vending machines 1.6
Other 3.2
Total: 73.7 hours per year
Forrester data, for example, shows that “75% of consumers move to another channel when online service fails, which can incur a cost of many millions of dollars.”
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