Benefits of the Irisys queue management system

3 min read
Dec 10, 2015

In the first article, we shared the evidence that a better and faster checkout experience contributes heavily to shopper’s overall satisfaction.  In the second article we discussed the need to first understand your current service level and the effort required to achieve your desired service level before making a service promise.  In the third article we described the process changes required to ensure your strategy is consistently delivered.  In the fourth article, we stressed the importance of selecting and monitoring the correct key performance indicators (KPIs).  In this – the fifth article in the series – we describe some of the specific ways our customers have used the system to better understand and improve their business.

The Irisys Queue Intelligence™ management system

The primary function of the Irisys system is to track how many customers are waiting in line, how long they are waiting and to provide a real-time prediction of how many registers should be open to meet the retailer’s service promise.  This allows the retailer to continuously monitor and deliver their front end service promise.

Another major function of the system is to provide the required register staffing by time of day.  This information is used to ensure that only the labor required to provide the desired service level is used, and that registers aren’t being over or understaffed.  

While these are the obvious benefits of the system, our customers have found lots of other ways to use the provided data and tools to better understand and improve their business.  The following section describes a few of these uses.

Additional uses of the system

Door Count Data

The system provides a real-time and an end-of-day report of the count of people walking in each entrance.  Our customers have used this information in a variety of ways –

  • Merchandising - One of our retailers discovered that she was placing her featured merchandising units near the store entrance with the lowest customer traffic. She began placing the merchandising units next to the entrance with the highest traffic thereby increasing the number of shoppers that would see the units.
  • Store Entrances - One of our retailers had coffee shops in several of their stores that had entrances from the outside. The coffee shops opened up into the store.  They thought customers were using the coffee shop entrances; however, the door count data showed that these entrances were rarely used.  The retailer made the decision to lock these entrances.  This data-based decision relieved the store from having to monitor the entrance and possibly prevent loss from theft.
  • Shopping Carts – Some of our retailers use the door count data to determine which entrance shopping carts should be staged by time of day for incoming customers.

Lane Data

The system provides a report that shows queue lengths at each lane by time of day.  We have seen this information used several ways.  A few of these are described below –

  • Register type – The lane report clearly shows congestion at each register by time of day. With this information, one of our retailers was able to determine that they didn’t have the proper mix of regular and express registers, and made the decision to convert some of their regular registers to express.
  • Problem registers – because this report clearly shows lane congestion, several of our retailers have used it to identify and address issues pertaining to cashier speed, lane opening sequence and register visibility.
  • Validate mystery shopper results and investigate customers complaints – because 10 weeks of lane report history is easily accessible, our retailers are able to go back and determine what was happening on the front end at the time of the report or complaint.

Lane Scheduler

The Lane Scheduler is an Irisys tool that is used to build till opening schedules at the store level that align with the retailer’s service objective.  Two of our current customers that don’t employ a workforce management system – one with several hundred stores and one with under 20 stores – use this tool exclusively to build their front end till opening schedules.

The above is just a few examples of how our customers use the data, tools and reports from the Irisys system.  For a more complete list, use this link to download a copy of the Irisys Queue Management System Benefits document. This document provides additional detail on system benefits and describes the Enterprise Reporting, Till Profile, Lane Scheduler and Predictor tools.  Please contact us for more information on how the Irisys Queue Intelligence™ management system can help you improve your business.

Occupancy Business Case

Connect with us

Need more information? Ready to get started? We're here to help, get in touch.