FILL IN THE GAPSIN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE DURING SOCIAL DISTANCING

Meet Covid-19 retail guidelines with sophisticated customer flow management

Meet Covid-19 retail guide-lines with sophisticated cus-tomer flow management

With the re-opening of retail stores, all sizes of business are confronted with the ongoing issue of maximising customer flow during social distancing.

The priority must be to keep employees and shoppers safe while mitigating risk. Your store and operation must meet new guidelines (and potential enforcement notices). Yet with fewer people in a store at any one time, you also need to maintain commercial viability and competitiveness. A recent study shows shoppers may need a minimum of ten square metres to maintain social distancing – so innovative ways must be found to keep customer flows high.

At ACF Technologies, we believe hard-earned levels of customer experience needn’t be lost due to the ongoing pandemic. Gaps in customer experience created by social distancing can be filled. With sophisticated virtual queuing and appointment scheduling,

you can deliver personal and safer customer experiences which will be genuinely appreciated. And the solution can be implemented quickly and successfully.

The ROI you can achieve is also impressive: working with ACF, a global telco reduced customer no-shows by 40%; a large UK Retailer shifted 60% of bookings online (and saw 18% fewer appointment cancellations); and a Government body reduced the average wait times for customers by 18%.

Overview of Government guidelines

Retailers will be aware of the Government guidelines for minimising contact resulting from visits to stores or outlets. Of the 18 guidelines* which aim to protect staff and customers from risks to health and safety, we believe that 12 can be fully met by more sophisticated virtual queuing, appointment scheduling, and other digital measures.

Examples include: controlling pinch points during social distancing; regulating the numbers of customers in-store; staggering access during opening hours; managing the use of outside street spaces; and adjusting queue systems to support disabled or elderly shoppers.

Combining all of these different forms of customer flow management may sound complicated; but in reality, they can be streamlined using a single solution: Q-Flow.

*Correct at time of going to print

How retailers can fill the gap in customer experience

01While physical queues may become a part of life, the ‘need to queue’ can be transformed to reduce queuing time and manage customer visits more effectively. Virtual queuing not only control queues; it can aid social distancing and ensure public spaces don’t become overcrowded. Using QR codes or automated SMS messaging gives customers the freedom to return for store access at the right time, rather than queuing.

When linked with live store capacity monitoring, virtual queuing also helps to control customer numbers in-store. And when customers are shopping, they can use the same virtual queue solution to access changing rooms or visit customer service. Q-Flow manages queues for all sizes of store, including a ‘lightweight’ solution that simplifies queuing for smaller stores.

Virtual queuingImprove customer experience and cut queue times

02Pre-reserved store visits or appointments reduce pressure on queues and support better customer experience. Personal one-on-one visits are a great way to drive competitive advantage. Whether it’s in-store events or special opening times (for the elderly, key workers or high-value shoppers), scheduling these visits commits shoppers to time in your store; influences buying behaviour; and can potentially increase average spends.

These ‘special times’ can be automatically aligned with regular store operations. And you can even match staff availability and skillsets with customers as they arrive for appointments or time-slot visits.

Scheduling of appointmentsand store visitsGive customers their own space and time

03If you haven’t already moved to Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store, our solution is implemented rapidly, to take the pressure off queues and boost online sales. Collection can be driven by online or telephone orders, and fulfilled by in-store or kerbside collection – all managed by automated SMS messaging to customers. Even if you have a basic collection solution already, using more sophisticated software lets you automatically flex collection appointments or allocate special collection times to particular groups, further improving the customer experience.

Pre-order and collectServe more customers safely

04Right now, customers need confidence they won’t be entering a crowded store, and you need greater insight into foot traffic in your premises. Q-Flow delivers transparency for both. Using Q-Flow features, customers can avoid queuing at peak times simply by checking store busyness in real-time via their mobiles. Meanwhile, retailers can monitor actual numbers of customers in-store to control social distancing and meet Government guidelines.

Should customers need to wait, they can see current wait times for the store, improving their queuing experience. If you have multiple stores, you can give real-time recommendations for the least busy stores a customer can visit and lower the risk of losing a sale.

StorebusynessAttract customers in off-peak times and measure store capacity

05Virtual customer serviceImprove customer experience with more efficient channels

There’s never been a better time to move towards an omnichannel solution that delivers unique customer experiences. Using Q-Flow’s Assistant Anywhere solution, you can create personalised video services that meet the customer’s need for support and service, while increasing your staff productivity.

Assistant Anywhere is fully automated and contextual, and can easily align to the different service needs and rules within your business, with communications streamlined by SMS and email. It also automatically aligns with virtual queuing and appointment scheduling to create a genuinely joined-up retail experience for customers.

06Intelligently flex customer trafficFill the gaps in customer experience, automatically

How you manage multiple customer touchpoints and visiting options during social distancing may have a bearing on longer-term success. So flexibility is critical: intuitive queuing, flexing of store visiting time slots, and solutions for integrating passing traffic will allow you to out-perform less agile competitors.

You can go further too with the power of Q-Flow. For example, we make it easy to automatically adjust store schedules due to new Covid-19 procedures (such as cleaning-down appointment areas). Or you can automatically deliver reminders and marketing content – to fill the gaps during periods of waiting and improve the customer experience.

Client examples

Boots use our omnichannel solution nationwide to enable appointment booking online, by phone, app or in-store. This covers 2,500 stores and our booking engine manages over ten million appointments per year. The solution fully integrates with multiple internal systems, and even includes a

rota management system for staff.

For Santander, our enterprise omnichannel appointment booking solution is fully integrated into internal systems, and manages bookings online, by phone, via an app and in person. It spans 800+ branches and includes automated calendar

optimisation for all 10,000 staff.

Vodafone benefits from intelligent in-store queue management, branded kiosks for joining queues, digital signage for calling customers forwards and customer segmentation business rules. This means that over 750 stores are already well equipped to

deal with the challenges of social distancing.

About ACF Technologies What you can do next

ACF Technologies are a global leader in customer experience management for retail. Through a consultancy-led approach, we help you to streamline interactions from queue management to appointment scheduling, and live reporting of store activity to omnichannel provision. Our solutions improve operational efficiencies, create better and more profitable customer experiences and, in the current climate, help you to meet Government guidelines for social distancing.

Q-Flow is our comprehensive queue management and appointment scheduling platform. It allows retailers to manage and optimise individual customer journeys and experiences while supporting back-office processes.

The retail scenarios we propose here are real, achievable, and of great importance to ensure you optimise the customer experience and maintain profitability. Therefore, we are available immediately to discuss options to improve your queuing and appointment scheduling systems, and meet current guidelines or changes to those guidelines. In the first instance, please email acfinfo@acftechnologies.com or call 0333 600 8090 to request an appointment and discuss your requirements or our capabilities.

Schedule a demo now

FAQs

Our clients represent a true cross-section of retail: from the High Street and shopping centres to financial institutions. As a result, Q-Flow is at work in department stores, fashion, telcos, supermarkets, pharmacies, retail banks, showrooms and many other businesses.

Very much so. For different retail clients and situations, you will currently find Q-Flow supporting 750+ stores, managing ten million+ appointments per year, or providing automated calendar optimisation for 10,000 staff. We built our solution to work at scale, and perhaps the best single example of that is our work with the Department for Work and Pensions, where our booking engine handles in excess of two million appointment bookings per month.

The answer is high configurability. We have spent many years building a solution which supports any size or shape of store; which can accommodate all customer journeys; and which can automatically tailor a journey depending on the needs of the customer and business. This ability to adjust to customer behaviour (and in the present climate adapt to Government regulations) sets our solution apart.

Depending on the complexity, we aim to have a working solution live within a matter of days or weeks, but it could be even quicker if your use case needs rapidly resolved. As one example, we supported the Department for Health and Social Care in delivering appointment scheduling for Covid-19 testing across the UK. We took this critical project live in a matter of weeks.

Find out what Q-Flow can do in a real-world retail setting

Find out more about our solution

Schedule a demo

Managing the customer visit to ensure safety is at the heart of our solution, and also the focus of the Government’s guidelines. We believe the nature of these guidelines can be met, and exceeded, by the use of Q-Flow. Equally important, the configurability of our technology gives you the power to meet any future guideline changes, or indeed, changes in customer behaviour or demand.

What kinds of retailers use your solutions? Why is this different from my current queuing or scheduling system?

How fast could a solution be up and running?

How does it help me to meet UK Government guidelines?

Is this ready for very high volumes of customers?

ACF Technologies (UK) Ltd

Technology House, 48-54 Goldsworth Rd, Woking GU21 6LE

acfinfo@acftechnologies.com

0333 600 8090

© 2020 ACF Technologies, All Rights Reserved

All product names and brands are property of their respective owners. All company, product and service names used in this document are for identification purposes only. Use of these names and brands does not imply endorsement.