The younger generation is mobile first and time conscious, which has led to an increasing trend of on demand services. Let’s look at why predictive queues will change the future, and how they work.

Queues and walk-in bookings have always been around, as it is easy to walk in and wait for a service. This is great during a quiet period or if you have time to spare. For short services such as coffee or fast food, small wait times are normal. Services like hair and beauty present a challenge as clients have limited time, and these personal services require a longer wait period.

The typical hair or beauty service experience may look like this:

10 minutes of local travel +  25 minutes of waiting + a 30 minute service + another 10 minutes of travel = meaning it takes 75 minutes total for a 30 minute service.

By predicting the arrival and reducing the wait time maximum to 10 minutes, clients are saving over 4 hours per year! This is almost ½ a work day that clients could be doing something more productive or fun. This means In a city of 5 million people = 1.8 million work days wasted while waiting for services. And this is only hair and beauty services!

“By predicting the arrival and reducing the wait time maximum to 10 minutes, clients are saving over 4 hours per year! This is almost ½ a work day” – SLIKR Benchmarks 2016

A solution is to combine walk-in’s and bookings with mobile and web check-in. A predictive queue understands the concept of future dates and times. If we know someone wants to arrive at a specific time, we can add them to the queue for that time – same as a booking.  The queue can then start predicting peak periods later in the day and advising people to arrive later so to avoid a rush.

If there are gaps a predictive queue can fill them while slightly adjusting the arrival time of someone else who has queued ahead. This achieves a combination of optimisation for the service provider where time = money, and the client achieves certainty to within a 10 minute window.

The major advantage for shops is securing the client then planning on a service, they can check-in and arrive just in time.