How to choose a virtual waiting room

Why are your website visitors queuing?

Depending on your visitor build-up, you can make informed decisions on the type of queue you need. Also, it governs where waiting rooms need to be placed in the sequence after arriving at your website for a successful interaction, leaving the site and its queues on successful completion.

The type of visit you expect can help determine the kind of setup most suited to you and your application.

• Sign-ups and selling, driven by specific promotions
• Ticket sales for high-demand events
• Seasonal demand for eCommerce websites
• Big news reveals or product/event launches
• Time-sensitive, scheduled applications and registrations
• Cover for website maintenance and system downtimes

When are your website visitors queuing?

If you know there’s likely to be a surge in traffic, you can plan for it. All of the options in our ‘why’ section help provide a suspected timeframe for high-traffic events. With that in mind, your system needs to manage the following by whichever means suits your setup.

• Increased traffic over a given period
  It could be a weekend, or it could be a month—either way, the surge needs to be managed fairly.
• High demand at a single specific time
  Special event ticket sales or product/new range launches pinpoint the start of an influx of excessive traffic and a possibility for an accurate estimation of its duration.
• Unexpected traffic surges
  If you’ve experienced unaccountable or unforeseeable surges, you’ll need a system that works around the clock—week-in, week-out.

Where are your website visitors queuing?

Another crucial factor is how well the system you choose integrates with each and every platform you utilise.

The most popular platform for almost all of our Internet use now is via mobile. That said, it would be remiss of any organisation not to provide cover for all eventualities. That means having a system that works beautifully on mobile, tablet, laptop, and desktop, whichever browser or website platform.

• Choose a system that keeps your visitor’s place in the queue even if they close down the webpage, app, or turn off their phone.
• Is your system mobile-friendly, mobile-specific, and will it work on all mobile browsers?
• Can it support the code or system your existing platform functions on?

Another sensible consideration to make is which parts of your website or app need specific protection? You may want to allow traffic to flow as usual over the majority of your site, only protecting the pages that are the most vulnerable to being overwhelmed.

This can become an issue with many eCommerce facilities, and indeed with ticketing events where a vendor wants their other events to be accessible as usual. It’s also an excellent opportunity to let visitors view what else on offer while they’re patiently waiting to make their booking or buy a product.

How are your website visitors queuing?

Customer experience goes hand-in-hand with customer confidence and building belief in your brand. In today’s society, we are quick to judge and slow to forgive—and why not? There are so many alternatives to the systems we choose to engage with.

Those alternatives are your direct competition—do you really want to hand over your customers just because your systems are failing you?

Queuing psychology shows us that it’s not necessarily queuing that causes the most frustration, but not knowing what's happening.

How we queue, or more importantly, how well we’re entertained and educated while being kept up-to-date with our progress is paramount. If we’re aware of our position in the queue, and when we’re likely to be dealt with, that’s proven to be the most important factor for visitors.

Of course, we all want a seamless and immediate application, but where that’s not possible, understanding why we’re waiting and for how long plays a healthy part in defeating our anxiety. Nobody appreciates being left in the dark without a clue what’s happening.

Connections dropping, hitting page redirects, or being sent back to the beginning of a sales or action funnel are the quickest ways to upset your visitors—so implement a system that educates your visitors and allows them to feel cared for and safely placed in a fair first-come, first-served system.

What are the common issues and needs of a virtual queuing system?

There are many possible areas to cause problems for service providers, vendors, and agents. The one common denominator is that they all require protection and prevention from any foul play.

Virtual queue-jumpers skipping the line

Choosing a server-side adapter prevents attempts to skip the line by bypassing or disabling JavaScript in client-side options.

Protection against bots

Bots are another problem where server-side solutions are better equipped to protect your platform from touts and hackers—those trying to find ways to crack your system and beat genuine visitors and consumers to the front of the queue.

VIP visitor access

Allowing direct access or speedier employment of your service for preferred customers is managed in your control settings. This requires the same level of safeguarding security and a possible change in architecture to address bottlenecks and delivery of different queues.

Eager users logging on in advance

What do you do with an excessive amount of traffic before an event launches? If you set up a queue to hold early visitors in place, does it adhere to the fairness of setting a specific event launch time? At the same time, you don’t want all of that traffic to cripple your site before your queue system launches.

Creating a queue that allocates a random order at the designated event start-time is a solution that fits with fairness etiquette. There are answers to every issue. Make sure your system covers every eventuality.

The key factors to choosing your virtual queuing system

The three areas you need to incorporate are:

• Satisfaction
• Control
• Safeguarding

Visitor satisfaction

Your visitors’ trust in your brand will slide downhill rapidly if your system continually lets them down, and we all know that reputation is paramount when it comes to loyalty.

Protect both your servers and applications with an appropriate virtual queuing system and your customers with ongoing updates at each step of their buying/registration/alternative process.

• Fairness comes first, so utilise first-come, first-served software.
• Introduce educational or informative experiences during longer queue times to occupy your visitors and distract them from lengthy waits.
• Include a seamless, safe customer journey—custom branded to build customer confidence.

Complete queue control

When choosing your virtual waiting room and queuing system, you must pick one that incorporates all the control you require at every step of the journey.

• Monitor and analyse traffic to spot surges and react to them, keeping your customers online, informed, and happy.
• Build insights into the best ways to manage future queues and where they are best suited to fit into your system.
• Adjust your in-system messaging to reflect your brand voice and style.
• Can you deliver distractions, further promotions, or special offers that add to your visitors’ waiting experience?

Safeguarding your system and your visitors’ experience

The main reason for any virtual waiting room is to stop websites crashing, losing valuable revenue from associated downtime, and sales losses. However, there are many ways hackers and less than credible opportunists will try to navigate your boundaries.

To protect yourself and your visitors, you must:

• Protect against bots and DoS attacks.
• Implement inclusion methods that prevent queue jumping and skipping places in line.
• Deliver additional security measures to prevent unwarranted access and to enhance consumer confidence.

The good news is that Queue-Fair includes everything you need as standard

You only have to browse our website to see that we cover all of the above eventualities and anything else you could ever need from a virtual queue. If you’d like to dive deeper into our system's more precise methods and applications, a complete technical guide is available for anyone who'd like to read it.

As well as a glossary of industry terms, it explains how queue and safeguard rates control your visitor ingress and output, how server-side and client-side adapters work, and which will be most appropriate for your needs.

If, after you’ve drained our guide of every piece of information, you still have questions, then our team of technical experts are always on hand and ready to help.

Give us a call, and we’ll get you on track to the safest virtual waiting rooms on the web.