When it comes to choosing a virtual online waiting room, there are plenty of considerations to take into account. Not all websites or businesses need the same requirements or applications, so a one-size-fits-all attitude isn’t appropriate for most.
So, let’s take a deeper look at those questions, and more importantly, see where the answers lie.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Choosing a server-side adapter prevents attempts to skip the line by bypassing or disabling JavaScript in client-side options.
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.
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.
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 three areas you need to incorporate are:
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.
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.
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:
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.
