Shortening the queue at the collection desk without hiring
Short answer: a queue at a collection desk rarely forms because too few people are standing behind it. It forms because every customer, including the one who knows exactly what they came for, waits on the same employee to look up the order, sign it off and hand it over. Take the simple cases out of the queue and the staffing you already have turns out to be enough.
Look at what the queue is made of
A queue of ten people at half past seven is almost never ten of the same thing. Usually it is eight instances of “I am here for order 4417” and two that genuinely need attention: something that does not add up, an urgent question, a customer who does not know what they need.
Those eight simple cases are not difficult, they are just serial. They each take a minute or two of the same person, and they sit ahead of the two customers who actually need that person. Hiring another employee in this situation buys you a second person to do the same lookups faster.
What takes the simple cases out of the queue
A kiosk at the desk where the customer identifies themselves with their order number, sees which bay their order is waiting in, and signs on screen. That signature lands in the system immediately, with nothing to retype later.
What makes this work is in the details:
- Identifying has to use what the customer already has. An order number, an email address, or the code from the confirmation. Every step that asks for something else sends the customer back into the queue.
- The customer has to know where to go without being told. A bay number on the screen works, “your order is ready” does not.
- There is always a way out to a person. A customer who gets stuck must not stay stuck in a screen. That is precisely the customer the employee is there for.
So the employee does not disappear from the desk. Their queue simply gets shorter, and the work that is left is work where they add something.
What you get besides the waiting time
Two things that rarely come up beforehand.
The first is that the handover is recorded at the moment it happens. Who collected what and when, and signed for it, is captured without anyone entering notes at the end of the day. Arguments about “that order was never collected” largely disappear.
The second is that a desk vacancy you cannot seem to fill becomes less painful. That is not an argument for hiring nobody, but it does take the pressure off a recruitment round that sometimes runs for months.
When it does not work
If most customers come to the desk for advice rather than for an order, then it is not a collection desk and a kiosk will not do much. The test is simple: count for a week how many customers at the desk know exactly what they came to pick up. Under half, and this is the wrong answer to your queue.
We have written this up as an example scenario in our work. What something like this costs is on the packages page, and a short conversation usually makes it clear whether your queue has this shape.