The smart queue: how to organise walk-ins

Thursday evening: the crowd at the door

A barbershop with three chairs, two of them on booked appointments. Eight o’clock comes and four people walk in within ten minutes. You tell the first one twenty minutes, and you do not really know, because the man in the chair is having a colour and it may run long.

The crowd itself is not the problem. The crowd is income. The problem is that everyone standing there has no idea how long is left, so they ask you every five minutes while your hands are busy, and one of them gives up and leaves without you ever knowing he was there.

And at the end of the night you have no honest number for what happened: how many you served, how many walked out, and how long they waited before their turn.

Why a paper number and shouted names are not enough

Paper does put people in order, but it gives nobody a time. Whoever takes number 7 stays on his feet, because if he steps out he may miss his turn, and your shop floor becomes a waiting room.

Calling out names leans on your memory. You call, nobody answers, you skip him, and ten minutes later he is back saying he was outside and he came before that man. You have nothing to settle it with, so you lose either the customer or your time.

And the paper ends with the day. After that you cannot tell that Thursday night waits longer than Saturday night, or how many customers you lost while you were busy.

• the customer stands because he has no time to work with
• an argument about turns while your hands are full
• whoever leaves walks out without a trace

What changes when the turn lives on the phone

The customer scans the code at the door, or opens your booking page, types his name and number and picks the service and who he wants, or “whoever is free first”. There is no app to install.

Then he sees his place on his phone, how many are ahead, and the expected wait. The estimate is built on the first real gap in someone’s working time, around the appointments already booked, not on a general average. That means he can go for a coffee and come back as his turn nears, and the page updates itself in his hand.

You get the other screen: the list of who is waiting, and a Next button that calls the following person, with “your turn now” appearing on his phone. Mark Started and Done, and if you call someone who does not come, mark No-show and carry on. If he comes back, return him to the line in one tap. When you finish, record the service, the amount and how he paid from the same screen.

And whoever leaves the queue from his phone is kept in your reports instead of vanishing. At the end of the month you see how many were served, the average wait, who never came, and who left, and you decide from your own numbers whether Thursday evening needs another pair of hands.

• a code at the door or the till to take a number from
• a waiting screen you open in the room: now serving and next
• the customer can leave the queue himself from his phone

The queue and appointments on the same day

The first fear an owner has is that the queue will eat the appointments. Someone who booked a week ago arrives, finds ten people waiting, and asks why he should wait when he has a time.

What actually happens is that his time is kept. The queue counts the booked appointments first, and every new number is placed in the gap before or after them, never in their place. That is also why the expected wait is honest: it comes from a real gap, not from dividing the people by the chairs.

You choose how to run it. With Queue and appointments, a customer either takes a number now or books a time for tomorrow. With Queue only, everyone comes in turn and there are no appointments at all. Salons usually pick the first, so a client can book her long session, while quick barbershops are happier with the second.

When to pause new numbers

On some nights the wait reaches an hour, and whoever takes a number now will be unhappy whether he waits or leaves. That is when you pause new numbers in one tap. Anyone scanning the code sees that the queue is paused for now, and you finish with the people you already have, calmly.

Use it before closing time too, because taking a number in the last quarter of an hour means either letting the customer down or working an extra hour. The queue also closes by itself when there is no time left for anyone before you shut.

Pausing is not turning a customer away. It is more honest than a time you cannot keep, and he comes back tomorrow instead of sitting for an hour with a grudge.

The honest limit: not every trade needs one

The queue is built for trades that take people in turn: barbershops, beauty salons and spas. Those are the ones it opens for in WGTK, and it does not appear for the rest.

A restaurant does not work this way, and neither does a court or a studio. A table, a pitch and a room are held for a set time for a named person, so the right tool there is the appointment, not the turn.

And if your trade does take people in turn but your shop is quiet and no crowd builds, quick record is enough: log whoever came with the amount and how they paid in a second, without running a queue nobody needs.