It would be interesting to evaluate the importance of the post Covid 19 rules on social distancing that will be enforced to control the spreading of a second wave of the epidemic once things do come back to ( new) normal.
Since the time retail as we know it has been around, all the stores and it’s management have been closely monitoring waiting times and how to better handle traffic. That said I am mentioning retail environments but the same principle applies in the same way to your local post office, bank or coffee shop.
As mentioned queues management,even with the support of dedicated software ( I’m thinking of the one I personal used before Qmatic )has always been a 🔑 (key) performance indicators for both evaluating the service level provided and at the same time your workforce productivity.
Now with all the rules that will be enforced post Covid such as only few customers at once, store stuff only interacting with one customer at the time, temperature check before entering the store, will definitely affect waiting time.
So whilst certain KPI ( for further reading on this check my post about the 5 Retail KPI simply explained) like Conversion Rate will be skyrocketing ( no customers will browse the stores, realistically we will only enter store if we do need something, other metrics like the customers served per hour will be affected.
From a retail management perspective this might not be important at this moment in time, but will be difficult to try and do any vs. LY comparison.
Another perspective regarding waiting times, will be if you are on the other side of the counter: the customer. Let’s be honest,nowadays we all live very busy lives try to balance work, home and social life, so time for shopping in most cases had to fill in as a gig saw puzzle.
Now how this will impact our schedules? If for the same shopping task time needed might as well be three time as much?
UpBiz 