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How Virtual Waiting Rooms Are Increasing Customer Satisfaction

2022-11-11by Nikki Gabriel

Across the world, waiting rooms are just a fact of doing business. No matter whether you work in healthcare or finance, entertainment, or the legal sector, your customers often have to wait for appointments with your employees. With the movement to remote working, more often than not, these waiting periods take place from the comfort of the user’s home.

 

Yet, as remote meetings become more popular, users want more. That’s where virtual waiting rooms come in, with businesses around the globe incorporating these spaces into their workflows. Instead of focusing on customers traveling across their city for an appointment, they can simply log into an online platform and wait for their appointment.

 

Virtual waiting rooms streamline the customer experience, boost interaction, and make sure that no one has to wait in a line. In short, these new technological spaces are a force for customer good, helping to cut down on waiting time and keep business moving. In this article, we’ll dive into the world of virtual waiting rooms, breaking down what they are and why they’ve become so popular with modern businesses.

 

Let’s get right o it.

 

What Are Virtual Waiting Rooms?

Depending on the specific industry you work in, how a virtual waiting room manifests will vary. In general, a virtual waiting room is an online space where customers can check in for any appointments that they have. Once checked in, the person they’re meeting with is alerted to their presence, or they’re placed in a queue.

 

Instead of making people commute to a physical office, this online system allows users to experience any meeting they may have from the comfort of their homes. While many people think of doctor’s office appointments, the uses of virtual waiting rooms go far beyond this. In fact, any business that expects a high traffic volume to their website can use a waiting room system.

 

As an external server, a virtual waiting room allows businesses to control traffic to their site, ensuring that their local servers remain functioning, even at times when many users are logging into their meetings. Beyond organizational benefits, there are a range of technical benefits to using a virtual waiting room.

 

On the side of the customer, a virtual waiting room removes any frustrating parts about attending a virtual appointment. Streamlining the experience and allowing customers to know exactly how much more time they’ll have to wait for, this system smooths out customer-business interactions.

 

What Are the Benefits of Virtual Waiting Rooms?

Virtual waiting rooms are a powerful technology that helps businesses streamline their workflows and provide a better customer experience. Depending on the specific industry, the applicable benefits of including a virtual waiting room may vary.

 

For example, in a doctor’s office, moving to a virtual system allows patients to evade exposure to other patients within a physical waiting room. Although slight, in the era of COVID-19, advantages like these really do make a big difference.

 

Beyond these specific examples, there are a range of general benefits that businesses can expect to receive when they start using virtual waiting rooms:

 

?   Better Customer Experience Through Personalization

?   Improves Attendance Rates

?   Actionable Insights to Improve Staffing

?   Total Privacy for the Customer

 

Let’s break these down further.

 

Better Customer Experience Through Personalization

Personalization is now one of the most important aspects of modern customer interaction. Everything from marketing to 1-1 contact should be personalized, with your customers wanting to feel important to your business. Instead of treating people like a number, you should strive to give them an experience that they’ll remember.

 

In fact, around 71% of customers expect a high level of personalization, with this having quickly become the industry standard. A virtual waiting room allows businesses to start on the right foot. By asking a customer their name, pronouns, native language, and any preferences they have for the meeting, you can instantly bring them a level of satisfaction.

 

Instead of just being a number in a queue system, a personalized waiting room allows them to feel more in touch with your business. You’ll be delivering a highly-personalized experience while they wait, ensuring that the first contact they have with your business is a good one.

 

Improves Attendance Rates

 

No matter how important they could be, no one like giving up their time for a meeting. Whether it be a workplace meeting or a healthcare appointment, everything takes time that we don’t necessarily want to give up. With this general sentiment around meetings, many people forget they’ve booked them, leading to no-shows.

 

In fact, in the medical industry, as high as 13% of appointments are not attended. That’s 13% of time that doctors are wasting while waiting, without certainty as to whether the patient is on their way.

 

Not only does a no-show waste time, but it can lead to unnecessary interruptions to a company’s workflow. By introducing a virtual waiting room, a client will have to check in for their meeting. This simple action will alert the system, ensuring that the host of the meeting knows that they will be attending. Instead of just assuming all meetings will happen without hassle, this system of checking in ensures that attendance remains high.

 

What’s more, as a virtual system, you can connect a meeting room to automatic emails. An hour before, or whatever amount of time you see fit, you can trigger an automatic email that alerts the recipient that they have a meeting coming up. This electronic and automatic system boosts attendance rates and ensures that everything runs smoothly.

 

Actionable Insights to Improve Staffing

Throughout the day, when you have a virtual meeting room, you can receive live data about how busy your business currently is. Perhaps in a certain hour period on Friday each week, you have many more people that log into your waiting room system. If a queue is building up at a certain time regularly, then this is a sure sign that you could place more staff on shift to deal with the queue.

 

Knowing when these peaks in traffic arrive allows you to take action to remedy them. Although a virtual waiting room ensures that the traffic doesn’t overload your servers, as it’s on a separate page, they don’t help with getting through the queue as quickly as possible. However, their insights generated by interaction will point toward busy periods.

 

Using the power of data produced by your virtual waiting room, you can improve your workflow and accommodate better to busy periods, keeping your customers happy.

 

Total Privacy for the Customer

Finally, one of the leading benefits across all industries when turning to virtual waiting rooms is the fact that they are totally private. Commuting to a physical location also implies spending time in a physical space where others are waiting. By moving online, users access your waiting room from the comfort of their homes.

 

No matter if they’re contacting you for a healthcare appointment, legal advice, or simply to access your services, they’ll have complete privacy. While more important in some industries than others, this is a huge benefit for those that care about being discrete and want to fly under the radar.

 

As a customer-focused service, virtual waiting rooms are some of best ways to provide your clients with complete privacy.

 

Final Thoughts

Virtual waiting rooms are powerful spaces for businesses that want to deliver the best possible experience to their customers. With the vast range of applications across many distinct industries, introducing one of these virtual spaces can streamline your interaction with customers and help support your servers.

 

Across the technical benefits, customer satisfaction increases, and improved workflows that businesses receive when they introduce a virtual waiting room, this is one of the most effective improvements you can make to your online business. Especially in the age of virtual meetings, we must adapt if we want to stay ahead of our competitors.

 

Virtual waiting rooms are the way to go.

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