UScellular: A Virtual Queue Management System Case Study

UScellular, a Chicago-based purveyor of award-winning telecommunication services and products, connects 5 million people from coast to coast. As UScellular grows, its number of people connected and customers served is only increasing. The company needed a way to balance that growth with its dedication to exceptional customer service.

To build customer loyalty and retain its status as a great place to work, UScellular was ready to reexamine its stance on customer queues. As it turns out, 5,000,000+ customers were proving too much for UScellular’s legacy pen-and-paper queuing model.

UScellular decided to partner with Qtrac to upgrade from in-person lines to Qtrac’s virtual queue management system and integrated appointment scheduling, As a result the company has enjoyed improved customer satisfaction, better use of team time, and an enhanced ability to grow its operations.

The Challenge

UScellular is a leading full-service wireless carrier in the United States, serving millions nationwide. However, its previous methods of managing customer appointments and in-person wait times weren’t as innovative as the rest of its services.

• The company knew it wanted to grow, yet its 4,800 employees were already operating at maximum capacity keeping customers happy.
• UScellular had an internal SharePoint solution it used to keep track of some appointment and customer data, but it wasn’t available for customers to use.
• Further, this system didn’t integrate with UScellular’s other business tools. Additionally, neither paper systems nor SharePoint facilitated in-depth reporting and analysis on customer behavior and preferences.
• UScellular’s teams used multiple tools—from emails to cell phone notes to Post-Its—to manage company data. It was a chaotic system that wasn’t fueling efficiency or making anyone happy.
• The company generally wanted to move toward less in-person traffic—or, at least, to implement systems that would allow for more thoughtful in-person office visits.
• Finally, UScellular’s customers wanted more ownership over their appointments—and more visibility into their wait times.

To meet these needs, UScellular knew it was time to elevate its customer queuing system from pen-and-paper to something vastly more efficient. Qtrac’s virtual queue management system provided the solution to expand bandwidth and enable future growth.