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.
After partnering with Qtrac to upgrade from in-person lines to virtual queue management systems and integrated appointment scheduling, UScellular 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, and 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 and expand bandwidth and enable future growth, UScellular knew it was time to elevate its customer queuing system from pen-and-paper to something vastly more efficient.
Enter: virtual queue management systems.
