The Art of Waiting: Recent Episodes
NEMO-Q
Take a card, grab a seat. This is The Art of Waiting, a NEMO-Q podcast, your one-stop shop for the most important changes in line management software and solutions.
Erik Berg, VP of marketing at Nemo-Q, explained to Host Tyler Kern the benefits and ease of utilizing the 8-second survey.
8-second surveys gather data on the intended audience’s experience. It can be used to measure customer satisfaction of a product or service and even employees’ morale at the company.
Why 8-seconds? Nemo-Q ran some market research on surveys and found that most people who start a lengthy survey abandon it within 10 seconds. Therefore, they created the 8-second survey.
“The idea is to gather enough pertinent information in eight seconds to have actionable data. So in eight seconds, through a series of smiley faces and short answer questions, we’re able to get enough information to make changes the next day,” said Berg.
While most immediately think of customer experience surveys, Berg highlighted the benefit of obtaining employee feedback more frequently than your typical once-per-year survey. Similar to customer experience surveys, an employee pulse survey can build trends to help prevent turnover and increase employee morale.
“People start off with the customer experience. They see how we analyze the data for them. We’re actually able to give them recommendations on actions they can take, new questions they can ask,” Berg continued. “And they say, ‘Wow, look how quickly I can effectively change my business, and why not change the morale of the company in the same way?’”
Nemo-Q approaches surveying with a curiosity to know more. To obtain more data intelligence, a customer who rated a business poorly may receive a follow-up question specific to their experience. For instance, was it lack of staff friendliness or lack of facility cleanliness that led to that rating? These two questions provide significant insight into the “why” while only increasing the survey length by a second.
The bottom line: Nemo-Q helps create a culture of action to move companies forward in a creative, quick, and efficient capacity.
Pet adoption soared during the pandemic. Nearly 20 percent of homes surveyed by the ASPCA adopted a pet. This increase in pet adoption leads to a domino effect that will increase wait times at the vet office.
On this episode of The Art of Waiting, A NEMO-Q podcast, Host Courtney Echerd talked with Erik Berg, Vice President of Marketing at Nemo-Q, about how installing a queuing system at vet clinics can improve wait times and increase customer satisfaction.
Berg noted that even in his home the pet number increased during the pandemic, so he understands the issue of waiting at pet clinics. With more pet owners, there is also a higher demand for pet food, pet products, and veterinary services. While it’s certainly an inconvenience for pet owners, it could take a toll on a pet’s health.
“There are two sides to the coin,” Berg said. “The first is the people aspect of it, and that’s obviously the animals, and the reason for needing to be at the vet is important. But, also you as a person are busy, and just like if you’re going to the doctor you would like to be seen on time and in a timely fashion … the other side of the coin is for the pet.”
With the increase in pet adoption, vet clinics have become crowded. A queuing system that allows customers to get on a waitlist before coming to an office creates efficiency. It creates a better workflow that will enable animals to be seen quicker. This also reduces anxiety for the animal, as they won’t have to wait in a crowded, stressful animal clinic.
On this episode of The Art of Waiting, A NEMO-Q podcast, Host Tyler Kern talked with Michael Berg, CEO of NEMO-Q, about queuing technology and how it can be utilized in banks.
Queuing is matching up different people waiting in line for different things, tracking how long they wait, and then making sure you have the resources needed to serve them appropriately and efficiently. Businesses can then blend appointments with walk-in traffic, which can be essential but might not be best if left up to human error. This also tends to matter more in a bank setting, where it’s not the same as other environments.
“If you leave that to humans, it can be slow,” Berg said. “Banks are very different from retail. They’re, obviously, very different from a DMV or a tax office in the sense that they actually have regular customers. They have good customers, and they have some really high-value customers.”
Banks often have customers that have a lot of money in the bank. In a queueing scenario, a high-value client can be identified with a number or a card that’s tied in with the bank’s system. This will allow that customer to receive high priority. For example, if an important customer comes to access the safe deposit box, they could be identified, and it might be known they don’t have investments with the bank.
“You don’t want to send a fresh employee, one that’s just out of high school or college, to let them in the safe deposit box,” Berg said. “You may even want to make them wait a couple of minutes for the branch manager who can sell this person something, and a queuing system can do that.”
On this episode of The Art of Waiting, A NEMO-Q podcast, Host Tyler Kern talked with Michael Berg, CEO of NEMO-Q, about queuing technology and how it can be utilized in banks.
Queuing is matching up different people waiting in line for different things, tracking how long they wait, and then making sure you have the resources needed to serve them appropriately and efficiently. Businesses can then blend appointments with walk-in traffic, which can be essential but might not be best if left up to human error. This also tends to matter more in a bank setting, where it’s not the same as other environments.
“If you leave that to humans, it can be slow,” Berg said. “Banks are very different from retail. They’re, obviously, very different from a DMV or a tax office in the sense that they actually have regular customers. They have good customers, and they have some really high-value customers.”
Banks often have customers that have a lot of money in the bank. In a queueing scenario, a high-value client can be identified with a number or a card that’s tied in with the bank’s system. This will allow that customer to receive high priority. For example, if an important customer comes to access the safe deposit box, they could be identified, and it might be known they don’t have investments with the bank.
“You don’t want to send a fresh employee, one that’s just out of high school or college, to let them in the safe deposit box,” Berg said. “You may even want to make them wait a couple of minutes for the branch manager who can sell this person something, and a queuing system can do that.”
Customer surveys are important. They are needed to understand who your customers are, what they’re trying to do, and how well a company is helping them achieve those goals. But crafting them is important, and questions need to be framed in a meaningful and actionable way.
On this episode of The Art of Waiting, a Nemo-Q Podcast, host Hilary Kennedy talked with Michael Berg, CEO of Nemo-Q, a pioneer in the field of queuing management and customer flow technology. They have experience from thousands of installations making a real difference in the way customers wait.
At some point, everybody has taken a survey – or maybe avoided one. In some cases, users might start a survey only to realize they don’t want anything to do with it. Why is this?
“You don’t know how long the survey is, to begin with,” said Berg, who has over 30 years of experience in customer queuing and wait time management. “Everybody tells you it’s a quick survey, and it rarely is.”
Berg elaborated that customers will get that one graphic in an email asking for feedback, but that will lead them to realize that’s only for one question out of 40. “You answer five questions, and it says, ‘You’re almost done,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I’m done right now,’” Berg said.
While survey regret is real, Nemo-Q has an eight-second survey that can double or triple participation rates. When a customer sees “eight seconds,” it creates a challenge for them, so they hit the button. With a high click-through rate, Nemo-Q can get a robust survey in eight seconds. Berg said it’s key how questions are asked and how answers are presented.
There’s one thing that a return to semi-normal in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear – customers and visitors don’t have time to wait.
Expectations for seamless, quick experiences are higher than ever, and that means more industries are turning to queuing solutions to make that efficiency a reality.
The Art of Waiting host Daniel Litwin was joined for this episode by NEMO-Q National Sales Manager Nick Eason, who offered some front-line insight into these new industry use cases for the organization’s powerful queuing solutions.
In particular, queuing has made its way even deeper into the retail scene in addition to finding new homes and use cases in healthcare, marijuana dispensaries, airports, hospitality organizations and more.
“They’re actually very significant,” Eason said. “Normal retail course of business and things definitely slowed down because of the pandemic … but some of the other ones picked up significantly.
“There was definitely an increase across healthcare, especially.”
The universal benefits for each industry are clear. Queuing solutions help inform customers and guests about wait time, leading to higher satisfaction, empower them to wait from anywhere, can help pair them with employees best suited to their needs, and, overall, help ease strain on employees and drive powerful, organization-wide efficiencies in combination with robust data.
Listen to the entire episode for more queuing insights.
With the world reopening and a considerable uptick in face-to-face interactions expected, more and more businesses face a demand and capacity issue. Namely, demand may exceed the capacity to handle customers. Queuing can provide the perfect solution, but it comes with an intimidating prospect.
Waiting in line at a healthcare facility has always brought challenges, but those difficulties were heightened as the COVID-19 pandemic raged on.
Nick Eason, National Sales Manager at Nemo-Q, spoke to host Tyler Kern about how Nemo-Q’s solutions are helping these facilities be more efficient in their processes, which will continue to help them navigate this unprecedented time and prepare for a future of more efficient lobbies.
The approval of several vaccines against the novel coronavirus is welcome news around the world. Now that there are vaccines proven to work, the struggle has become how to get those shots from labs to human bodies.
It’s tough to consume news coverage and not see scenes of long lines of cars or people at vaccine rollout sites as counties and states wrestle with the best way to begin protecting people in their communities.
In the heat of the moment of an event, things often can go wrong. That’s especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic, when shifting protocols and regulations have made organizers even more stressed when it’s go-time.
This added stress makes you want your queuing solution not only to work well but also to be able to respond quickly if something goes wrong. Something like misreading a monitor doesn’t remove the need to quickly understand what’s happening and when.
Not only does NEMO-Q respond quickly to customer issues, technician Cameron Evans says it also makes sure that it follows up with clients to ensure the same issues don’t pop up in the future.
“That holistic approach, our attention to detail and making sure we follow through with everything. I can’t speak the same for other competitors, but one thing I can say that we do is we follow-up, we cover our bases, we make sure we’re doing everything we possibly can on our end to make sure the customer we’re servicing is getting the help they need,” Evans said.
This overall strategy of customer support isn’t only applicable to big events. NEMO-Q offers comprehensive support to all its clients, including hospitals and government buildings, which have taken advantage of the technology in big numbers with offices now busier during the pandemic.
“There’s an increased demand for our services and services like it, so there was more pressure there to meet those service standards,” Evans said. “Did it affect our operations dramatically or impact the level of service we give? I would say no because our approach is built on the foundation of the holistic approach and because the storm of COVID-19 came we were able to withstand it a lot better than I would say some of our competitors out there.”
Waiting in line never has been fun, but now it can be dangerous.
Grocery stores and other retail outlets have tried to use tape or other systems to enforce social distancing measures that prevent the spread of COVID-19; however, it can be a struggle with customers not used to the system or simply not paying it any mind.
The solution may be in virtual queuing, methods that allow customers to get in a line that exists outside the physical realm and then be notified when they should come in.
“What we actually want to do is remove people from lines altogether,” said Erik Berg, VP of Marketing for NEMO-Q. “They can wait in their cars, they can wait from home and ultimately it leads to all of us being a lot safer, a lot more health conscious and still leaves a positive taste in the mouth. You’re not going to that business and being forced to wait outside because they’re 20% capacity. You can wait from the comfort of your home.”
The setup can be effective for places like small barber shops, letting a shaggy customer know the chair is now ready for the post-quarantine fade, or as big as sports stadiums when fans are allowed to enter those facilities once again.
“We’re looking at ways to allow people to get their tickets and then be told when it’s safe for them to come inside, maybe moving into the stadium in waves, going to get concessions at certain times and getting push notifications to their phones,” Berg said. “There are lots of different strategies to look at and implement, but I think appointment scheduling and overall use of cell phones is the biggest one for us.”
Right now, it’s keeping us safe, but perhaps in a not-too-distant future when coronavirus is a thing of the past, we’ll also find we want to spend less time in lines simply for convenience’s sake and the innovative solutions offered by NEMO-Q may become a part of every day life.
Coronavirus is shutting down local economies across the nation and the world. Unless your business is "essential," it's likely the doors are locked.
Those essential businesses, though, often include important legal offices, some government buildings, grocers and pharmacies, and medical care environments.
Many of those industries, especially when overwhelmed with customers, rely on queuing systems to keep things orderly and people in line for as little time as possible.
Keeping things orderly and quick is now even more important. On this episode of The Art of Waiting, CEO of NEMO-Q Michael Berg explained how queuing solutions support social distancing recommendations in an office or workplace.
Berg breaks down...
- Which industries and businesses staying open have the most dire queuing challenges
- How previous crises like Hurricane Katrina have shown the need for smooth queuing operations
- The unique layer of social distancing needed for queuing solutions
- How NEMO-Q is supporting these businesses and organizations in upgrading their queuing operations or launching a first-time system
All system software eventually needs an upgrade. And, with NEMO-Q ready to serve up software enhancements for its legacy systems, Erik Berg, Sales Director at NEMO-Q, dropped by to let host Daniel Litwin in on what’s changing with this new rollout.
Berg said the new features are easy to identify, and users will notice the ease of use improvements right away.
“NEMO-Q recognized the need for customers to be able to configure the system to fit their needs, and the new software design does that,” he said.
The most significant shift in strategy is that NEMO-Q’s solutions are now web-based instead of client-based. This change allows for the versatility and ease-of-use customers expect today. Customers can expect to be able to utilize NEMO-Q on their smartphones and tablets with this upgrade.
“Ultimately, we haven’t changed the customer experience too much, but what we have done is improve those customers’ workflows and made life easier for them,” Berg said.
“By helping our customers, we’re helping their customers,” he said, noting that improvements in efficiencies should reduce customer queue wait-times.
In today’s experience-driven society, people long for engaging, personalized attention. The healthcare market is no different, and it’s increasingly being driven by enhanced patient experiences. Patients are becoming more involved in their healthcare, and their attitude is shifting to that of a consumer.
Evolving in pace, then, is critical for healthcare organizations, and queueing solutions from NEMO-Q can aid in that evolution. While a multitude of factors go into a patient’s experience, wait time is often outsized.
Nothing is more frustrating that sitting in a lobby with no clear idea of when your waiting-room purgatory will end, and this perceived wasted time can lead to patients walking out the door for good. They can also take other patients’ business with them through the power of social media, word of mouth and more.
Enter a Wait Anywhere solution from NEMO-Q.
The NEMO-Q Wait Anywhere solution enables patients to secure a place in line from anywhere, expediting check-in processes and decreasing time spent waiting in lobbies. NEMO-Q ensures that a patient is seen by an employee in the correct department with the correct skill set. Further cutting down on wait times and patient pain-points.
With Wait Anywhere, patients can enter your queue online from any phone, computer or on-site kiosk. The solution is adaptable across age groups and preferences, the patient is offered a choice between a kiosk and a personal interaction when checking in.
Wait Anywhere couldn’t be simpler. By accessing your website, patients can see projected wait times and enter their mobile number to be assigned a spot in line. From there, reminders and wait-time updates can be sent to further inform patients, and these messages can be interactive to allow for changes and requests. Wait Anywhere even allows for the blending of appointments and walk-in traffic and features a global-management dashboard the provides key information, such as wait time, service levels, productivity, NEMO-Q exclusive employee waste time, and more.
These key insights can help you adapt over time to differing traffic patterns and employee average productivity, saving time and money and further boosting efficiency. NEMO-Q solutions also provide capability for patient satisfaction surveys, garnering immediate feedback and specific information about positive and negative experiences that can further help streamline the patient experience.
As a global leader in queue management software, NEMO-Q offers healthcare organizations the opportunity to modernize how patients wait. NEMO-Q’s robust platform allows you to manage queuing and collect data, empowering timelier visits and insights that improve both the patient experience and your competitive edge.
Not all customer waiting lines are created equal. A walk-in traffic line at the DMV is characteristically different than a registration line at a college or university, said queuing expert Erik Berg. On this episode of the podcast, host Shelby Skrhak sat down with Berg, a sales consultant for the North American Region at NEMO-Q, to discuss how to best handle traffic management on college campuses.
"For a government entity like the DMV, it's very first-come, first-serve in the order they came in and very fairness-centric," Berg said. "But in a college or university, it doesn't have to be that way."
What makes higher education campuses unique is the students' familiarity with doing business online.
"These kids grew up with technology so we don't have that fear of people not wanting to use their mobile phone or get in line from their computer," Berg said.
NEMO-Q creates systems for college campuses that seamlessly transfer students between departments and merge walk-in traffic with appointments to maximize efficiency. They've implemented their Student Flow Management system at campuses such as Michigan State, Harvard University, Texas Tech University, UT Arlington, Georgia State, University of North Florida, University of Central Florida, and USC.
As a result, campuses have reduced labor expenses, increased employee efficiency, and reduced student abandons. Most importantly, Berg said, the queue system has increased student satisfaction.
"Students feel like they're valued and their time matters," he said.
Waiting in line seems to be an unavoidable experience. On this episode of MarketScale’s Building Management Podcast, Michael Bruner, National Sales Director for NEMO-Q, sat down with host Sean Heath and they discussed the philosophy and technology behind removing the wait from waiting in line.
Virtually every government office experience requires waiting in a line, however, Bruner pointed out that they are addressing the lines associated with an enormous number of sectors today.
“We have about 50,000 customers across the world using the NEMO-Q system. A lot of those are outside of the government world and they cover really any industry where someone stands in a line," he said.
While there appears to be the exact same line in whichever government office a person finds themselves visiting, each one is quite distinct, according to Bruner.
“One city is going to be very different from another city and their office constrictions, whether it be size of the office, number of employees that are behind the counter, those are all different across each different office," he said.
Bruner pointed out that a key factor in controlling an office’s efficiency is found in the data at their disposal.
“One of the biggest things to reducing wait times is to ensure that from the time the office opens until the time the office closes that you are staffed appropriately for the expected volume of customers. Using the data from our system, customers have the ability to go in and see exactly what they can expect for that day," he said. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure."
Online shopping is dominating the transactional marketplace for its ease and immediacy. For brick-and-mortar business, this fact makes providing a positive in-store experience all the more crucial for keeping customers content and loyal. Much like first impressions, the lobby experience can be the singular determination of whether a customer leaves happy and returns again. On this episode of MarketScale's Building Management Podcast, we discover just how important a positive lobby experience can be in both the private and public sectors. The podcast welcomed Michael Berg, queuing expert and CEO of NEMO-Q, to elaborate on the lobby experience today.
“The customer is going to walk away with an experience, they’re going to walk away with an impression of the business no matter what happens," Berg said.
Simply put, business need only make their queuing experience pleasant to maintain positive brand perception. But how? The first hurdle is finding out what people are happy or unhappy about by gathering feedback.
NEMO-Q has streamlined and customized a fast, eight-second surveying process that delivers real results.
“Companies can get instant actionable data even after a day of use,” Berg said.
The data, in turn, helps businesses approach queuing systematically. Whether it’s a flustered parent with noisy children in tow or a disgruntled patron in a rush, every customer has a pain point when it comes to queuing. These issues can only be addressed once they’re known.
By capturing data, problems like long lines, employee in-efficiency, and customer engagement can be identified in as little as just eight seconds.
To check your pulse, you'd place two fingers on your wrist or neck and count the beats per minute. But checking the pulse of an entire company could be as simple as taking an eight-second survey. In this new episode of the Building Management podcast brought to you by MarketScale, host Sean Heath sat down with Erik Berg, sales consultant at Nemo-Q, to discuss employee engagement as the key to efficiency.
North-Texas based Nemo-Q offers pulse surveys, including their 8-Second Survey, a short poll that asks employees how they're feeling at different parts of the day and offers feedback that allows companies to go in-depth and solve underlying problems.
Among the biggest problems facing companies are disengaged employees, high turnover, and high incidences of stress-related absence.
"People are your number one commodity in business," Berg said. "Anytime you can decrease turnover and have more engaged employees, everyone's going to be way more efficient. That's a fact."
But disengagement manifests in many ways. "In fact, sick leave absences have increased 600 percent in the past seven years," Berg said. "That's people taking leaves of absence from work for stress-related problems."
Creating a channel for employees to share concerns and feedback helps team members feel they matter. "Employees want to feel like they're more than just a number," Berg said. "They feel it's nice to know that the company is putting an investment in them as a person, and they really care and want to know how they're feeling."
If you've ever waited in an unbudging customer line, then you've thought to yourself, "There's got to be a better way to do this." This is an issue that plagues facility managers and store owners regardless of industry, and like many other processes that have revolutionized brick and mortar stores, the answer to this problem may lie in efficient uses of data and technology.
On this episode of the podcast, host Tyler Kern sat down with Erik Berg, sales consultant for the North American region at NEMO-Q, to discuss best practices for customer queuing.
"It's the face of your business. Someone comes into your office, and it's the very first impression they get," he said.
NEMO-Q is a growing company that sells and designs queuing systems for government agencies, hospitals, and companies. Unlike the traditional waiting or line experience, NEMO-Q also provides companies with the ability to collect data by soliciting feedback.
In this episode, Berg discussed different methods for check-in, including an on-site kiosk or remote check-in on your smartphone or computer, and why this elevated experience can change a visitor's entire perception of an experience.
"You're inevitably going to have long lines in government offices, for example, so the name of the game becomes about the organization and whoever delivers best will win," Berg said.
Showing real-time wait times online is one way to mitigate the waiting process for customers, he explained.
"Having a modern solution to organize your walk-in traffic is almost a necessity," he said.
As a world of consumers, we understand the necessity of lines, but at the end of the day no one likes to wait. Companies, from retailers to DMVs to post offices, have long sought ways to more efficiently serve customers, which eventually generated the first queuing system. Decades later, modern queuing systems are becoming more prevalent and more sophisticated. Today, we welcome Michael Berg, CEO of NEMO-Q Inc., a provider of queuing systems that help companies manage customer flow, to take us on a journey through the history of queuing.
Modern queuing systems, beyond pulling a piece of paper from a tab on the well, are a rather young product in a young industry, with their first implementation in the 1970s. “The first system was designed for a post office in Sweden in an attempt to reduce labor costs and serve customers better. It was rather simple, allowing customers to push a button for stamps, packages, or other services. This then created multiple queues that allowed workers to deal with shorter transactions first, like stamps,” Berg said.
As people saw the value, queuing systems evolved quickly and became used more and more. “The first iteration was a black box with a microchip, then in the late 1980s, the next version looked like a game console with lots of keys. It was rather cumbersome and complex. Then, came the next version that used PCs," Berg said. "Yet, there wasn’t much change in how the system worked. It was still 'take a number and wait for it to display.'"
Like any technology, queuing systems didn’t stay stagnant, and a lot of development activity took place that utilized data to inform innovation in design and operations.
“There are two aspects to wait time. First, there is how much time a person waits versus how long it takes to complete the transaction. Our system measures these things, and wait time and transaction time are in good relation to one another; companies have to look at ways to change this," Berg said.
"Next, there’s perceived wait time. As wait time increases, people tend to think they’ve waited longer. So, we have the ability to present the estimated wait time at the beginning to impact the perception," he said.
What Berg has found out most recently that has a tangible effect on wait time is the integrations of digital signage with queuing systems. Those in line have something to look at, which Berg has found reduces perceived wait time immensely.