5 Easy Methods to Minimize Waiting Lines in Your Brick-and-Mortar Shop

While Filipino customers are well-known for being patient, the truth is, no one enjoys waiting in line. If you’re able to reduce wait times or make waiting more enjoyable, you’ll likely see an improvement in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

To that end, here are some strategies to reduce wait times and enhance the waiting experience for customers lining up at your store:

1) Get a POS That Lets You Accept All Payments

The Philippine payments landscape is more diverse than ever, with Filipino consumers now increasingly heavy users of payment cards and digital wallets. This means that it’s no longer enough to just accept cash and offer a card swipe machine for traditional credit cards. When you switch over to a fully-featured contactless payment and credit card POS or point of sale system, your customers will be able to pay however they want, ensuring smooth and orderly queues at your checkout lane.

Of the many POS solutions available on the Philippine market, the Maya Terminal has emerged as a clear winner among startups and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that have brick-and-mortar operations. Unlike previous-generation POS devices, the Maya Terminal is more than just a credit card swipe machine and can facilitate QR Ph payments, tap-to-pay cards, dipped EMV cards, and popular digital wallets. With Maya Terminal devices in your checkout lanes, you’ll be able to handle any payment your customers want.

2) Choose a More Mobile POS

One of the major drawbacks of older POS devices and card machines is that they aren’t mobile and can only be operated at a fixed location in your store. Apart from putting limits on your customer queue design, such a machine would also prevent you from using your POS system outside of a prepared area, making you unable to set up pop-up stores or participate in events where mobility is key.

Card terminal solutions like the Maya Terminal and its ultraportable counterpart, the Maya Terminal Lite, help solve these mobility issues, allowing you to not only take payments anywhere within your store but also out in the field when needed. With a portable card terminal machine, you can even take your POS right up to your customers, allowing you to refine your queue management and deliver on-point customer experiences.

3) Invest in Staff Training

Staff training makes a huge impact on your business’s ability to maximize its POS technology investments. Taking the time to ensure that your staff knows how to use your credit card terminal solutions will not only prevent hiccups in your checkout lanes, but it can also result in a better overall experience for all your customers. 

To reduce the training burdens on your staff, choose intuitive solutions like the Maya Terminal and Terminal Lite. These in-store payment devices are based on the popular and easy-to-use Android platform, ensuring that your checkout lane staff will need minimal onboarding time to start using them effectively.

4) Add Separate Queues for Complex Transactions

Complex or uncommon processes such as custom orders, item exchanges, and loyalty card sign-ups should be facilitated at a separate checkout lane, if possible. These processes usually take up much more time to complete compared to normal sales, and handling them in the same lane that your regular customers use will increase average waiting times significantly. Facilitating these other processes at a special queue, on the other hand, will allow you to create a much better experience for most of your customers with special requirements.

5) Make the Queues Fair

A 1993 paper published in European Advances in Consumer Research found that the feeling of “unfairness” has a major effect on how customers perceive their time in queue. This is an insight that truly carries over into today’s modern retail sphere.

While you can’t always speed up queues, you can at least design your checkout process so that it does not feel unfair to customers. A tried-and-tested way of doing this is to offer multiple servers for each queue.

Although offering multiple servers or POS systems in one queue is going to seem like it yields similar overall processing capacity as having multiple checkout lanes, it may feel more “fair” to customers who are in the queue and ultimately create a better overall experience for them—which, in turn, will influence their likelihood to return to your brick-and-mortar store.

Offer Your Customers a Superior In-Queue Experience with the Maya Terminal

The Maya Terminal is not just a credit card machine. It’s a fully-featured cashless payment acceptance solution that lets you process QR codes, digital wallets, and other emerging digital payments. With Maya Terminal devices in your checkout lines, you’ll not only speed up queues, but you’ll also unlock a better in-store experience for your customers. Create a Maya Business Manager account today for faster queues and payments in your store.

Having a Maya Business Manager account doesn’t just give you access to better POS devices. It also opens up new ways to grow through one-of-a-kind offers like the Maya 1-2-3 Grow product bundle. 

Maya 1-2-3 Grow gives you a 1% merchant discount rate (MDR) for QR Ph transactions made through Maya Business solutions. That translates to PHP 14,600 in transaction fee savings for every PHP 1 million in QR Ph sales. As part of the bundle, opening a Maya Business Deposit account as your settlement account also lets you enjoy free fund transfers via InstaPay and PesoNET, as well as a generous 2.5% p.a. interest on your account. This translates to PHP 25,000 in earnings on a PHP 1 million deposit.. Even better, the Maya 1-2-3 Grow promo entitles you to a Maya Flexi Loan offer as large as PHP 2 million within just 3 months. Sign up for Maya Business Manager today for faster in-store payments and unique opportunities to expand your business, like Maya 1-2-3 Grow.