Fairness is an essential part of customer service. To maintain a strong, lasting relationship with your customers, it is important to have a sense of fairness. Your customer interactions leave a lasting impression. It is often more important than the product or service itself.
In fact, customers switch brands mainly because they feel unappreciated.
Even if a website is taken down, this importance does not diminish. Customers can sense when they are being unfairly overlooked because of how connected the modern consumer has become.
A patchy service can make it more difficult for customers and you to feel frustrated when a website goes down. A high-quality waiting room is a great way to prioritize your customers even when your resources are limited.
Site stumbles: They happen to everyone
It’s not uncommon for site owners to lose their sight. Some business owners mistakenly believe that an increase in traffic to their site is a positive thing.
Online customers don’t wait. They will click away if they don’t like your site in a matter of seconds. Although it may seem like a terrible thing, site abandonment can be reduced by acknowledging the problem and assuring customers that they will be taken care of at the right time.
Your website’s server is running out of resources, and this can lead to a site being unavailable due to a sudden user influx.
Each user uses a small amount of the server’s memory and processing power. A traditional server has a hard limit, which means that even one additional user could compromise the integrity of the entire site.
Your site can be saved from being down by recognizing user influxes. You can do this by creating a waiting area. After a certain threshold has been set, all visitors are directed to a virtual waiting area. This is done on a fair basis so that everyone gets what they need.
A Website Waiting Room: The Benefits
There are several factors that can lead to users abandoning your site when it crashes. The lack of transparency and a lot of error messages tell users that they won’t find what they need. Your competitors will likely be willing to take on any additional slack and this could lead to a significant loss.
Website waiting rooms promise that users will still be able to access your website as long as they wait. Although this may sound alarming – after, no one likes waiting – the context of user surges shows that waiting rooms can keep users.
Consider what could trigger a surge in users: a huge new product, a ticket, a time-sensitive release, or limited availability; virality on social media. A waiting room helps to protect your site’s integrity and eliminates the frustration of trying to fix downtime.
Users who attempt to connect to your site will be bombarded by error messages if it is down for the count. These messages can reflect poorly on your brand and send the message that your website is not being managed properly.
A waiting room, on the other hand, actively supports customer experience at a time that is more needed than ever. Transparent wait times assure customers that they will be able to get in their queue. When they do, the customizable visitor threshold ensures that you provide a pleasant user experience throughout the site.
Virtual queue skipping
Nobody likes queue skippers. They make it impossible to wait in line. Worse, when one person or bot begins queue skipping, everyone will follow their lead. Queue skipping is as common online as it is in real life.
There are a few ways to skip the queue. The most common way to skip the queue is to use the waiting room architecture on the main site to redirect the user to another website.
This is how Queue IT, the world’s leading waiting room service, works. Tech-savvy users can opt out of the queue simply by opening Web Inspector and blocking any request URL from the redirected site. They can now access the site much faster than legitimate users. (If they don’t crash it in the first instance).
Another form of queue-skipping is when a user places a bot in a place of their own. The bot will keep its place while the user goes about their business.
A high-quality virtual waitroom solution can prevent both of these problems. For products that have high resale values, like concert tickets, server-side bots and skip prevention mechanisms are essential.
There are also client-side options. You could have a blank page redirect users directly to the queue, which would protect your main site from any queue skippers. Even if they disable redirection, users can still not interact with your site.
A Waiting Room Can Make You Feel More Secure
Bots can cause havoc on your website. It is important to avoid bad bots, such as the large influx of bots under DDoS attacks or individual queue-skipbots. A waiting room can be used to stop targeted attacks by validating each user. A waiting room solution, just like airport security screenings, has mechanisms to verify the validity of each user.
This is the basic form of a CAPTCHA. Other solutions include a queue number where each validated visitor has a unique identifier. You can also prevent bot scalpers by transferring early visitors to a countdown webpage.
All early visitors will be randomly assigned a place in line. This eliminates bots’ advantage of arriving minutes before you sell. Fair user experiences allow you to prioritize real people at the other end of the DNS request.
Waiting rooms are an essential part of modern eCommerce. They can be used to protect your site from malicious attacks or defend your customers from scalpers.
