Qmatic Customer Flow Management Queuing Systems for Train Stations

Qmatic has a long history of improving efficiencies in the travel industry by using customer flow management (CFM).

Qmatic is all about valuing time and making waiting worthwhile. It is the inventor of CFM and is also the world’s largest queue management company. CFM is a methodology for managing customer flow and experience from initial contact through service delivery. Qmatic operates in 122 countries and has 51,800 installations worldwide in the travel, finance, retail, healthcare and public sectors.

Customer flow management systems for the rail industry

Qmatic clients, including Eurostar and Transport for London, benefit from more efficient operations and improved customer experiences by using CFM. East Coast Lines in the UK has implemented a CFM solution in order to meet the government mandated times for issuing tickets in their main travel centres.

The Department of Transport has mandated that a passenger will wait no longer than three minutes in off-peak and five minutes in peak times to purchase their train ticket.

Using the Qmatic solution, train operating companies are able to monitor the number of passengers entering their travel centre and measure the waiting times. When waiting times approach the three and five minute deadline, an alert is issued to the management via both SMS text messaging and email. As a result, the management can open additional cashier positions and serve customers quicker.

Customer flow patterns for train stations

Qmatic has installed a CFM system in the Eurostar ticket office at St Pancras International train station in central London. The management wanted to improve communications with their customers and improve service. The statistics generated by the system were used to give Eurostar a better view of the customer flow patterns.

Linear queuing and electronic call forward system

When linear queuing is well-managed, the service provider can benefit from reduced service hours, a better use of floor space and big savings in the cost of resources. Linear queuing can start with simply laying out the line better and using barriers. This seemingly simple measure creates a great improvement and feeling of fairness. To get the biggest business benefits, you need CFM methodology and the introduction of Qmatic’s electronic call forward system.

Barriers for rail flow management

Qmatic barriers are manufactured to the highest build standards and include a patented safety tape cartridge. Qmatic has its own barrier manufacturing facility so it can bypass the middleman and sell directly to you, ensuring great prices without compromising product quality or after-sales support.

Barriers combined with call forward gives you a linear queuing solution that is easy to install, for fast-moving situations with high volumes of passengers.

Customer counting for flow management in stations

The challenge of providing adequate, well-priced, cost-effective and on-time transportation to passengers requires more than just trains, stations and staff. Much time and money is spent by private and public entities to ensure that these critical modes of transport function properly. The goal is that passengers who need the service can depend on it and revenue is maximised.

The customer counting solution ensures that managers, schedulers and operational and safety personnel understand the operational needs of the service based on accurate passenger counts. 

Customer counting is an additional, but totally aligned component of CFM. It can be used with both linear and virtual queuing systems to better manage the customer flow. As a result the client can get a more holistic view of the customer and staff situation in a face-to-face service environment.