Queue-it customer survey: Real virtual waiting room results from real customers

It’s not uncommon for people to view a virtual waiting room as a purely defensive tool. We get it. The solution prevents website crashes and slowdowns, errors like overselling or failed transactions, and bots and bad actors. These benefits are why most companies start using Queue-it.

But over the past 10+ years of working with companies and organizations on their biggest days, our customers have often told us the real benefits of a virtual waiting room come not just from what it prevents, but also from what it provides.

Control. Confidence. Peace of mind. These are the phrases that come up again and again when we ask customers what they’d miss most if they couldn’t use Queue-it.

So in 2023, we surveyed our customers to find out exactly why they use Queue-it, what value they get out of a virtual waiting room, and the effect it has on how they run their major events. This is what we found.

Table of contents

Saving on scaling

• On average customers report a 35% decrease in server scaling costs
• On average customers report a 26% decrease in database scaling costs

Increasing productivity & efficiency

• 73% say running sales/registrations is less stressful
• 50% average reduction in staff needed on-call during sales/registrations
• 75% sell through product more efficiently

Improving customer experience

• 86% say their customers’ online experience has improved
• 67% saw fewer customer complaints for sales/registrations
• 80% say their sales are fairer with Queue-it
• 58% say their insight into genuine & malicious traffic has improved

Explore the full Queue-it customer survey results

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The average reported savings on server scaling costs by using Queue-it was 35%. For database scaling, savings averaged 26%.

These are significant figures, as anyone familiar with the line items in their cloud computing invoices will know. But how does Queue-it enable these savings?

• No more overprovisioning: Online traffic almost never arrives on your site in the uniform patterns your load tests simulate. When you predict 60,000 visitors to arrive in an hour, they don’t come at a rate of 1,000 per minute. They arrive in sharp, sudden spikes when the sale goes live, when your email hits customers’ inboxes, or when an influencer posts the link. Traffic can go from 10,000 one minute, to 500 the next, then right back up to 10,000. To handle these sudden spikes, companies typically scale for peak demand for the duration of an event—meaning they dramatically overprovision resources. This isn’t the case for companies that use Queue-it. The waiting room flows visitors to the site at exactly the rate you choose, saving costs by allowing you to scale to a fixed point (e.g. to handle 1,000 visitors per minute) then operate at maximum capacity without the risk of failure.
  
  
• No need to re-architect systems: Queue-it is a bolt-on tool that enables any site to run online events like one that’s purpose built for high traffic. Rather than spending huge amounts of time and money on re-architecting systems to scale for occasional large events, Queue-it customers can keep their site as it is and add the virtual waiting room for protection during peaks.
  
  
• No wasted resources on unwanted traffic: Queue-it’s bots & abuse features block malicious activity before it hits your site, meaning you don’t have to scale to handle traffic you don’t want. We’ve seen sales where over 95% of traffic comes from bots and unwanted visitors. With Queue-it in place, you deal only with the resource load created by customers you want to serve.
  
  
• Higher reliability: Failure to scale is an often-overlooked driver of costs. Crashes and slowdowns won’t appear on your cloud computing bill, but they will cost you big. Many Queue-it customers who initially try to solve their site issues with autoscaling quickly learn the solution has several limitations. Autoscaling is reactive, meaning it can take too long to scale in response to load; it doesn’t address common bottlenecks like payment gateways and database queries; and unless your application is purpose built for autoscaling, it’s unlikely to have the elasticity required to handle sudden traffic spikes. By controlling traffic inflow with a waiting room, you avoid these limitations of autoscaling and can more reliably keep your site online. In this way, Queue-it customers save money not just by spending less on scaling, but also by preventing lost revenue and resources caused by crashes when autoscaling falls short.
  
  

Big events are a big strain on human resources. High traffic doesn’t just stress your infrastructure, it stresses your staff. Several managers we’ve spoken to say they’ve lost talented engineers who were fed-up with constantly putting out fires and solving issues caused by traffic spikes and bots.

Taking the stress and work out of high traffic events was one of the major benefits customers emphasized in our survey:

• 73% say running sales and registrations is less stressful with Queue-it
• 50% average reduction in staff needed on-call during sales/registrations
• 75% sell through product more efficiently with Queue-it

The virtual waiting room lets your commercial teams execute on their big ideas without tech teams stressing about the website staying online. There’s a few key ways Queue-it makes running large-scale events simpler:

• Reduced prep work: Setting up a virtual waiting room is far easier than preparing your website for large, unpredictable traffic spikes. Once you integrate Queue-it into your tech stack, you can set up a new waiting room within minutes. This reduces on-call staff and time spent preparing for an event, so you can increase productivity and free up time to focus on delivering broader business value.
  
  
• Increased efficiency: Selling through product more efficiently means you save time during and after your big events, too. By controlling your traffic, you avoid dealing with issues like overselling and errors in the customer journey like cart timeouts or payment failure. And by blocking bots and abuse, you don’t need to manually cancel bot orders or field customer complaints.
  
  
• Improved usability: Scaling infrastructure and removing bottlenecks is a highly specialized skill that’s typically done exclusively by technical teams. Queue-it is far simpler to operate and can be used by anyone. Many Queue-it super users actually sit in the marketing or commercial teams.
  
  
• Enhanced control: The real-time monitoring and control in the GO Queue-it Platform gives you complete insight into and control over your traffic. You can adjust the inflow up or down in real time if your systems are running hot or pause or stop the queue if something goes wrong.
  
  
• On-hand support: The Queue-it support team is on-hand with some of the world’s biggest companies on their biggest days. They’ve dealt with just about every problem related to high traffic at every scale. When you get Queue-it, you get the expertise and experience that comes along with it.
  
  

Companies need a virtual waiting room when they’re at their most visible, during their most high-stakes sales and registrations. The solution, ultimately, is designed to improve the customer experience on these mission-critical days. It’s about enabling customers to access and use your site in a way that’s reliable, seamless, and fair.

When survey respondents were asked about their customer experience with Queue-it:

• 86% say their customer’s online experience improved
• 67% say they saw a reduction in customer complaints
• 80% say their sales are fairer
• 58% say their insight into genuine & malicious traffic improved

Of course, many of these customer experience benefits result from Queue-it delivering a more stable, reliable website. Going from a website that regularly crashes to one that consistently works dramatically improves the user experience.

But beyond preventing failure, there are several ways Queue-it actively enhances the customer experience and makes high-demand events fairer:

• Delivering fairness: When there’s more demand than supply, it’s tough to fairly allocate products using traditional scaling. People with faster internet, bots, and greater technical skills consistently beat out customers without these advantages. With Queue-it’s pre-queue system—which combines randomization and first-in-first-out queuing—all visitors who show up on time for an event get an equal chance.
  
  
• Blocking bots & abuse: Beyond the sales mechanism, Queue-it’s suite of bots & abuse features enables a fairer and smoother experience for customers by keeping malicious actors out of drops. This improves the customer experience for all who are playing by the rules by increasing their chances of getting their hands on products.
  
  
• Providing transparency: The waiting room is designed around the tenets of queue psychology. It provides visitors with their position in line, their estimated wait time, shows their progress, and allows them to be notified via email when it’s their turn. Site visitors don’t have to stress about closely watching the waiting room or constantly refreshing the page, they don’t have to worry about slow pages or errors like cart timeouts or failed payments. They get a transparent, informed wait, before proceeding to a website that works exactly as it should. This transparency provides a far superior customer experience to similar tools designed to handle peak load.
  
  

Queue-it is the market leading virtual waiting room solution, having served over 75 billion users across 172 countries. With a mission to deliver online fairness to all, Queue-it empowers the world’s biggest businesses to perform on their busiest days. When Ticketmaster, The North Face, and the State of New Hampshire need to manage high-demand events, they turn to Queue-it. Book a demo today and start preparing for your next high-profile sale or registration.

Methodology: Responses collected November 2023. Results are based on responses from 71 individuals at 69 Queue-it’s customers. Responses of “I don’t know” were excluded from reported statistics, unless otherwise stated.