The ROI of Queue-it part I: Capitalizing on peak events & protecting your brand

Peak traffic is an opportunity. Manage it right, and you’ll drive sales, delight customers, and build trust and loyalty.

But peak traffic can also be a threat. Manage it wrong, and your site or app may crash from the load, get abused by bots & resellers, and send frustrated customers to competitors.

For the past 14+ years, Queue-it has helped organizations of all shapes and sizes mitigate the threat of peak traffic while capitalizing on the opportunities it presents.

In this article, we’ll cover some of the key reasons 1,000+ organizations choose to use Queue-it’s virtual waiting room on their busiest days, and the return on investment they see from that choice.

To walk through the concrete numbers of how Queue-it’s virtual waiting room boosts revenue for our customers, let’s look at an example from Spark Street. Spark Street is an (entirely fictional) online retailer that sells its own branded clothing, along with a curated collection of products from other brands.

Spark Street’s peak traffic comes during two key activities:

• Exclusive product drops of Spark Street’s branded collection
• Major flash sales, the biggest of which is Black Friday

While Spark Street may not be a real brand, the example we’ll walk through and figures we’ll use in this article come both from the latest industry surveys, and our experience with major retailers like The North Face, Snipes, and Zalando.

Between its exclusive product drops and flash sales, Spark Street has four peak traffic sales annually. The basic numbers for these sales are:

• 100,000 hourly visitors
• 3% conversion rate
• $75 average order value

Let’s look at the three ways Spark Street saves $1,352,500 annually by using Queue-it’s virtual waiting room to run fair and reliable sales—no matter the demand.

You can't make sales on a website that doesn't work. The most direct cost savings of Queue-it come from keeping your site online and enabling you to serve every customer, no matter the demand.

Before using Queue-it, the success of Spark Street's major sales and drops was often limited by load-induced website issues:

• Annual site issues: Spark Street experienced half an hour of site issues across four major sales events, or two hours annually.
  
  
• Affected customers: Across these two hours, 200,000 customers were affected, 6,000 (3%) of which would've made a purchase.
  
  
• Lost sales: Spark Street's partial downtime meant 75% (4,500) of these visitors did not make their $75 purchases, the equivalent of $337,500 in lost sales revenue.
  
  
• Customer return rate: 60% of consumers say they won't return to a site after experiencing a problem, meaning 2,700 of Spark Street's customers didn't return to complete their purchase once the site was restored—resulting in $202,500 in lost sales.

For Spark Street, just half an hour of site issues during a single sale lost them $50,625 in revenue. Across the year, the losses totaled $202,500.

By implementing Queue-it, Spark Street took control over their site traffic, empowering them to capture every sale without crashes, errors, or slowdowns. Using the virtual waiting room for just four peak traffic sales helps them avoid two hours of annual site issues, boosting their sales revenue by over $200,000 each year.

Spark Street annual savings from implementing Queue-it

• Revenue saved by capturing every sales opportunity: $202,500

Downtime of even one to two seconds can be very costly. When you multiply that by 60,000-100,000 people, that adds up … Queue-it is a game-changer in terms of what it helps us accomplish—launching massive traffic events with zero disruption.”

Alex Wakim, Director of Operations & Business Development, LiveGlam (a real Queue-it customer)

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Despite 40% of visitors returning after their crashes, research shows that many of Spark Street’s other customers will turn to competitors, and some will abandon their brand altogether.

It’s easy to see the immediate lost sales revenue when your site crashes during a peak event. But there are also long-term impacts of crashes, slowdowns, and errors that are felt months or even years after the incident(s) occurred.

Customer loyalty, trust, and lifetime value are all directly damaged by negative experiences like website crashes, errors, or overselling. When a customer visits a website or app that doesn’t work, one in three say they’ll abandon the brand altogether, and 65% say they’ll leave the site with less trust in that business.

So what's the financial impact of this lost customer loyalty and trust for Spark Street?

• Annual site issues: Before Queue-it, Spark Street's two hours of site issues affected 200,000 visitors per year, 6,000 (3%) of whom intended to make purchases.
  
  
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): On average, Spark Street's customers make two $75 purchases per year for three years, giving them a CLV of $450.
  
  
• Potential loyal customers: 50% of the 6,000 ready-to-purchase visitors were in the initial stages of their customer journey—these 3,000 visitors have a CLV of $1.35 million.
  
  
• Brand abandonment: One in three of the 3,000 potential loyal customers (1,000) abandoned Spark Street after their bad experiences, resulting in $450,000 in lost CLV.

When Spark Street overcame their peak traffic challenges with Queue-it, they won the loyalty of 250 new customers during each of their four annual peak events, or 1,000 new customers annually.

These 1,000 new loyal customers that would’ve otherwise been driven away by bad experiences now spend an additional $150,000 at Spark Street each year.

Plus, the Spark Street team can now focus their customer acquisition efforts on attracting new customers, not just winning back the customers they lost to crashes.

Spark Street annual savings from implementing Queue-it

• Revenue saved by capturing every sales opportunity: $202,500
  
  
• Revenue saved by preserving customer lifetime value: $150,000

“Queue-it has helped us eliminate customer complaints related to our launch experience … Now, when our customers access our launches, they can trust us to handle the traffic. They can trust our site to be fast. They can trust our launches to be fair. Queue-it creates an overall professional experience that works exactly as advertised.”

Chris Pirrotta, VP of Digital experience, Sideshow Collectibles

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And this estimate is still modest. Spark Street’s site problems don’t just affect the 6,000 customers who planned to make purchases. They affect the 194,000 others who experienced the issues, the thousands more who saw the complaints on social media or news headlines, as well as Spark Street’s partners and collaborators. They affect Spark Street’s brand reputation.

Spark Street’s brand reputation is one of the main reasons their customers choose to shop with them. They’re known for their fashion-forward curation of products, their competitive prices, and their smooth, no-fuss shopping experience.

Damage to brand reputation consistently shows up as one of the top cost drivers in almost every major report on the cost of downtime.

Responses from real-world executives and IT leaders suggest that Spark Steet’s annual website issues harm their brand equity and trust, diminish shareholder value, threaten partner relationships, attract bad press, and spark complaints and negative sentiment on social media.

To keep things simple, we’ll bucket all these hits to brand reputation into their impact on total annual turnover.

• Value of brand reputation: Leading research shows brand reputation is worth 25% to 38% of a company's annual turnover.
  
  
• Spark Street's brand value: Spark Street's annual turnover is $400 million, making their brand reputation worth $100 million (25%).
  
  
• Impact of website issues: Spark Street's four annual website issues damage their brand reputation by 1%, or $1 million.

By implementing Queue-it and ensuring smoother peak traffic sales—ones that don’t damage relationships, attract complaints, or make the news—Spark Street upholds their brand reputation, saving $1 million annually.

This may sound like a lot, but it’s actually a pretty modest assumption. When Meta suffered a large outage, its stock plummeted 5%—losing $6 billion in value in less than a day.

As Warren Buffet said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

And yes, reputational damage can be restored. But to restore their brand reputation, Spark Street would likely need to spend a similar sum on marketing, PR and investor relations. A report on the top 2000 global companies found they spend about $27 million annually on restoring trust and relationships after downtime incidents.

Spark Street annual savings from implementing Queue-it

• Revenue saved by capturing every sales opportunity: $202,500
  
  
• Revenue saved by preserving customer lifetime value: $150,000
  
  
• Revenue saved by upholding brand reputation: $1,000,000
  
  
• Total annual revenue saved: $1,352,500

“Queue-it helped us deploy controlled digital services that kept us out of the news, brought a sense of calm to our organization, and ensured we worked as efficiently as possible.”
Santiago Aguilera Moreno, IT Systems Architect

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The cruelty of load-induced website crashes, slowdowns, and errors is that they occur when you’re at your most visible, when the upside of getting things right is the biggest.

Peak traffic events are opportunities to drive massive sales, connect with new customers, and strengthen your brand reputation.

Queue-it empowers organizations across the globe to capitalize on the opportunity peak traffic represents. It enables you to capture every sale by operating at max capacity without the risk of failure.

For a company like Spark Street, ensuring success on just their four busiest days translates to over one million dollars in annual savings.

But capturing control of traffic with Queue-it doesn’t just improve things for your customers and your bottom line. It also makes life easier for your employees. In the next installment of our ROI series, we’ll look at how Queue-it helps reduce stress, boost productivity, and improve collaboration within organizations.