Australian retail technology vendor Beonic has unveiled what it claims is a world-first system to improve customer service - by giving early warnings of customer queues to store managers.

 
Called QEW, the Queue Early Warning system uses people counting sensors to track visitor traffic within large department stores or supermarkets coupled with analytic software to give advance warning before queues begin to form.
 
The Beonic system uses sophisticated calculations to estimate visitor movements, but displays only two numbers to store managers. One is the number of employees rostered for cash register operation and the other is the number of extra cash register operators needed to meet anticipated customer demand.
 
According to beonic, the system is already in advanced customer testing in Australian commercial environments.
 
Beonic executive director Clyde McConaghy said QEW was a powerful tool to improve customer service. “To our knowledge, there’s no other application like this in the world,” he said. “While Tescos in the UK has a similar system, our system far exceeds what they can do.”
 
McConaghy said the QEW solution was aimed at enterprise retail clients. “It is designed to meet the needs of medium to large stores, such as department stores and supermarkets, where you can't see the true number of people in the building,” he said.
 
“The back-end calculations are incredibly complex, but we have delivered maximum simplicity with the software’s main screen. Two numbers show how many staff you have and how many more you need to meet customer demand and avoid having queues. The system even shows if you have too many staff at the cash registers, so you can redeploy them.
 
“It’s about giving store managers access to simple, actionable information that equips them to run their stores more efficiently. Head office management is also delivered data to calculate the daily and weekly value of the efficiency gains in dollars. We already have orders for the system and we expect a lot of interest once other major retailers become aware of it.”

The new Beonic system was formally launched at the Retail Business Technology show, July 20-22, at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre.