The ROI of Queue-it part II: Increasing productivity & reducing stress

This is part two in our series on the return-on-investment organizations get from using Queue-it’s virtual waiting room.

In our first piece, we looked at how organizations can save over $1 million in revenue by preventing downtime, along with the positive impact delivering reliable, fair, and transparent experiences has on customer trust and lifetime value.

In this piece, we’ll look at the ROI of something a bit harder to quantify, but just as important: Queue-it’s impact on staff productivity, stress, and collaboration.

To walk through the concrete ways Queue-it saves organizations money by boosting productivity and reducing stress, let's look at an example from the (fictional) organization Ticketania.

Ticketania is a ticketing software platform that runs onsales for major concerts, festivals, and sporting events. They support around two events per week, but face the occasional “atomic” event, which attracts enormous consumer demand, media attention, and swarms of ticket bots.

Before implementing Queue-it, Ticketania’s team put in a lot of work before, during, and after these “atomic” onsales (especially when they crashed or faced site issues).

• Before events: The team prepared with load tests, site optimization, setting up prescaling and autoscaling, and contacting third-party vendors to inform them of the increased demand.
  
  
• During events: Tech, support, and marketing teams were on-call, monitoring site performance, server usage, sales progress, and social media channels.
  
  
• After events: The team often experienced site issues on their biggest days, including crashes, slowdowns, and errors. Staff would work hard to restore the site and its data, deal with customer support requests and complaints, run a root-cause analysis, and issue public statements.

What's the cost of all this work? And how much of it does Queue-it help eliminate?

Before we find out, let’s start with a few key facts about Ticketania:

• Ten "atomic" traffic onsales per year (five of which cause site issues)
• 20 on-call staff during on these days
• $50 average hourly pay across team members ($98,800 annual salary)

Across their organization, Ticketania’s employees spend 1,600 hours on-call annually during peak events, the equivalent of $80,000 in wages.

For a long time, Ticketania’s leadership just considered this the cost of running successful onsales. The revenue coming in exceeded the cost of wages, and staff were always busy, so they accepted it.

But when Ticketania implemented Queue-it, they, like 200+ other Queue-it customers, found that the number of on-call staff needed during these sales halved. And, like 85% of Queue-it customers, they found they sold through tickets more efficiently and with fewer errors—meaning less work after the event.

With control over the traffic and user experience, tech teams don’t need to put out fires, support teams deal with fewer customer complaints, and marketing and PR teams don’t have a reputational mess to clean up.

The reduction in staff needed on-call, along with the other benefits of increased traffic control, boosted Ticketania’s profits in three key ways: reduction in overtime hours, improvement in staff productivity, and better employee engagement and retention.

”Before, one event could cause numerous errors. It was so stressful because we had to solve the situation as soon as possible. But with Queue-it in place, the effect was drastic. With the waiting room configured right, we could easily ensure smoother ticket onsales.”

Hiroaki Hasegawa, Director of System Development Department, CN Playguide

Read the full story

Downtime doesn’t follow a 9-5 schedule. When the unexpected occurs, staff need to rush to handle the blow-back and get site back online, no matter the hour.

In a survey of the top global 2,000 companies, overtime wages accounted for 5.5% of the total cost of downtime, or $11 million per company, per year.

Even temporary downtime can have downstream effects that take days to fix. One organization told us that a 20-minute outage required the tech team to work a full weekend to fix. They had to restore data, check for security breaches, run a root cause analysis, and test and monitor systems.

This is not uncommon. On average, downtime caused by software failure takes 16 hours to fully recover from, and 16% of downtime incidents take up to 48 hours to fix.

Before working with Queue-it, one of Ticketania’s five annual incidents would require their team to work five hours of overtime per person to fix.

With 20 employees working five hours of overtime (at time and a half pay rates), these more severe incidents cost Ticketania $7,500 per downtime incident, or $37,500 each year.

And this is just for employees working extra hours when incidents occur. For many companies, major sales events require staff to work weekends or evenings regardless of whether their website goes down or not. Reducing the number staff needed on-call for these out-of-hours sales by 50% with Queue-it, for many organizations, results in significant additional savings.

By implementing Queue-it, Ticketania eliminated both the downtime and the overtime.

Annual staff and productivity savings from using Queue-it:

• Annual cost savings from minimizing overtime expenses: $37,500

"It really is a safety net. Especially over our Boxing Day sales where we weren’t at the office, Queue-it just gave us peace of mind, that if anything happens or goes wrong, it’s manageable. … Queue-it is definitely worth its weight in gold."

Jodie Bratchell, Ecommerce & Digital Platforms Administrator, LeMieux

Read the full story

There’s an opportunity and innovation cost that comes with all the time employees spend dealing with high demand. Downtime is a drain on productivity.

Among the top 2,000 companies globally, downtime causes productivity losses of about $12 million per company, per year, or 6% of total downtime cost. Most executives at these companies label the slowed innovation and stagnant developer productivity downtime causes as “very” or “prohibitively” damaging.

This massive figure comes as no surprise to us. In almost all our conversations with customers, following their first peak traffic events run with a virtual waiting room, we ask them “what’s next?”

The answers are consistent:

• "Traffic control gives us the luxury to put our resources into the projects we see as critical to increasing digital service adoption,” says Santiago Aguilera Monero at Gencat
  
  
• "We focus on the ticket sales, Queue-it focuses on the queues. That’s perfect for us, because it lets us focus on our objectives without worrying about the site going down,” says Mijail Paz at Sympla
  
  
• “Having Queue-it in place lets us get back to normal and focus on the projects we’re excited about,” says Jut McDaniels at BPRD

It was no different at Ticketania. For them, the productivity lift they saw from using Queue-it came from three key areas:

• First, as we’ve covered, they cut on-call staff hours in half, freeing up employee time
  
  
• Second, like 85% of Queue-it customers, they sold through tickets more efficiently, meaning fewer customer support requests and less time spent fixing problems like overselling, timed out carts, and bot orders
  
  
• Third, like 62% of Queue-it customers, the virtual waiting room actively improved collaboration between tech and business teams, streamlining how they work together to run large-scale events

These three key factors—fewer on-call staff, less post-sale clean-up, and improved collaboration— dramatically boosted productivity among both Ticketania’s technical and business teams.

This impact on innovation velocity, competitiveness, and time to market, for a company like Ticketania, represents an estimated annual productivity gain worth $50,000.

Annual staff and productivity savings from using Queue-it:

• Annual cost savings from minimizing overtime expenses: $37,500
  
  
• Annual productivity & innovation boost from saving employee time: $50,000
  
  

“There are a lot of opportunities if business and IT can keep pace with one another. But there aren’t so many people or services that can bridge that gap ... This is where Queue-it sits perfectly. It embodies what’s needed from both sides. It bridges IT and business.”

Atsumi Murakami, Chief of Innovation, Peach AVIATION

Read the full story

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.

Before implementing Queue-it, Ticketania’s employees were sick of being on-call, of working overtime, of fixing problems when they could be working on the projects they actually care about, and of the stress that comes with peak demand.

These problems didn’t just harm their productivity, they harmed their engagement in their jobs, and their attachment to Ticketania as an employer.

76% of Queue-it customers say running sales/registrations is less stressful with a virtual waiting room. Combine that with the reduction in on-call and overtime work, and the improvement in collaboration between teams, and you get fundamentally happier employees.

For Ticketania, the effect of implementing Queue-it was a 2% reduction in turnover risk among their team of 20, which works out to $59,280 in annual savings.

Annual staff and productivity savings from using Queue-it:

• Annual cost savings from minimizing overtime expenses: $37,500
  
  
• Annual productivity & innovation boost from saving employee time: $50,000
  
  
• Annual cost savings from reduction in turnover risk: $59,280
  
  
• Total annual staff-related savings from virtual waiting room: $146,780

“It’s easy to understand when we nailed it or when we faced troubles just by looking at people in the company’s faces. And this event [with Queue-it] went really smooth. From customer service to the fraud team to the technical team, 100% of us were happy ... just by looking around and talking to people, it was obviously a huge success.”

Roberto Jose, Head of Technology, Ingresso.com

Read the full story

Ensuring the reliability of your website doesn’t just help your customers and your bottom line, it helps your colleagues and employees.

When we speak to customers who’ve spent years struggling through stressful high-demand sales, we consistently hear that Queue-it provided a sense of relief, it instilled confidence, it removed “one big worry”, it gave them back the feeling of control.

Those feelings impact your team’s workload, as well as their wellbeing. That translates to real business value—for a company like Ticketania, almost $150,000 worth.

In the next installment of our ROI series, we’ll look at how Queue-it helps reduce scaling costs by ensuring right-sized infrastructure that can handle even the biggest traffic spikes.