Looking to improve your customer experience and business results in 2020? Don’t overlook your queues. A surprising amount of business can be won and lost in the place where customers stand waiting. When you consider the fact that customer satisfaction (and therefore loyalty and sales) are influenced by the time spent waiting, it pays to pay attention. Here we present 16 queue management stats to help fuel your efforts to improve your queues and your business in 2016:

1. US businesses lose an estimated $83 billion in sales annually due to poor customer experiences.
2. Companies rated high in customer service are 12 times more profitable than competitors.
3. After five minutes, a customer’s perceived wait time is 2x the actual wait time.
4. Half of customers will purposely avoid a brand in the future if they had to wait longer than 5 minutes.
5. Customers are likely to abandon a queue after only 2 or 3 minutes if it’s not moving fast enough.
6. 48% of customers have avoided a retailer because of someone else’s negative experience.
7. A majority (80-90 percent) of customers would change to another retailer just to experience shorter checkout queues.
8. 65 percent of Americans are not able to make time for themselves at least once a day.
9. 70% of companies that deliver best in class customer experience use customer feedback – versus industry average of 50%, and 29% for laggards.
10. Customer frustration leads to 13% telling 15 or more people if they’re unhappy. Conversely, 72% of consumers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people.
11. 67% of consumers site bad experiences as reason for churn.
12. Only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain. The rest churn.
13. 91% of unhappy customers who are non-complainers simply leave.
14. It is 6-7 times more expensive for companies to attract new customers than to keep existing customers.
15. 66% of consumers who switched brands did so because of poor service.
16. 85% of customer churn due to poor service was preventable.