From Qmatic, the company that introduced Customer Flow Management to the market, and GMT Corporation, which sells enterprise workforce management and performance optimization, has arisen a partnership intended to provide “a holistic view of service delivery and efficiency in face-to-face service environments.”

More specifically, officials of both firms say, this partnership is intended to improve the customer experience in bank branches, hospitals, retail outlets and government departments that provide face-to-face service.

If they can improve the face-to-face service at the DMV they deserve every product of the year award there is.

Qmatic officials explicity eschew what they call the “rear-view-mirror approach.” As they explain it, historically, “improving branch service effectiveness was largely a rear-view mirror exercise, analyzing prior events in an attempt to improve future service delivery.”

This means a procedure such as store staffing was done “largely based on the number of transactions conducted, and not necessarily grounded in the actual number of visitors to a branch.”

In other words, the customers, the actual people standing around cooling their heels in a bank instead of being out about their day, weren’t considered. Metrics suffered accordingly: “Customers who waited in a queue longer than they desired would sometimes abandon the queue, which meant the total number of visitors to a branch -- as opposed to those who remained to conduct a transaction -- were not factored into the branch's capacity model or staffing plan.”

None of which led to any improvements in customer satisfaction, of course. So the idea with this partnership is to combine Qmatic's Customer Flow Management with GMT's workforce optimization tools for better real time visibility into branch office efficiency, looking specifically at things like staffing, queue wait times and branch traffic, with an eye to increasing the customer satisfaction in such situations.

And these are bottom-line considerations we’re talking about, not just “Oh well, might as well improve customer service if it doesn’t cost us anything.” Simon Angove, Chief Executive Officer of GMT, points out that "the quality and effectiveness of branch service delivery is directly proportional to the number of skilled staff available to meet the expected customer demand in the branch. In today's intensely competitive banking market, satisfied customers have a direct effect on the bottom line."