A Ticket to the Future: How Qmatic, a Visit from Royalty and Our Partners Shaped the Way the World Waits

Image description: Their Majesties the King and Queen of Sweden during an official visit to Qmatic headquarters. Archival photograph, used with respect. This image is used for historical and editorial purposes only. 

In the late 1980s, something remarkable happened at a small but ambitious company in Sweden. Qmatic, at the time still known mainly for its physical queue systems, received an official visit from His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf and Her Majesty Queen Silvia. 

The visit was quiet, respectful, and deeply curious. The King and Queen were shown around the facility—observing the design and assembly of ticket dispensers and the printed number slips that had already begun transforming the way businesses handled queues. But what was it that brought the royal couple through our doors? A shared interest in efficiency and service. Because even then, it was clear that the experience of waiting isn’t just a technical problem. It’s a human one. 

From Tickets to Touchpoints: The Qmatic Journey  

Qmatic’s original mission was disarmingly simple, to take the chaos out of queueing. This has not changed.

And even back then, in banks, clinics, pharmacies, and post offices across Sweden, people stood in lines and they were impatient, anxious, uncertain whose turn it was. At Qmatic, we built a system that changed all that via a kiosk and a paper ticket. Suddenly, people could sit down, and most importantly trust the process.  

What looked like a queue number was actually the start of something much bigger. It was the beginning of a more respectful, organized and transparent way to manage service and customer expectations. As Qmatic has evolved from delivering analog ticket rolls to enabling data driven and digital queue management across the globe, we have shifted from traditional queue systems to a platform that supports more intelligent, personalized and integrated experiences. Today our offerings allow customers to check in remotely, receive real time updates, share feedback, and complete parts of their service digitally before they arrive, and we are now developing new AI enhanced capabilities that will be introduced over the coming year. 

Partners: The Architects of Our Global Footprint 

Qmatic is headquartered in Sweden and has regional operations in the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, the United Arab Emirates—and more. The company serves customers globally through a network of over 120 partners in more than 80 countries. Through this approach, partners deliver value under their own brand which is powered by Qmatic’s stable and extensible platform, enabling faster growth, local adaptability, and innovation at scale. 

Our partners who represent technology integrators, resellers, solution architects and more have been with us every step of the way. They brought Qmatic to cities we’d never visited. They localized our systems, embedded them into new environments, and extended their functionality to serve local needs. More than sales channels, our partners are builders of trust, curators of experience, and interpreters of customer behavior in every region, language, and culture. Thanks to them, Qmatic now operates in over 120 countries, helping hospitals and clinics streamline patient flows in healthcare, supporting public institutions in government to deliver fair and transparent services, enabling retailers to optimize customer journeys and in-store operations, strengthening customer engagement and compliance in banking and finance, and making processes more accessible and structured in education. Through these verticals, our partners turn one platform into many different, highly specialized solutions. 

Q-World: A Shared Direction for the Future 

In 2025, at our global partner event in Rome, we gathered more than 80 partners from across the world. It was the moment we introduced Q-World which is not as a product model but as a shared direction for how we build, innovate, and grow as one ecosystem. 

Q-World is how we unleash the power of partner innovation on the world’s #1 customer journey platform when we move together. This direction forward truly reflects the simple truth our history has always shown, that we achieve more when we build together.  

Why the Queue Still Matters 

We live in an age of one-click purchases and instant gratification. Yet, waiting, in some form, remains a constant. Think about queues today not  just as lines of people, but more like invisible workflows, digital touchpoints, and micro-decisions inside every service journey. Whether a person books a doctor’s appointment, applies for a passport, or seeks customer support, they are still entering a queue — but at Qmatic, we believe that queue should be intelligent, dynamic, and adaptive.  

Studies consistently show that waiting experiences shape overall satisfaction more than almost any other part of a service interaction. According to PwC, 73% of customers say the experience itself, not the product, drives their brand loyalty, and research from Forrester indicates that friction early in the journey increases abandonment by up to 60%. The queue is often the very first touchpoint where this friction appears.  

The emotional truth of waiting hasn’t changed. The queue is still the moment where customers form their first impressions, assess whether a process feels fair and efficient, and decide whether they trust an organization to deliver on its promise. A confusing or poorly managed queue can erode brand value within seconds—Deloitte reports that one in three customers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. Conversely, a well-managed queue can become a moment of clarity and confidence. When people understand what will happen next and feel in control of their time, satisfaction rises sharply; in fact, MIT research shows that perceived waiting time can be reduced by up to 40% through clear communication and intelligent flow management. At Qmatic, we see the queue not merely as a waiting period but as a strategic opportunity—one that can strengthen trust, reduce operational pressure, and elevate the entire customer journey when managed with insight and intention. 

Looking Ahead: Designing the Next Era of Waiting 

As customer expectations evolve, so must the systems behind them. That’s why we’re not only developing new features, we’re designing new paradigms such as proactive service orchestration, omnichannel journey blending, deeper integrations, experience as a metric and more. And we’re not doing it alone. Together with our global partner community, under the Q-World framework we launched in Rome, we are co-creating the future of waiting, making it smarter, more empathetic, and more valuable for everyone involved. 

Every day, across sectors and markets, Qmatic helps people move smarter with the right technology, the right partners, and the same sense of purpose that once brought the King and Queen of Sweden to our doorstep.

Contact us here, to get to know us better!