Waiting is a universal problem.  Wherever you are, it is painful to have to wait for your turn at a restaurant, barber shop, store, or other business.  And businesses suffer from lower customer satisfaction and lost revenues when wait experiences are not managed well.

That is why we are happy to announce that Waitlist Me is now available in over 60 countries!  Check out our international plans page to see if it is live in your country.

One of the challenges in offering the service globally is that prices to send SMS text messages in other countries are generally higher than in the US and Canada.  The prices also vary considerably from country to country, and often even by mobile carrier within a country.  We have addressed this by having a flexible system for charging for text messages separately, with pricing for these texts depending on the country.  There is also more control in the Waitlist Me app over when to send confirmation and notification texts, so businesses don’t waste money sending a text that isn’t needed.  Since texts are not included in monthly subscription prices, we have lowered the price for Premium to $10 and Pro to $20 for international plans, and removed the 100 party limit on the Basic free level of features.

In terms of localization, all the customer facing parts of the Waitlist Me service have been translated into 30 languages, so businesses can send out texts and display their public waitlist pages in local languages with even our basic service.  With Premium and Pro they can customize the messaging even more for these and other features.  The Waitlist Me app that businesses use is still in English, but we’ll be fully localizing this in more languages over time.  The nice thing though about the Waitlist Me service is that the core processes of adding, notifying, and checking people off the list are very simple, and don’t require a lot of reading or knowledge of English.

As the calendars roll over to a shiny new year, your fitness business is approaching wave after wave of busy seasons. With January comes the New Year’s resolution crowd, followed by the spring breakers and the bikini body-seekers. Make sure you have the right tools to optimize your memberships and customer service when things get busy.

Waitlist Me is the app that can help you run your gym or fitness studio better this new year. Its core features are a great place to start—learn more about them here—and here are a few additional benefits of what Waitlist Me Pro has to offer:

Get the most out of your special equipment

Specialized equipment like massage chairs, red light therapy, and tanning areas can be a big investment. Waitlist Me’s resource management feature helps you get a better return on that investment by using it more effectively.  You can set up your equipment, rooms, or special services as resources, and assign customers to those resource.

Our resource management features allow you to easily track what is in use and for how long, so you can give your customers better time estimates for availability and improve your utilization rates.  Combined with our built-in analytics system, you can get a better sense of your usage patterns.  Not sure if you should invest in another purchase? The data the app gathers automatically can help you make decisions based on facts, not guesses.

Maximize your people resources

Experts on your staff, like trainers and massage therapists, are assets you want to make the most of. Chances are you can boost their productivity—and the value they add to your gym’s customer experience—by tweaking their scheduling or the way they interact with your clientele. Waitlist Me helps you do that.

While the regular version of the Waitlist Me app lets you schedule appointments and add customers to the waitlist to meet with different members of your staff, the pro-level follows customer activity once they get off the waitlist. The downloadable reports chart the data over time, and lets you see when you need to increase (or decrease) staffing levels and if a certain specialization or individual is in high demand.

Let customers make appointments and reservations on their own time

A waitlist is all well and good, but what if your customers could go straight from the locker room into a session with a personal trainer? With Waitlist Me Pro’s appointment widget, they can.

The web widget is an easy-to-install addition to your website that lets customers send appointment requests for staff or reservation requests for special equipment or rooms. The widget allows you to set business hours for the appointments—perhaps you only want to take them during typically quiet hours, or maybe you want to use them during peak workout periods. And, unlike old-school reservations that tether an employee to the front-desk phone, Waitlist Me Pro reservations are available online 24/7, freeing up your staff and making life convenient for your clientele.

Promote specials and events

Hosting a competition? Running a sale on merchandise? Running a bring-a-friend special? Let your customers know! Waitlist Me Pro’s customizable public waitlist feature lets you display custom messages and promotions when they check their place in line.  You can bring your branding to your waitlist and include graphics, coupons, discount codes, announcements, videos—just about anything you can think of.

Waitlist Me Pro keeps the balance between your congenial, community atmosphere and top-notch customer service, by keeping things running smoothly and improving the waiting experience.   It is also designed to be intuitive and quick to use no matter how tech-savvy (or not) you and your clientele are.

Here are 4 customer-approved ways Waitlist Me Pro can help your barbershop:

Keep track of who’s busy (and who’s not)

What’s better than flipping through a paper calendar with scribbled-down availability? Honestly: just about anything. Waitlist Me Pro makes it easy to keep track of appointments for each barber at the same time as you manage your highly variable walk-in traffic.

The app allows you to see your upcoming appointments and the walk-in customers waiting for each barber as well as the customers they are currently serving and how long they have been with them. Waitlist Me’s intuitive visual layout shows the barbers who aren’t “in” as grayed out, while those who are busy are highlighted in red and show a time counter of how long they have been busy.  You can also see who the next person waiting for each barber is and what time they were told they would be served.

Run a more efficient business

Having a good time at work is a bonus. Enjoying your colleagues and your clientele? That’s the cherry on top of the sundae. But you are running a business—and that’s a reality you never forget.

Waitlist Me Pro keeps track of your resources, helping you focus a little more on the work you love and a little less on management. The app helps you keep track of many things: the amount of time your barbers spend on each client, how long customers wait before they hit the chair, who works the most and who works the least. You can run reports whenever you want and use the knowledge they impart to make decisions about staffing, expansion, business hours—anything and everything.

Customize your online waitlist and appointments tools

You know your business better than anyone. That’s why we built Waitlist Me Pro to give you as much freedom as possible over how you set up your waitlist and your appointments.

The pro-level app allows you to set your business hours as well as blackout days for appointments. Clients leave notes for you on their preferences or any accommodations they require. Have a regular client bringing a child in for his first cut? Prefer a certain style that might add on more time? All of that can be added as a note, allowing you to provide top-notch customer service, every single time.

Promote your loyalty program or current special offerings

Waitlist Me Pro offers the highest level of personalization. Whether you want to bring your brand colors and logo to the “add me” website widget or to a public waitlist you display online or in-store, Waitlist Me Pro lets you add custom HTML, change colors, and customize the wording.

If you offer a loyalty program, discounted products, or a new service, the public waitlist is a great way to let your clientele know. You can change the HTML to include graphics, videos, or plain text that keep your customers up-to-date on everything that’s going on in your shop.

Whether you run a four-star fine dining establishment or a seasonal fish fry favorite, the tools you use have the potential to make your restaurant…or break it.

Forget the grease pens of yore. Forget the phone ringing off the hook during dinner service. Forget the harried servers with too-full sections (and the bored ones with too little to do). Waitlist Me Pro is the tool you need to upgrade your table, resource, and reservation management.

Here are four ways the Waitlist Me Pro app can transform your restaurant business:

Divide and conquer

Tradition belongs in your food, décor, and customer service, not in your floorplan. Waitlist Me Pro scraps the laminated restaurant layout and multi-colored grease pens in favor of an at-a-glance resource management system that shows hosts instantly what tables are available, what tables should be flipping soon, and which sections should be prioritized.

The pro-level resource management features let you create different sections in your restaurant depending on the time of day, staffing, holidays, special events—anything you can think of that would change the way you allocate your tables and your servers. Save your section layouts and enlist them with a swipe of the finger. Done!

Keep waiting customers happier with better wait estimates

With Waitlist Me Pro, even the greenest of hostesses can give an accurate quote to a customer waiting for a table. The app tracks the current amount of time a groups have been at a particular tables and makes it easy to see what tables have upcoming reservations or have been assigned to waiting customers. This visibility helps hosts predict exactly when waiting customers can expect to be seated.

Bonus: Sorting by time within sections makes it easy to see which sections have more available tables and which tables have been occupied the longest and are most likely to open up soon.  Additional statistics at the top of each section show the available tables and seats as well as the percentage of tables filled so it is simple to know where to seat the next customer.

Know your numbers

Don’t just guess how many staffers you need on hand for happy hour or holiday parties, or if you should change your sections or table layouts around.  Waitlist Me Pro offers resource utilization reportsto help you make better decisions.

The app tracks your usage data, so that you can creates reports based on various parameters. How quickly are you turning over tables? How many sections should you have on a Saturday night? Can you get away with one less server during brunch? Waitlist Me Pro’s reports will help you answer these types of questions and more.

Build your brand

When competition is stiff, you need to leverage every opportunity to differentiate yourself and your dining experience from the other restaurants in your area. Waitlist Me Pro offers you a chance to stand out from the very first point of contact.

The app’s pro subscription level allows you to add your branding to the web widget, public waitlist, and customer notifications. The public waitlist personalization, in particular, includes options to change the color scheme, status messages, and personalize the HTML at the bottom of the page so you can suggest loyalty programs, list daily specials, or display other information.

The holidays are coming up. You know what that means: a rush of customers eager to snap up the next big tech toy.  If you can’t manage the wait times effectively, though, your customers are guaranteed to be toe-tapping their way around your displays as they wait for the next available associate. Or worse, they may just head to another store.

Waitlist Me Pro can help you turn your customers’ visit to your store into an experience they’ll be more satisfied with. Think: more referral business, glowing Google reviews, and kudos from corporate. Read on for ways our pro-level app will help you do business better.

Schedule your staff more efficiently

Prepare for the storm by tracking your team in real time and accessing reports on staffers’ past performance.

Waitlist Me Pro’s hallmark feature is resource management and reporting. The app lets you assign your associates to different areas of the store (or to different tasks), track how much time they spend with each customer, and see who is working the most and who is working the least. With this data in hand, you’re better prepared to make decisions about serving customers as things get busy.

Add promotions to your public waitlist

Running a special on certain devices or services? Sponsoring an old phone holiday drive? Recycling batteries or chargers? Let your customers know when they check in, thanks to Waitlist Me Pro’s customizable public waitlist.

This pro-level feature lets you add whatever HTML you want to the waitlist. You could include graphics, coupon codes, videos, or plain text, in addition to changing the page’s colors, adding your logo, and swapping out the wording to bring your brand voice to the app’s functionality.

Let customers add themselves to your waitlist, no matter where they are

With Waitlist Me Pro, customers no longer have to start their waiting from your store. They can use the web widget—which Pro allows you to customize more—to add themselves to your waitlist from wherever they are. It’s web and mobile friendly, which means they can access it from home or on the go.

Combine the add-me remote feature with our public waitlist and text notifications, and you’ve got the ideal customer experience. Waitlist Me Pro lets your customers live their lives, run their errands, and make their appointments—and they’ll never worry about losing their place in line.

Quote more accurate wait times

There is nothing worse than waiting around twice as long as the time initially quoted. The app has always helped store associates predict more accurate ETAs. But with Waitlist Me Pro, you can take making better estimates to the next level.

By being able to see in real-time which of your staffers are busy and which are available as well as how much time they’ve spent with each customer and when, on average, they should finish up. With Pro, you have more data at your fingertips to make smarter decisions faster.