Monday, May 8th, 2017 .

Forget display advertising for a sec. The best thing you can do for your business this spring is to build your store’s reputation by offering unrivaled customer service.

Want to beat the competition? Download Waitlist Me and transform the wait experiences customers have when they visit.  By adding them to the waitlist and sending them text notifications when you are ready for them, you can show you care about their time and give them the freedom better use their time while they wait.  They’ll thank you for it with more purchases and repeat visits.

Consider this: Your customers are awash with ways to unload the results of their spring cleaning purges. There’s the drop-it-and-forget-it ease of Goodwill and Salvation Army, the millennial comfort with Craigslist, and the DIY thriftiness of “oh, I’ll fix it up at some point, just toss it in that pile over there.”

As a consignment boutique owner, you’re struggling against years of customers swapping stories about long wait times and nonexistent communication for mere pennies on the dollar. Your store is great! But the industry you’re in? Well, there are some ghosts in that closet.

You need one easy way to break free from the brush that tars you—and set yourself apart from the half-dozen other consignment stores in your zip code.

7 ways Waitlist Me will revolutionize the way you work with customers:

– Text and call notifications let you notify your customers when their appraisals are ready.

– Public waitlist allows clients to check and see where they are in the list without stopping by (or tying up your phone lines).

– Status color coding lets you see at a glance where a client’s items are in the pipeline. No more fumbling for lost bits of paper!

– Loyalty tracking shows you who’s new to the store and who’s a repeat customer, letting you know in an instant when a VIP walks through the door.

– Built-in analytics run in the background, letting you track traffic and activity patterns and delegate your resources efficiently.

– Multi-device sync lets you use one business account on multiple devices. That means no more calls on your day off about what’s going on with so-and-so’s check.

– App compatibility for iOS, Android, and Web means you can use Waitlist Me on a device you already have.

 

The solution: Start using Waitlist Me, stat.

It’s time to get rid of Post-It notes and legal pads. It’s time to stop losing customers’ contact information (and their trust and business along with it). It’s time to bring your store into the 21st century with Waitlist Me.

Second-hand retailers across the country use Waitlist Me to manage their clientele and their in-store resources. Waitlist Me offers simple software that’s intuitive to use as soon as you start it up. There’s no training and no hefty user guides. Just download it and get back to work.

Consider it spring cleaning for your small business.

Thursday, May 4th, 2017 .

With spring comes warmer weather and sandal-shoppers, and more customers in your salon. Don’t leave them stuck sitting on a bench, frustrated with the wait times. With Waitlist Me, you can give your clients the freedom to take a walk in the spring weather while tracking their wait on their phone…without losing their spot in line. They will receive a text notification when they are added to Waitlist Me, and can check to see how many people are ahead of them from their phones. Then just press a button to send a text notification to let them know when you are ready for them.

An easier waiting process will encourage customers to return and refer friends. Waitlist Me also allows you to schedule reservations, so you can keep things running smoothly with both your regular visits and larger bookings like for birthday parties, bridal showers, and outings with friends. Reservations for the current day will automatically appear in the same view as your waitlist so managing your schedule and walk-ins is a breeze.

When giving their name, customers can also specify what they would like for a service, from the person they would like to help them to the style of manicure or pedicure they would like. This makes it easier to schedule them for available or preferred nail technicians, and speeds up the entire process, so you can serve more people per day while providing a more and a more relaxing experience for your clients.

With a waitlist system that gives you more valuable information, you can measure how many people are coming into your salon every day, and how quickly those customers are being helped. This will help you improve the wait estimates you give to your clients and improve their wait experiences. Set your nail salon above the rest by streamlining your services and getting rid of paper waitlists and reservation books. No more remembering to buy another reservation book, losing pens, running out of space and deciphering illegible handwriting.

Spring is the perfect time to clean up your reservation system, so try Waitlist Me.

Thursday, March 16th, 2017 .


Using a paper floor plan has been common in the restaurant industry for a long time, and many software applications have incorporated spatial floor plan concepts into their designs.  Floor plans are deceptively complex to use, however, and can cost you time and money in ways you may not expect.  Waitlist Me CEO, Brian Hutchins, was recently featured in an article published on RMagazine, and goes into detail about 5 main reasons that floor plans are more complicated than they seem.

 

1) Key information is scattered in different directions

2) Comparing apples and oranges is difficult

3) Tables are static, but demand is not

4) Bad decisions lead to unhappy customers and frustrated employees

5) Measuring and improving results is difficult

 

Read  the article on RMagazine for all the details or watch the Waitlist Me video on table section management.

 

Friday, February 10th, 2017 .

leaving linesIt is probably not a surprise that Valentine’s Day is one of the busiest days of the year for restaurants. According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute, Valentine’s spending tops 13 billion dollars, and of the people that celebrate the holiday, more than a third of them head out to restaurants. When you’re making the special preparations to set the right ambiance for your restaurant, don’t forget about the experience your customers will have before they make it to their tables. For those guests who didn’t call ahead to make a reservation, take the pain out of waiting with Waitlist Me.

Customers are happier when they can check their place in line and have the freedom to leave the hostess area, which translates into less walkaways and higher customer satisfaction. Waitlist Me can also speed up table turns so you can seat more people each day. So you win on both sides, being better able to manage the surge in visitors on Valentine’s Day and offering superior customer service in the process.

In search of something romantic, many guests will try someplace new on Valentine’s Day instead of their regular hangouts. Make a great first impression that will keep these first timers coming back. Let Waitlist Me help you today.

Tuesday, February 7th, 2017 .

Waitlist Me makes it simple to know the best place to seat your next customer. Our unique approach to section management blends psychology, data science, and cutting-edge design principles to create an intuitive tool that restaurant staff can pick up in a few minutes and enjoy using.  See how it works in this video:

 

The old way of scribbling on a laminated floor plan with a grease pen is messy and inefficient. It’s hard to estimate wait times and optimize table assignments without seeing key information like how long tables have been occupied.

Most apps that try to use data to improve on the grease pen approach make the mistake of clinging to the old-fashioned floor map diagram, which is deceptively complex. Why? Searching the whole map for the information you need is slow. Comparing different clusters of shapes, colors, and symbols is complicated. And interpreting a bunch of unordered data, like little progress bars, spread across all the tables, is very difficult. To name a few reasons.

All this extra complexity is unnecessary. Wait staff shouldn’t need a map to find tables after a couple days on the job. What they need is a fair, easy, intuitive way to know where to seat the next customer.

Look how much simpler it is when you group tables into a framework where the data can work for you, and you can read key information naturally like a book, in ordered lines, from top to bottom and left to right.

 

Tables are grouped by sections, and sorted by availability to make comparisons and decisions simple. The open tables for each section stand out in green on the left. Tables that have been occupied the longest show first, with the time displayed in the lower left. So it is easy to do a quick scan within a section to see how busy it is, as well as compare across sections.

 

Tapping on a table will bring up an action bar for adding customers to tables, clearing tables when done, changing table statuses, and more. This page has a good overview and video of the other table management features.

If you organize your tables and sections differently by day or time, Waitlist Me also gives you the flexibility to switch between different layouts. For example, you might divide tables into 6 sections for a busy weekend night, but only need 3 for a regular weekday night. By tapping on the Layouts link in the top right, you can choose from among your saved layouts and regroup your tables and sections on the fly.

 

Creating and editing sections layouts can be done in the app settings under Manage Assignments. There you can also choose to have different colors represent different sections or special tables within a section or layout as well.

 

With Waitlist Me’s table management features, your customers will get better service, with less waiting. Your employees will get their fair share of the work, and the tips. And you’ll have a more efficient restaurant, and a more profitable business.

Stop struggling with floor maps. Take control of your tables, and your business, with Waitlist Me.