The week coronavirus hit the United States, grocery stores around the nation announced a similar plan: They were going to stagger shopping times to minimize the spread of COVID-19 to the sectors of the population thought to be most vulnerable, the elderly and the immune-compromised.

Most stores’ plans restricted an hour or two of morning grocery shopping time to these customers—and in doing so, introduced a new phrase to the lexicon: staggered waiting.

Wait. Isn’t all waiting staggered?

The short answer: nope.

The old-school, American-style queue amounts to a mosh pit of toe-tapping customers. During normal circumstances, that’s not a good thing. It’s frustrating for your guests and it often leads to lost business. During a pandemic, it’s even worse. You don’t want tons of people crowded together, huffing hot air all over each other!

Waitlists and reservation tools, like Waitlist Me, help businesses stagger waiting in a way that’s become quite familiar. For business owners, it helps even out the traffic flow, ensuring excellent customer service and zero employee overwhelm. For customers, it ensures a positive, efficient experience. Win-win!

Grocery stores are using the idea of staggered waiting a bit differently than most of us are used to, but it’s not actually a new idea. In fact, you’ve probably experienced it before.

How billion-dollar businesses use staggered waiting

Disneyland, the pinnacle of efficient queues, uses a staggered waiting system to provide an extra-special experience to its VIP guests, many of whom visit the parks through organizations like Make A Wish. It’s also offered as a premium, upgraded feature for ticketholders.

Another example of staggered waiting happens weekly at many Target stores across the country. The big box retailer has offered sensory-free shopping hours for customers who are sensitive to light, noise, and crowds for years. It’s been a huge success, especially for those on the autism spectrum.

Ways your business can use staggered waiting today

If you’re looking for new ways to control crowds or traffic patterns, staggered waiting is a concept you should explore. Not sure how that might look for your workplace? Creative ideas can come from different places, and you can look around at what others are doing.  Here are a few examples of how businesses can stagger demand to improve workflows and better cope with COVID-19.

Quick tip: Use Waitlist Me’s custom text notifications to share new waiting policies or instructions with your clients and customers.

– Veterinary office using morning hours for feline appointments and afternoon hours for canine appointments to keep small waiting areas calm.

– Restaurants offering special deals or menu items at different times of the day to encourage people to dine at off-peak hours.

– Tutoring center facilitating study material pick-up staggered by the first letter of students’ last names.

– Auto mechanic offering reverse delivery appointment windows to pick-up cars (and meet with customers) at home rather than at the shop.

– Local organic farmer providing fresh produce home delivery staggered by their customers’ area.

– Doctor’s office splitting patient appointments by background. Immune-compromised and elderly patients are diagnosed car-side, while other patients come inside the office.

– Family-owned pharmacy providing special hours for curbside delivery and in-store pick-up.

These days, we’ve started talking about the world in terms of B.C. and D.C.—that’s “before coronavirus” and “during COVID-19.” Though we are eager to move into the A.C. era (“after coronavirus,” naturally) even the most optimistic projections put that at least 6 months from now.

‘Til then, we’re adapting. For people working from home, that means video conferences at dining room tables. For those who are keeping restaurants, stores, offices, and other essential businesses open, that means embracing new ways of getting the job done.

One of the most popular ways business owners are staying open while minimizing the spread of coronavirus is to embrace touch-free or contact-free service. 

What is touch-free service?

Touch-free service limits the spread of the novel coronavirus by reducing the number of people who touch an item. The danger with this virus is that it’s very contagious. When you decrease how many individuals handle, say, a pizza box, you lessen the risk that one of those individuals will transmit the virus to the recipient—or to another employee who comes into contact with the box.

Implementing touch-free service is a more complex preventative measure than, say, requiring all employees to wear a mask. Going low-contact or contact-free requires business owners and managers to consider their entire workflow from start to finish so they can decide how to best protect themselves, their workers, and their customers.

Tools like Waitlist Me, a waitlist and reservation/appointment app, are one piece of the puzzle. Now, let’s see how that puzzle piece fits into some strategies that can be used across a diverse array of businesses.

Strategies for providing touch-free service using Waitlist Me

Pickup outside – Whether customers are picking up food, medicine, or other items they have ordered, they may not need to come into your building to get them. Waitlist Me can be used to confirm their order with a text message that can also communicate instructions on what to do when they arrive. Customers can reply to texts when they arrive and either wait in their cars or outside the door in a more open area for their orders to be brought to them. With Waitlist Me Pro there is also an option to send open text replies to customer texts for things like clarifying questions or letting them know if more time is needed for their order.   

Limit numbers inside – When allowing people inside to dine, shop, or be treated, Waitlist Me can help avoid crowded waiting areas and limit the number of people in the building. Simply add customers to the waitlist when they arrive and allow them to walk around outside or wait in their car until you are ready for them. They can check their places in line from their phones using the public waitlist feature, and you can press a button to text them when it’s their turn. You can even have your staff greet them outside or add them to the list when they pull into the parking lot. 

Reduce points of contact – There are additional ways to increase safety by cutting down on person-to-person interactions for customers arrivals. Post information on your website or a sign on your door asking customers to call or use the Waitlist Me web widget to add themselves to the waitlist, rather than entering the building to do so in person. The widget can help show how busy you are, so people can have a better idea of when to arrive. Or they can schedule an appointment or reservation that you can approve and manage in the app. With Waitlist Me Pro there are also simple scheduling controls for business hours and hourly availability that can help stagger the number of people visiting your business across the day.  

When coronavirus hit America, some side-eyed the “essential” classification for medical marijuana dispensaries and those that support them, like grow sites and edible producers. Of course, if you own or run a dispensary, you know better.

An estimated 3 million people in the U.S. and its territories depend on medical marijuana. Because a large percentage of dispensary customers already have compromised immune systems, it’s especially important for businesses to protect shoppers.

Waitlist Me is helping do exactly that during the COVID-19 crisis. Here’s how some cannabis businesses are using our waitlist and reservation app to keep their doors open and their customers safe.

Enforce occupancy restrictions

If your dispensary is scant on square-space, consider creating a restriction on the number of people allowed inside your business at one time. Station a staff member outside to function as crowd control—and to add customers to your waitlist—and another employee inside, behind the counter. You’ll be able to provide excellent one-on-one service while still protecting those that matter most: your employees and your customers.

Tip: Use Waitlist Me’s text notification feature to encourage guests to wait in their cars. Reassure them that their place in line is secure, and that you’ll send them a text when it’s their turn to go inside.

Encourage social distancing and touchless service

With scores of new customers coming in the door—not to mention the new products on offer—questions abound for cannabis industry pros. And that’s the way it should be! But a queue for customer service isn’t a safe situation during a pandemic.

To avoid a cluster at your counter, add the Waitlist Me widget to your website. Direct customers to add themselves to your waitlist from their phone, so they can start the waiting process while en route to your store or wait in the parking lot from their car.  

Tip: Head off ETA questions right at the start by adding the link to your dispensary’s public waitlist to your website. That way, people can check their place in line with just a single glance. Or use the web widget features to show how many people are currently waiting.

Make pickup as quick and easy as possible

Even though it’s nice to get out of the house during these difficult times, those you serve still want to make their trips in public as speedy as possible. To help them do that, encourage customers to make an appointment to shop or to add themselves to your waitlist before they arrive. Waitlist Me’s web widget lets them do both. When they check in, they can specify what the goal of their shopping trip is (i.e. to refill a prescription, pick up an online order, or shop for a certain type of product) so your employees can expedite their visit.

Waitlist Me Pro users can even use our flexible two-way texting feature to respond to customer questions, clarify details, or let someone know if their prescription isn’t ready yet.

Tip: Upgrade your curbside pick-up with contact-free service, which will be a boon for your immune-compromised customers. Update the custom text notifications to include pick-up directions, like where to park and to roll down a passenger window for no-touch delivery.

The worldwide coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated just how important it is for businesses to manage what we used to consider minor details: the spaces we occupy, the items we touch, and the people we come into contact with.

But for manufacturers, distributors, and logistics professionals, there’s no detail too small to be optimized—and that’s been true for far longer than the modern world has combatted highly contagious illnesses like COVID-19, SARS, or Swine Flu. Since the 1960s, supply chains and production lines around the globe have adopted a leaner operation. It’s called just-in-time manufacturing, or JIT. 

What is JIT?

Just-in-time manufacturing is built on the principles popularized by Toyota’s production processes in Japan. It’s also known as continuous-flow or demand-flow manufacturing.

No matter the name, its goal is the same: JIT seeks to make production more efficient by ensuring that materials and finished products are always in transit rather than sitting around, waiting to be used. This decreases business overhead because goods in this system require less storage space.

It also makes for a smoother production process. Raw materials arrive the moment they are needed. Finished goods are shipped out as soon as they’re completed. There’s no lag time, no costly delays, and no square footage going to waste.

How to use just-in-time principles to fight COVID-19 (and improve your customer’s waiting experience)

Other businesses, from retail stores to restaurants, doctor’s offices to mechanic shops can put the principles that power JIT to work for both their bottom line and the overall safety and satisfaction of their customers. Watilist Me is a simple tool to make some of these concepts easy to implement.

Here are five ways your business can use Waitlist Me today to smooth out the kinks in your waiting process:

1. Let customers wait elsewhere. Waitlist Me makes it simple to text customers when ready for them and see their replies. That means you customers don’t need to be crowded in a waiting area. They can wait in their car or somewhere nearby. 
2. Keep queuers in the know. Our public waitlist feature lets your customers check their spot in line from their smartphone. With just a few taps, they can see their ETA and plan their arrival at your business just in time to be served.
3. Add guests on the go. With the add-yourself web widget, individuals can hop on your waitlist from wherever they are, whether that’s home, in transit, or in the car in your parking lot.
4. Educate customers on pick-up policies. When you add someone to your queue, Waitlist Me can send an automatic text confirmation. You can customize the information in this text to include coronavirus-specific instructions, like how to facilitate your no-contact pick-up service.
5. Confirm details using two-way texting. Waitlist Me Pro and Platinum allow businesses to send custom text responses to their customers. You can use this feature to clarify orders, pick-up instructions, or any other questions guests may have.

Nobody knows better than our pandemic first responders how important it is these days to safeguard patients and healthcare workers. Doctor’s offices, urgent care facilities, and medical centers are also taking new steps to ensure the safety of their patients and staff. 

Waitlist Me makes it easy to improve waiting experiences and cut down on crowds and lines.  Here are some ways doctor’s offices and medical facilities are using our waitlist and reservation app during the coronavirus crisis.

#1. Make waiting safer for everyone

The fewer people you have in your waiting room, the better, whether social distancing policies are in place or not. From restaurants offering take-out to retailers promoting curbside pick-up, there’s been a tremendous uptick in businesses encouraging customers to spend as little time as possible inside their brick-and-mortar locations.

Healthcare facilities can do the same. When patients arrive for their appointments, they can be added to your waitlist and asked to wait in their cars until they can be seen by a medical professional. When a doctor, nurse, or P.A. is ready for them, simply send them a text alert to let them know to come inside.  Some places are even doing simpler screenings or check ups in the cars to avoid patients having to come inside at all.  

#2. Decrease the amount of contact required

With highly contagious illnesses like coronavirus spreading through cities like wildfire, office staff must be cautious about all the little things that were standard just a month ago, like sharing pens, passing clipboards, and opening doors.

Limiting contact between individuals, whether they’re patients, caregivers, or administrators, is key. Automating doors is one way to upgrade your office with an eye toward the future. Going digital with your paperwork is another. It also has the added benefits of decreasing in-office wait times and freeing up staff from data entry tasks.

With our add-yourself web widget, you can add Waitlist Me to this list of helpful no-contact improvements. Patients can check themselves in using their smartphones from anywhere and receive a confirmation message.  Text them when you are ready and you can even view their replies if they are running a few minutes late or letting you know when they have arrived. With Waitlist Me Pro there are also options to send custom responses to the texts patients send, like to reply with an update on the estimated wait remaining.

#3. Improve the overall waiting experience

We’re pretty sure no one really enjoys sitting in waiting rooms for their turn to see a physician. Flipping through months-old magazines amid who-knows-what illnesses? That’s not anyone’s idea of a good time.

Many offices are using Waitlist Me’s online features that can be viewed in phone browsers to give patients more control over how long—and where—they wait. With the widget, individuals can check in for their appointments (or for open clinic hours) from the comfort of their homes. Then, they can check the public waitlist feature to ensure a timely arrival when a healthcare provider is ready to see them. The public waitlist lets them know how many people are ahead of them in line and how long the estimated queue time is.