Thursday, August 27th, 2015 .

Tech tips for small businesses

Taking advantage of new technologies can have a big impact on your bottom line. Here are a few pro tips:

Crush Your Rush

No one likes to wait, but when things get busy you can reduce walkaways by improving your customers’ wait experience. Waitlist Me is an app that helps you provide better wait estimates and send customers text notifications when their tables are ready. You can even display a dynamic view of the waitlist for customers to check on a digital sign or TV with solutions like Enplug and BrightSign.

Businessman with cloud computing concept

 

Leverage the Cloud

As the quality, price, and usability of hosted technology have improved dramatically in recent years, businesses are dumping old hardware for cloud-centric solutions. Clover is a new all-in-one POS system with an elegant design that replaces the cash register, payment terminal, receipt printer, and barcode scanner and has an app market for easily customizing features. Another example, Switch, is a cloud-based business phone system you can set up and customize in minutes, and
provides the type of features you’d want from a PBX at a fraction of the price.

Work Digitally Like a Pro

Just as email revolutionized regular mail for many of our communications, there are now more online documents, apps, and tools that can improve your business productivity. Google for Work is a powerful set of apps that let you communicate, create, share and collaborate, from any device with ease. Evernote is a popular consumer app that has recently added more team and admin features to help businesses manage digital workspaces. Finally, UberConference is a simple way to make unlimited conference for free from a computer or a phone.

Thursday, December 21st, 2017 .

Waitlist Me goes global, launches international service in over 60 countries

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.

 

Friday, October 30th, 2015 .

Let customers schedule reservations or appointments from your website

Looking for an easier way to take reservations?  Waitlist Me has a new feature for customers to schedule reservations (or appointments) from your website, and it as easy as adding a link or line of code to set up.

You don’t need to set up any complicated rules for how many reservations are available at what times, as reservation requests will come to you for quick approvals within the Waitlist Me app.  You’ll receive a notification alert so you know when to check, and reservation requests will be highlighted at the top of your main waitlist page as well as on the daily reservation views.

image_3

 

When you approve a request in the app, the customer automatically gets a confirmation text with their time, and the request becomes a confirmed reservation and appears in the reservations area of Waitlist Me.  If you decline it, the customer receives a text notifying them that it could not be scheduled.

The new remote reservation feature builds on the previous remote adding functionality for waitlists, so now businesses can choose between options of allowing customers to add themselves to the waitlist, schedule reservations, or both.

To enable the feature, log into Waitlist Me, go to the Settings area, and then choose to customize the Public Waitlist Page.  From there you can turn on remote reservations and customize things like the information you require from customers, whether you’d like to skip the approval step to have them automatically scheduled, and more.

Here is how the Settings look:

add-remote-settings

 

The Public Waitlist is one are where customers can see the Make Reservation option.

page2a

 

And when they press on that it will allow them to enter their info and requested reservation time.

page3

 

Another option is to use the Widget on your own website.  Here is an example of how that looks and you can customize the look and feel of the web widget in the Waitlist Me settings.

widget1

 

 

 

 

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.

Wednesday, July 31st, 2019 .

Displaying Estimated Waits For Add Yourself Features

When using the Add Yourself features, whether through Kiosk Mode or the Web Widget, there are several ways you can display an estimated wait to customers. Simply navigate to the Settings > Add Yourself > Main View. Here you can select the wait time that fits your business best. 

People and Groups – Show the number of parties and the total number of people on the list.

People – Show the number of people on the list.

Minutes By Group – Display an estimated time by multiplying the number of parties by a number of minutes you specify. For example, selecting 5 minutes will multiply the number of groups on the list by 5, and present that result as the estimated wait.

Minutes By People – Display an estimated time by multiplying the total number of people on the list by a number of minutes you specify. 

Last Estimated Time – Report the last estimate given by your staff.

List View – Show the public view of the waitlist, so people can see where they are in line.

Hide – No estimates, just go straight to the Add Yourself part.

Here are a few examples:

Web Widget, number of groups and people
Web widget, last estimated wait
Kiosk mode, full waitlist view