Amid the bottles of product and spritzes of perfume, what sets a top-tier cosmetics store apart from a beauty bargain bin? It all comes down to service—customer service. Greeting customers at the door with a grin and a basket is just the beginning.

Here’s how luxury beauty brands are bringing waitlist management apps like Waitlist Me into their stores to turn run-of-the-mill customer service into rock-star treatment that keeps customers feeling pampered (and primed to buy).

Make the most of exclusive offerings

Your sales associates are great at their job, but even their well-trained peepers can’t estimate a perfect foundation match 100 percent of the time. That’s where technology comes in, and top brands are increasingly turning to tech to move more product. Sephora, for example, has partnered with Pantone to create Color IQ, which helps customers discover color-matched products that are currently available in stores. Brilliant, right?

The next step is to get more customers using it on a regular basis—and that’s where a waitlist can help. Waitlist Me offers text alerts, which means that you can let customers know when it’s their turn to check the tech or have a special consultation, no matter where they are in the store (or the mall).

Balance resource-heavy bookings—like product parties—with walk-ins

You’re tapping in to the power of parties for one very good reason: They’re the perfect storm of shoppers who might never buy, normally, without scads of personal attention from your ace sales reps and a smattering of “oh, come on, buy it!” from their friends. Booking regular parties is a boon for your sales goals, but managing them in real-time can be a bear for store managers.

Enter Waitlist Me. Its interface is flexible, allowing managers to allocate resources (think: space and sales talent) for blocks of time and check on the fly to see who’s available on the floor to do what, whether that means tidying shelves or taking on an impromptu makeover.

Let product experts lead the way

Whether your pros are trained in skincare or eye makeup, Bobbi Brown or Benefit, their knowledge and expertise is what sets your in-store experience apart from a dot com. Give them the time and space to do exactly what you’ve taught them: Connect with shoppers on a personal level, show them product best practices, and help them choose the items that are right for their unique set of needs.

Instead of enlisting all your sales associates as greeters, some stores are choosing to station a generalist up front who can direct newcomers to the right aisles and book walk-ins looking for one-on-one assistance with a specialist. Waitlist Me’s real-time ETA lets greeters give accurate time estimates to eager customers, and our public waitlist feature also lets customers check in on their own to see where they are in line.

NoshList was excited to return to this year’s National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show (NRA) in Chicago from May 17-20, marking the company’s third year as an NRA exhibitor. There are a number of trends that are changing the way restaurants manage their businesses better with technology, and NoshList has been at the forefront of these innovations.

Since last year’s event, NoshList has tripled the number of people seated through the NoshList waitlist app. The NoshList wait list app closed out 2013 with more than 22 million diners seated across 4,000 restaurants. In the first quarter of this year, NoshList seated another 10 million diners, as growth continues to accelerate. We also were one of the first apps to integrate with the award-winning Clover POS device.

NoshList got a chance to show off several design improvements and new features in its new iOS 7 and Android apps, and gave a special preview of its new reservations feature for the first time at NRA. Adding reservations to the NoshList app is another way the company is building the simple and intuitive tools that restaurants need to improve their guest experience and operational efficiencies. The reservations feature will be live in the App Store and Play Store within a few weeks.

We had a great time at the event, spoke to a lot of interesting potential customers and technology partners, and were thrilled to have a chance to be interviewed by Turn & Burn on the NRA Media Stage.

We also had a couple Armor Active stands, which work great with NoshList. Here is a blog post on how they looked.

We are happy to announce the latest version of the NoshList iPad waitlist app along with a host of new features that let restaurants improve their guest experience and their operational efficiencies. Redesigned for iOS 7, the new app makes it easier to organize a waitlist and remember guest preferences with better notes and sortable statuses. Table management has never been easier with customizable table selectors, and the ETA feature lets restaurants keep track of same-day call aheads. There are also a lot of other enhancements to the user experience and look and feel. Check out the tutorial video below to see how it works:

With the new Quick Notes feature, restaurants can define as many pre-set notes as they would like to appear when a hostess is adding a party to the waitlist. It’s great for common events, such as birthdays and anniversaries, or popular customer preferences, like dietary restrictions. The notes can be viewed in the waitlist for easy reference and can be synched across all devices a restaurant might have.

A restaurant can also customize the table numbers that appear in a spinner for simple table assignment when customers are seated or added to the waitlist. Table management is a natural extension of running a waitlist, and we have made it much easier to assign and track table numbers in the new NoshList app.

The new app also integrates other features into the main waitlist view in more seamless ways. Seated history shows below the current list and can be toggled on and off. Parties that have an estimated arrival time are grouped below those with a quoted time, and people that add themselves to the list show up at the top with special highlighting to alert the hostess.

Waitlist Me makes it easy to let customers add themselves to your waitlist or reservations with our web widget, and we recently added features to our Pro service to control business hours this feature is available or accepts reservations.  Complementing these settings for regular business hours, there is now a feature to set specific blackout dates for holidays or days you might be closed or not taking reservations.

Simply login to the Waitlist Me website and navigate to Account > Settings > Customize Settings (under Add Yourself) > Blackout Dates. Press the green Add button, and choose the date you desire to restrict. The drop down menu lets you select whether you are closed and not taking reservation or waitlist requests or if you just aren’t taking one of these options like you normally would.  For example, on Christmas you might be closed, but on Valentine’s day you might be open but so busy you don’t take reservations that day.

Once a blackout date is set, you can see and manage the upcoming blackout dates on this page. If you need to remove a restriction, just hover over the date and press the red X that appears on the right.  Or click on the row to edit it.

Once you have blocked off a date, if a client tries to make a reservation they will receive a message letting them know that no reservations will be accepted:

Where did NoshList go? It is now Waitlist Me. But don’t worry, everything you loved about NoshList is still there, plus a lot more.

As more and more businesses from all types of industries have been signing up to manage their waitlists, reservations, and appointments, we decided having a name that was broader and less tied to food would be better. As Waitlist Me, we are excited about all the opportunities for helping people that are waiting everywhere.

The road to Waitlist Me was paved with a number of features and user experience improvements. It started with enhancements for customized notifications and waitlist views. Table management was made more flexible so customers could also be assigned to people or other resources. Later, more prioritization was put on features such as reservations and appointments that were essential to many businesses. Finally, we invested more resources into making Waitlist Me cross-platform, so it would work on iPads, iPhones, Android tablets and phones, and even computers.

Being truly cross-platform is key to bringing the services to businesses everywhere. Some businesses don’t have Wi-Fi or have concerns using an iPad because of possible damage or theft. Now, even businesses with computers plugged into the Internet can use WaitList Me for their waitlists and reservations. The Android app also runs nicely on Clover, which is revolutionizing the way businesses think about POS systems.

In addition to the name change, we have redesigned and improved our iPhone and Android phone apps, and made a number of usability improvements in our tablet apps and online waitlist. Waitlist Me is also launching with a few powerful new features, such as the post-visit feedback surveys. Premium users can now customize and enable feedback surveys to go out after customer visits. Customers can easily send quick numerical ratings back in text messages or take surveys to rate their experiences in more detail, leave comments, an even request a manager to contact them about their visit.

Waitlist Me is also rolling out its first major API integration with Enplug, a company that helps businesses better engage their customers with smart digital signage devices and software.

More details on these new features will be coming soon.