COVID-19 hit the United States hard in March and shut down many businesses. Along with closures came new safety regulations for restaurants, for those that were able to stay open at all. When dining rooms and patios were forced to close, many restaurants moved to take-out only and created elaborate plans to ensure the safety of customers and staff. As cities and states have begun to slowly allow businesses to reopen, restaurants have been faced with a multitude of new regulations and guidelines for ensuring the safety of their operations.

What To Think About Before Re-Opening:

There are quite a few factors to consider when starting to re-open restaurants. Building trust is key. Although most people are itching to return to their normal life, many also want to make sure that places they go are upholding strict guidelines and rules to ensure the safety of guests, employees, and families. A few ways to build this trust and keep customers and happy and coming back to your restaurant:

    –   Maintain distancing guidelines between guests and staff.

    –   Increase the amount of cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting that is done on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

    –   Update your illness policy to include fever and respiratory symptoms and ensure that sick people are staying home.

    –   Have staff wear masks when possible.

    –   Ensure that existing and new employees are trained on proper hygiene, health policies, and guidelines for cleaning and disinfecting.

    –   Follow recommendations from the CDC as well as local and national public health authorities.

This might seem like a lot to implement, and it might take a bit of time to adjust, but there are apps, such as Waitlist Me, that can help with some of these challenges

Keeping Crowd Sizes Down with Waitlist Me

Another important factor to a smooth re-opening is ensuring that there are rules in place to limit the crowd sizes in the restaurant. Currently, no one wants to eat with someone hovering next to their table waiting for a seat, nor do people want to be stuck in a crowded waiting area. Waitlist Me can help in a couple ways.

Guests can put their name in with the hostesses and then freely wait elsewhere to be notified of a table opening via text. When a guest is added to the waitlist, they will receive a confirmation text message that will include a link to the restaurant’s public waitlist, allowing them to see where they are in line. They will also receive a text message when their table is ready. This type of consistency not only improves the waiting experience, but also helps with social distancing during the Coronavirus Era. Your customers can wait where they like, with more room to breathe and relax, without fear of missing out on a table.

Allowing Remote Check In

Waitlist Me also offers Self Check In as an option for guests to check wait times and add themselves to the waitlist. This feature can be enabled for Google as well as integrated into a website with the Waitlist Me Widget. Customers can also send reservation requests via the widget, cutting down on the need for phone calls to take reservations, and saving your staff time.

Creating New Floor Plans with Waitlist Me

Maintaining social distancing guidelines is very important to guests and employees. States are implementing rules and regulations that uphold these guidelines, such as limiting dining rooms to 50% capacity or keeping tables at least 6 ft. apart. With these new challenges, it can help to have a flexible way to update and manage floorplans. Waitlist Me lets you easily adjust your available tables to your capacity. The floorplan view can also help visualize a new plan prior to moving the tables to ensure the set up makes sense and allows for proper distancing.

These are a few of the ways Waitlist Me can help, and more can be found on our website.

Want to improve your queue? Whether you’re looking to shorten lines or lose fewer customers, you need the science behind waiting to be on your side.

Luckily, there’s an expert for that.

His name is Richard Larson, although he also goes by “Dr. Queue.” Larson is recognized world-wide for his research on queuing theory—and before you ask, yes, that’s a real thing. He’s one of the handful of scientists who look forward to the hour-long lines as amusement parks rather than the rides themselves.

Dr. Queue wiles away wait times by puzzling over what makes waiters content to queue. Larson explores what kinds of waiting environments keep customers happiest, what systems best manage traffic flow, and what causes queuers to bail rather than wait out a long line.

We designed Waitlist Me with queue theory in mind. Take a look at how you can use our app alongside the psychology of waiting to make your customers happier.

Distractions make waits appear shorter

You know the old saying, “a watched pot never boils”? It’s not quite true. The pot always boils; it just seems like it takes longer when you’re staring at it. The same can be said for any sort of wait. It’s why doctor’s offices invest in magazines and restaurants let you hang out at the bar.

Whether you manage an eatery, a store, an office, or a gym, Waitlist Me lets you notify customers when they reach the front of the line. Our text notification feature sets your queuers free, allowing them to find their own distractions until you’re ready for them.

Anticipation improves customer satisfaction

Is the food at a four-star restaurant better than the food at a neighborhood pub? Maybe. But built in to that four-star restaurant’s rating is the anticipation. Whether they’ve been awaiting their reservation or reading review after review, customers are already primed to enjoy their dining experience.

With our public waitlist feature, Waitlist Me lets you keep your diners salivating even if the bread basket is 20 minutes out of reach. You can sync the public waitlist to a TV in your waiting area and include enticing photos and videos along with daily specials.

Managing wait-time expectations leads to happier guests

Calling the cable company has gotten less painful over the last few years, yet we dread doing it. Why? Because we still remember the interminable minutes of hold music with no end in sight. The waits might still be long, but they’re much less tedious now because the companies let you know how many people are in line ahead of you.

Guests want to see a finish line no matter where or when they’re waiting. Waitlist Me’s wait time estimates and comparisons of actual and quote times help hosts and receptionists quote accurate wait times based on real-world data. And, after customers are added to the waitlist, they can check their place in line right from their smartphone.

Social fairness limits anxiety and stress among queuers

The first to arrive in line should be the first served—that’s social fairness. While it’s nice in principle, it doesn’t always make sense for businesses. Sometimes, a two-top that just walked in the door of a restaurant can be seated before a party of four that’s been waiting for 30 minutes.

Waitlist Me offer the appearance of social fairness that guests are looking for. Because our features free your customers from your waiting area, no one’s the wiser about which guest has been queuing the longest.

At Firespotter Labs, we have been busy working on new ways to make people’s lives better, and are proud to announce our latest creation: NoshList!

NoshList is a free waitlist app for restaurants that uses text messages to notify diners when their tables are ready. Here is how it works:

NoshList allows restaurants to easily manage parties – adding, seating and removing them as necessary – just by pushing a button. To add walk-up customers, NoshList users simply enter in a name, phone number and tap a button for the party size. There are even different icons for gender and age groups (i.e., blue for boys, pink for girls, and an icon that looks sort of like Darth Vader for “unknown”). At the bottom of the screen, NoshList shows the current wait times by party size for at-a-glance information, as well as the number of total guests waiting and the total seated.

WiggleWorks kids is a popular destination for children and their families, being the only indoor playground that caters strictly to kids who are 48-inches tall or less. Weekends can be very busy, and Waitlist Me helps WiggleWorks kids reduce wait times, increase the number of kids they serve, and make parents happier.

WiggleWorks kids provides soft, moveable, interactive play equipment for children at its two Washington State locations, one each in the towns of Bellevue and Puyallop. The equipment is used to help children build motor skills and the unstructured play area gives them an opportunity for social interaction with children their own age.

“We limit the number of children who can play at one time and we are first come, first serve. There was no way for someone to get on the waiting list unless they called in or came into the store,” said Bellevue store manager, Kristen Deskin. “We had a lot of complaints about our wait list system because there were opportunities for a lot of user error and it often got confusing.”

That confusion was compounded by the fact that employees were responsible for taking down names and phone numbers, which were sometimes misprinted or missing key letters or numbers. Troubled by the many customer complaints, Deskin and her team looked for a better way to manage their waitlist. In 2013, they turned to WaitList Me.

“When we launched Waitlist Me we immediately felt more in control of our waitlist and felt like we had more opportunities to serve the public. This is because we could accommodate the number of people wanting to get on the list,” Deskin said. “It also has freed up an employee because they are no longer tied to taking names.”

Deskin likes how WaitList Me is easy to use and provides a simple way to keep track of store waitlists and whether customers walk in or add their name from home through the WiggleWorks kids website.  Since making the switch, customers have been happier and are more excited to come into the locations.

“We have had wait times of up to two hours in the past and WaitList Me has reduced those times so no one waits now for more than 45 minutes to an hour,” Deskin said. “I also use it to see and track how many children are coming back into play after waiting compared to how many names we are having to delete. That was one big improvement I was able to track that enabled me to make some good business decisions with the owner.”

– By Valerie Killifer, special to WaitList Me

We’ve added some new features and UI improvements to help manage customer requests made from your website or social media page if you are using the Waitlist Me web widget. When a request is received, you’ll be able to see more information in the waitlist view about what it is for and where it came from. The entries appear at the top of the waitlist and will flash orange. If you’re on the Reservation or Resource Management view, a quick pop up will alert you to the new request.

For waitlist requests, you can see all the key information about the customer request such as name, group size, and any notes the customer added. Simply press on the row to accept the request, and move through the same steps you’d normally take to add customers to the list, but with the information the customer entered already pre-populated. You can also change the status color, assign a resource, and add any notes you need for your own reference. Then chose an estimated wait as the final step. Accepting reservation requests work similarly, with the added benefit of when you press on the row, it will show the request in the context of that day’s list of reservations to see if you have availability.

If a request was accidentally rejected, you can still see it in the History section by tapping on the “Show History” bar at the bottom of the waitlist. The History section also has some filters on the right side that can be used to show customers that have been served and removed from the waitlist in addition to rejected requests. Use the return arrow button on the right to accept a previously rejected request.