Running a restaurant isn’t the same as it was 10 years ago. Technology has shaped customer expectations around service in all parts of their lives, and people are less willing to put up with unnecessary waiting to get the goods and services they want. Fortunately, there are applications like Waitlist Me that help restaurants and other businesses raise the bar and deliver at a higher level of service that meets modern expectations.

Cut the clutter and stay organized 

A frazzled host and a messy greeting area is a big red flag for guests who come to you for an enjoyable evening out. Forget grease pens and paper planners. Waitlist Me eliminates hostess stand clutter and makes it easy to add and seat dining parties. Your front-of-house staff can see your business’ waitlist in a single glance and add customers to it with a swipe.

Over-deliver on wait expectations

With Waitlist Me, even a rookie host can quote accurate wait times and set the right expectations. The app shows real-time waits next to quoted times to make it easy to improve and know when things are running ahead or slow. Using status colors and notes to organize and keep tabs on waiting customers helps you get them seated more efficiently. You can’t always control the wait time, but you can improve the wait experience by serving customers on time, when you say you will.

Set your guests free

Kids aren’t the best at standing quietly in a restaurant lobby, and adults don’t want to be cooped up either. That’s why Waitlist Me lets guests relax and wander about if they like. The text notification feature does away with diners’ worries about losing their place in queue. No more hovering around your hostess stand, no more long queues stretched around the corner, and no more crowded lobbies turning off new walk-ins. Whether they choose to window shop, walk down the block, or hang out in the car, one quick text lets them know when their table is ready. All you have to do is tap a button. No muss, no fuss, no empty tables.

Give people visibility into their wait

The No.-1 question your host doesn’t want to answer when it’s busy: Is my table ready yet? A close second: Where are we on the list? Waitlist Me keeps customers in-the-know automatically with its popular public waitlist feature. Once they’re added to your waitlist, they’ll receive a text confirmation that includes a link to your public waitlist that they can check in their phone browser (no app download required). In real time, they’ll see exactly where they are in the queue along with their wait time.

Avoid lost reservations

The worst problem customers face on busy nights or big holidays is lost reservations. When your restaurant relies on overstuffed date books and grease boards, though, hostesses get used to saying, “What was the name again? I’m not seeing it in the book.” Your guests deserve better, and Waitlist Me helps you stay organized and manage your reservations in one location that you can access from multiple iPads or Android tablets. You can even login from your home computer or your smart phone to keep tabs on your reservations.

For businesses looking to automate more of the reservation acceptance process, Waitlist Me has new ways to restrict how many reservations you accept by day and by hour. With a Waitlist Me Proo subscription, you can set reservation limits on the number of groups and people that you’d like on an hourly and daily basis. For example, if you don’t want any more than 4 groups to schedule themselves per hour, you can quickly set up that rule.

Simply press the gear icon in the app and head to Add Yourself > Scheduling Rules. Choose a day and you will be able to set the maximum number of people and groups you’ll allow by day and by hour.  There are four different options, but you can pick and choose the ones that work for your goals in managing capacity at your business. You can avoid having too many people schedule at the same time without all the work of tracking the usage of every single table at your restaurant or resource at your business. You can use the Copy Rules button at the bottom to apply these rules to every day, or set up each day separately.

That’s it! Your rules will apply to self scheduling done through the Web Widget and Kiosk, where customers will see a message when there isn’t availability for a particular time or day.  They wouldn’t be able to book that time, but could still check other times.

The rules will also trigger warnings within the Waitlist Me app if you try to schedule above the limit to make it easier to know when you might be overbooked.  Though it won’t block you from scheduling above the limits for cases where you know you can handle the booking.

Over the last decade, the restaurant week concept has found its way to communities across the United States. Conceived by restaurateur Joe Baum and Tim Zagat of the Zagat Survey, restaurant week has led to huge gains for the food and beverage industry. Some restaurants have seen as high as a 40-percent increase in customer volume during the promotional period.

Because many restaurant week customers are first-timers, this period is also the ideal time for dining establishments to capture repeat business. Ready to score some new regulars? Here’s how to wow everyone who walks through your door during restaurant week.

Land a great first impression

In Waitlist Me HQ’s hometown, Charleston, S.C., restaurant week is a twice-yearly event with additional, neighborhood-specific weeks thrown into the mix as well.  Many a hidden gem have earned stand-out word-of-mouth rep thanks to excellent restaurant week showings.

Earning that sweet referral business starts the moment your guests walk through the door. Comfortable seating, warm lighting, and plenty of heated or cooled space for guests to stand upon entry are vital. If you’re planning on making any upgrades, do so before the week is set to start—and if you’re painting or doing anything odiferous, schedule your refresh with plenty of time to air out any lingering fumes.

Craft a memorable menu

One restaurant week bummer we hear about regularly is this one: Chefs create delectable special menus, but they’re devoid of house specialties that new customers are hoping to try during the promotion.

Depending on your restaurant’s price-point and the promotional restrictions enforced by your restaurant week’s organizer, it might not be possible for you to offer all the goodies that are must-haves for your regular menu. We encourage you to try to find a way to bring popular picks to this more limited menu, too. Appetizer portions and tasting platters are two possible ways to make this happen.

Get the word out early

Large-scale community events are typically coordinated by a local chamber of commerce or another business-oriented organization. For restaurant weeks, food and wine festivals, and other tasty opportunities, these orgs tend to put together event guides or listings. To maximize your customer volume, it’s essential that your business be included in these publications.

Figuring out what you need to do to get your restaurant on the map, so to speak, is a cinch. Some tech-savvy chambers will offer orientation-style information online for restaurant owners and managers. However, you can always call your chamber to find out what information you need to send to the right people. Remember, they’re there to help!

Upgrade your customer service tech

Of all the bad times to have a waitlist snafu, restaurant week is one of the worst. We created Waitlist Me so that your restaurant doesn’t have to worry about getting your guests from your waiting area to your dining room; our tech helps you quote more accurate times and prevent walkaways.

Waitlist Me is a simple waitlist and reservation app that you can implement today. With a single glance, your host can see how many people are in line, how long they’ve been waiting, and when they’ll make it to their table. You can also easily add our web widget to your restaurant’s website and let your customers hop in line from wherever they are.

Renting shoes and perfecting the art of bowling-without-bumpers is a favorite memory of Waitlist Me’s app developers, and we’re thrilled that our favorite outing of old is back in favor with everyone from teens to millennials to families with kids.

Seeing a surge in your clown shoe-clad customers? Waitlist Me is a waitlist and reservation app that can help you smoothly manage the increase in traffic—and turn new customers into loyal fans.

Here are 3 ways our app can help any bowling alley gain new business (and improve customer service) today.

Prevent walk-outs when there’s a wait

A line at the door can make any strike-happy group turn tail and hit up a pizza parlor or movie theater, instead. Waitlist Me helps you keep customers regardless of your wait time. How? By making that line disappear.

Thanks to unlimited text notifications for users in the U.S. (and pay-as-you-go texting for Waitlist Me’s international plans), you can add groups to your waitlist and then let them roam free until a lane becomes available. They could grab cheese fries and a pitcher of beer at your snack stand, shoot pool and play PAC-MAN in your arcade, or window-shop their way down the street. When they’re first in line, you can send them a heads-up via text.

Perfect for:

– Bowling alleys with limited staffing (or a small waiting area)

– Checking in large groups during peak business hours

– Bowling alleys facing lots of local competing attractions

Give large groups a great time

You brought in snacks and arcade games to serve your bowlers better. But those add-ons don’t have to be after thoughts. Now, with large groups looking for impromptu hang-out spaces, your bowling alley is primed to offer a variety of fun options for everyone, including the non-bowlers in the bunch.

You can use Waitlist Me to give everyone a chance to do whatever it is that floats their boat…without making ‘em stand around in long lines by themselves. How? Waitlist Me is flexible enough to be used for people waiting for lanes, your in-house food area, or even popular games like air hockey.  Text ‘em when it’s their turn, ensuring that they’re never sacrificing quality time with friends and family to hold their place in line.  You can manage lines for different activities with status colors or even set up a separate waitlist for areas that have regular waits.

Perfect for:

– Booking birthday parties, office outings, and other celebrations

– Special events, like trivia nights and karaoke

– Attracting big crowds for bowling league competitions

Make it easy for customers to choose your bowling alley

Who wants a hassle for what should be a fun happy hour outing? Not your guests! That’s why it’s essential to make it a cinch for your customers to decide to shoot the breeze at your business rather than another spot down the block. A parking lot and food specials are a great way to get ‘em coming in your door. Another tool to have in your back pocket: Waitlist Me.

The app is built to handle waitlists and reservations side-by-side, so you can forget about that mess of sticky notes cluttering up your front counter. Customers can call before they come, walk right in, or even add themselves to your waitlist or make a reservation online. And, thanks to the public waitlist feature, they can check your ETA from wherever they are, whether that’s the water cooler, the bar next door, or the parking lot.

Perfect for:

– Catering to the after-work crowd

– Offering pop-up events

– Handling holidays and rainy summer afternoons

Waitlist Me offers several methods for calculating and displaying estimated wait times to help improve quote accuracy. The default option provides a rolling average wait that is recalculated every time a party is checked off the waitlist by being marked as served. You can choose a time period to include in this average, from 1 – 24 hours. Three group size ranges can be customized for displaying these averages. These settings are in the app under the gear icon > Customization > Waitlist View > Wait Estimates.

With Pro and Platinum subscriptions, there are advanced features to help you estimate wait times based on party size and time of day. The calculations can be set to use the previous week or previous four weeks of data for parties served. To enable this option, select Historical for the Calculations option from the menu shown above. Then you can access the data any time by pressing on the Avg Wait option from the main waitlist screen. (These settings can be accessed again quickly by selecting Historical on the main waitlist screen.)

The Waitlist Me iPad and Android tablet apps let you view graphs and charts that average the data for the previous week or four weeks, which makes it easy to spot trends over time. Use the menus at the top to switch between days of the weeks and various group views. This view shows a breakout of group ranges: 

While the combined view gives a historical waits that includes all group sizes:

If the data shows you consistently have waits for specific group sizes, it may be beneficial to remove some of the lesser used table sizes and add more to accommodate the group sizes that usually wait the longest. These metrics can help you plan future staffing so you can ensure coverage for the busiest times. Beyond helping with the real-time process of providing more accurate wait estimates, reducing walkaways, and improving customer satisfaction, the data can be used for strategic analysis and improvements.