Waitlist Me Pro keeps the balance between your congenial, community atmosphere and top-notch customer service, by keeping things running smoothly and improving the waiting experience.   It is also designed to be intuitive and quick to use no matter how tech-savvy (or not) you and your clientele are.

Here are 4 customer-approved ways Waitlist Me Pro can help your barbershop:

Keep track of who’s busy (and who’s not)

What’s better than flipping through a paper calendar with scribbled-down availability? Honestly: just about anything. Waitlist Me Pro makes it easy to keep track of appointments for each barber at the same time as you manage your highly variable walk-in traffic.

The app allows you to see your upcoming appointments and the walk-in customers waiting for each barber as well as the customers they are currently serving and how long they have been with them. Waitlist Me’s intuitive visual layout shows the barbers who aren’t “in” as grayed out, while those who are busy are highlighted in red and show a time counter of how long they have been busy.  You can also see who the next person waiting for each barber is and what time they were told they would be served.

Run a more efficient business

Having a good time at work is a bonus. Enjoying your colleagues and your clientele? That’s the cherry on top of the sundae. But you are running a business—and that’s a reality you never forget.

Waitlist Me Pro keeps track of your resources, helping you focus a little more on the work you love and a little less on management. The app helps you keep track of many things: the amount of time your barbers spend on each client, how long customers wait before they hit the chair, who works the most and who works the least. You can run reports whenever you want and use the knowledge they impart to make decisions about staffing, expansion, business hours—anything and everything.

Customize your online waitlist and appointments tools

You know your business better than anyone. That’s why we built Waitlist Me Pro to give you as much freedom as possible over how you set up your waitlist and your appointments.

The pro-level app allows you to set your business hours as well as blackout days for appointments. Clients leave notes for you on their preferences or any accommodations they require. Have a regular client bringing a child in for his first cut? Prefer a certain style that might add on more time? All of that can be added as a note, allowing you to provide top-notch customer service, every single time.

Promote your loyalty program or current special offerings

Waitlist Me Pro offers the highest level of personalization. Whether you want to bring your brand colors and logo to the “add me” website widget or to a public waitlist you display online or in-store, Waitlist Me Pro lets you add custom HTML, change colors, and customize the wording.

If you offer a loyalty program, discounted products, or a new service, the public waitlist is a great way to let your clientele know. You can change the HTML to include graphics, videos, or plain text that keep your customers up-to-date on everything that’s going on in your shop.

The demise of fast fashion darling Forever 21 might have you reaching for a Xanax, but should it? Not necessarily. After all, while one empire has fallen, some fast fashion brands are thriving.

Look at Target! Their private label pivot in 2018 has been hugely successful. Look at Old Navy! The Gap, Inc. brainchild plans to open 800 stores in the next decade. Look at Gymboree! The beloved clothing brand for babies and toddlers is making a comeback as a pop-up shop concept within The Children’s Place retail outlets.

See? There’s no need to panic. From new merchandising tactics to rebooted branding and marketing initiatives, there are all sorts of ways to keep a fast fashion business profitable. One of our favorite ways to keep your retail venture in the green is to improve your customer experience.

Not sure how to wow your customers? Keep reading for our favorite strategies.

Make customers feel welcome

One prominent reason many consumers turn to online shopping: pushy sales tactics that make them feel uncomfortable. While you should always greet walk-ins with a smile and a cheery “hello,” it’s time to reconsider retail standards that feel like the opening of a sales pitch. Instead of, “Can I help you with anything in particular?” try deploying friendly small talk. A comment about the rainy weather or a compliment on the cute sweater they’re wearing will make the customer’s experience feel more conversational than transactional.

And speaking of conversation, there’s no reason for your employees to avoid it. We’ve all been the only customer in an otherwise-empty shop, shrinking under the microscopic gaze of associates. Awkward! While private conversations should be kept off the sales floor, bantering about TV shows, sports teams, and other harmless topics can make customers feel at ease in your store. Remind them, though, that their body language is important: They need to look approachable 24/7 and they should always be paying attention to customers, ready to offer help on finding a size or snagging a dressing room.

Eliminate long lines

Online fast fashion retailers like Amazon and ASOS struggle with shopping cart abandonment. Brick-and-mortar retailers should be concerned about a similar situation: long waits for fitting rooms and cash registers. 

Lines have the tendency to intimidate rather than to encourage. Many shoppers will load up their arms with potential purchases, then turn to the line for the changing room and wonder if all these goodies are worth the interminable wait. One solution is to use a waitlist and appointment management app like Waitlist Me, which makes long lines disappear by taking them digital. Retail staffers can hold on to the merchandise customers are interested in and let them continue browsing while they wait. A quick text lets shoppers know when they reach the front of the line.

Improve staff productivity

Top-notch customer service starts with staffing. If your sales associates are overrun by to-dos or traffic, they’ll be too frazzled to show the level of service that results in sales and customer retention. Adding an app like Waitlist Me to your toolbox can help retail store managers make smarter real-time decisions based on how busy the store is.

Waitlist Me allows managers to easily view things like how many customers are waiting for help or a fitting room, and how long fitting rooms have been occupied. Keeping tabs on traffic patterns means that they know where bottlenecks are emerging so they can direct employees accordingly before customer experiences start to suffer.

If you’re just getting started with Waitlist Me Pro or Platinum, you’ll want to go through these steps to set up your tables, sections, and layouts.

Set up tables – In the settings, navigate to Assignments. (In the app this will be under the gear icon > Manage Assignments.) Enter in the names of all of your tables, as well as their sizes. Each account defaults with assignments 1 – 30; delete any you do not need.

Name sections – When you’re done with the Assignments, go back to the previous screen and then choose Sections. Add the names of every section you will be using in any layout.

Name layouts – Enter the name of all the layouts you have. For example, Weekday Dinner & Weekend Dinner, or 4 Servers, 5 Servers & 6 Servers. If your sections never change, simply create one layout and name it something like Main or Dinner. 

Set up layouts – For each layout you’ve named, press Edit to set it up. Put a check in the box for each table that belongs to your first section. Then press the +Section in the middle of the row, and assign that section. If you want to use the color coding for your sections, choose the color at this time too. Continue this process until you’ve assigned all of the tables to the sections that belong in that layout. (You don’t have to use every table in every layout.) Then go back and repeat the process for other layouts. 

Once finished, Pro users can see more on how to utilize the grid view for table management here.

Place tables in rooms – With a Platinum subscription you’ll be able to create a spatial floor plan. To do this, go back to the main waitlist screen and then press the circle with the line in it on the upper left. From here, follow along with this video tutorial to set up your room(s) and place your tables:

Waitlist Me has been helping restaurants and other businesses better serve their customers for over a decade with simple and flexible solutions for managing wait times and scheduling. Today thousands of businesses use Waitlist Me to serve millions of people every month, increasing revenues and customer satisfaction in the process.

As we have continued to improve our waitlist, reservation, and table management features over the years, we have worked closely with a wide variety of small and medium-sized businesses across several industries and developed a deep understanding of the needs of those businesses. Recently, we noticed several challenges businesses faced in delivering consistent customer service quality in ways that were simple and efficient.

Over the past year, we have focused more of our efforts on solving some of these problems. Starting with a deep dive into discovery initiatives that involved talking to hundreds of customers and businesses, we then moved through multiple design and feature iterations to develop a whole new set of solutions that we are launching under the name Perklist.

So what is Perklist? On a high level, it is a simple set of perks, or special benefits, that businesses can provide to their customers. As each business is unique, Perklist is designed to be flexible in allowing businesses to choose what perks they offer and how they use them to better serve customers in ways that fit their brands and processes. Basically, it is a versatile toolkit that businesses can use to understand, engage, and interact with their customers in more authentic ways.

To give a few examples, some key areas that Perklist can help businesses include:

– Better service – Providing better service through seamless seating and personalized benefits and experiences

– More visits – Driving more guest visits through targeted specials, timely messaging, and fun reminders

– Stronger relationships – Building stronger relationships through honest listening, consistent recognition, and genuine interactions

Perklist provides several types of perks that businesses can utilize based on their needs and goals. Some of the main feature areas include:

– Scheduling – Priority seating options through Waitlist Me integration

– Promotional – Customizable benefits that can be delivered effectively in novel ways

– Menus – Simple options to display menus, specials, and exclusive items

– Feedback – Private surveys for encouraging customer feedback and gaining valuable insights

– Messaging – Engaging group updates, question clarifications, and interactive conversations with select customers

Our journey in developing Perklist has just begun, and we see many opportunities to extend the functionality and value the service can provide to businesses and their customers. Some of these ideas are complimentary to Waitlist Me, like how Perklist can provide more choices, interactivity, and even exclusivity in scheduling visits. However, there are many other features that we didn’t feel fit neatly into Waitlist Me and could better evolve as a separate service. That said, our core product goals in developing Perklist are the same as those of Waitlist Me in our focus on simplicity, flexibility and providing exceptional value, and we hope people will enjoy this new service as much as they do Waitlist Me.

We are excited to see where things go with Perklist. Check it out!

Soccer? Olé! For restaurants and bars around the globe, it’s a fútbol frenzy as fans around the world grab their jerseys and get their watch game on.  And since Waitlist Me is international and available in over 60 countries, it is a great tool for businesses everywhere to score a victory with their customers.

Whether you’re running a team-specific bar with patrons all cheering for the home team or your business has viewing screens for soccer fans watching every game, Waitlist Me is here to help you keep up with the crowds.

Wondering how a waitlist and reservation app can help you keep customers coming back, game after game? Here’s how food and beverage businesses are using it to do exactly that, right now.

Ensuring diners never lose their spot in line

Vibrating pagers are just one more thing for your guests to keep track of, and yelling names? Well, that’s annoying (and easy to miss when you’re in the middle of a rowdy crowd). Waitlist Me solves the “Wait, did they call our name?” problem with text notifications. Now, nobody misses a beat (or a minute of the action).

Kicking clutter to the curb (and seating guests faster than ever)

Rustling appointment books, piles of sticky notes, and a smudged grease board slow you down. With a slew of things to check and update, your hosts have tons of tasks to take care of that have nothing to do with showing your customers a good time. Waitlist Me eliminates paper clutter and gives hosts the ability to add and seat parties with a glance and a swipe.

Winning over new-to-you diners

A scrum of soccer fans in your waiting area can make new customers turn tail. Don’t let your popularity turn off potential guests! Waitlist Me helps you maximize foot traffic by setting your queuers free. Thanks to text notifications and a public waitlist they can check for ETAs, they don’t have to stand around your hostess stand. That means new walk-ins feel welcome, even when there’s a wait.

Offering up accurate wait estimates without the guesswork

No tapping toes here! Waitlist Me takes guesstimates out of the waiting game. Our app shows accurate wait times right on the home screen, so your hosts can relay wait times to diners with just one glance, saving you time and frustration.

Putting specials on display

From early opening times and viewing party schedules to appetizer and drink specials, you have a lot of news to share with your guests. Waitlist’s Public Waitlist feature is a simple way to ensure they’ll see important things you want to share while they wait.

Keeping track of special requests for every party

Every time you add a party to your waitlist, you can add a note with their needs or special requests. Do they want a corner booth? A TV tuned to the England game? A high chair? Wheelchair access? Add a note and get it right the first time, guaranteed.

Host viewing parties for two games simultaneously

Hosting viewing parties for a couple games that are on at the same time? Waitlist helps you do that in a snap. You can add folks to each game’s list and seat them accordingly—without any fights over which TV is tuned to what game.

Entertaining customers while they wait

Our Public Waitlist feature lets you customize what you show your guests—and this World Cup season, you can go way beyond your logo and brand colors. It’s easy to add GIFs, music, images, and videos. Hook it up to a TV screen in your waiting area, and customers will be glued to the screen, not their watches.

Letting fans jump in the queue from wherever they are

With Waitlist Me’s Add Yourself web widget, your diners can go for that last-minute pick-up game without worrying about grabbing a table later. As soon as they wrap up on the field, they can hop on your waitlist from a smartphone and never miss a game or a meal.