FACTORY GIRL is a breakfast & lunch restaurant in Amsterdam and in Berlin.  The concept of FACTORY GIRL was founded by Sofia D Sözen in Berlin in 2009 to become a hip and stylish culture serving healthy breakfast & lunch all day long. The atmosphere bursts with warmth, friendliness, coolness and charm. FACTORY GIRL is an exciting and homey culinary experience built on values of being cruelty-free to animals. 

“We serve extremely rich, luscious vegan & vegetarian food with beautiful presentations,” says Sözen. “We change the menu often to keep the excitement alive and the ingredients we use are mostly organic.” 

The concept of FACTORY GIRL is a place where you can begin your day or take a break in style or just drop by for a coffee or quick Vegan Coco Anjela treat. FACTORY GIRL believes in a healthy lifestyle with a planet-friendly attitude. That’s why the restaurant provides daily fresh, healthy vegan and vegetarian food with an infinite amount of ingredients, spices and herbs. 

“We try to create distinctive recipes that still have conventional tastes. And above all, FACTORY GIRL welcomes everyone with different preferences!” says Sözen.

There are a lot of dishes that are customer favorites, but a couple that stand out are the Vegan Dessert Coco Anjela, Shakshuka, and Gluten Free Pancake and Benedict. The menu contains many options, so it provides a great way for guests to create their own meal. 

“We have a lot of caring and love for our brand,” says Sözen. “We enjoy our work as a team. We play good music, provide a high level of service, and make fine and healthy food in a friendly environment. We support kindness and we love animals as much as we love bringing people together.” 

FACTORY GIRL’s commitment to quality service and spotless management was what originally led them to try Waitlist Me.  When the restaurant was busy, they would have to write down the names of the waiting people and it wasn’t easy to keep things in order.  They were having difficulties due to the long wait times.

“Waitlist Me allowed us to communicate with our guests by letting them wait from anywhere then telling them it’s their turn with an SMS,” says Sözen. “Our guests can check in online, they can see the wait times and we can keep everyone informed. It’s a new way to not wait in line. We can also control the number of customers inside at any given time. Waitlist Me lets us create an awesome customer waiting experience.”

FACTORY GIRL’s previous system of using paper was also throwing off their internal system and processes. Often guests had to wait too long, especially on weekend nights when things could get chaotic. Switching to Waitlist Me gave better tools for their management and team to help run things more smoothly when things got busy.

“We are now able to monitor our lines in real-time,” says Sözen. “We can see how different locations compare, the number of guests waiting, current wait times and other metrics that help to empower our team and streamline how our business operates.”

FACTORY GIRL’s flexibility in trying new things has been part of their ability to keep the personality of their brand consistent as they continue to make improvements within their core concept.  They are driven by the passion for making people happy and making strong connections with their customers and within their team.  These values have also helped them through the past year, which has been particularly challenging for restaurants because of COVID.  In their Amsterdam location they adapted and modified their service to allow for pick up. “FACTORY GIRL has strong founding pillars,” says Sözen, “We prefer to re-form ad re-sculpt our projects and plans for the current situation and needs. People still want to eat good food, and we always try our best to please our customers.”

Locations:

FACTORY GIRL Berlin – Auguststraße 29c, 10119 Berlin, Germany

FACTORY GIRL Berlin – Saenredamstraat 32, 1072 CH Amsterdam, Netherlands

For restaurants that are looking for an attractive, secure display for their devices, we have teamed with ArmorActive to provide a hardware solution. ArmorActive’s iPad kiosks are designed to secure and protect the devices, while complimenting both the sleek look of the iPad and NoshList’s stunning user-interface.

ArmorActive, located in Utah’s “Silicon Slopes”, offers a number of attractive hardware interfaces for running applications such as NoshList, and is the fastest growing iPad kiosk design, engineering & manufacturing company in the world.

With iPad security provided by ArmorActive and the NoshList waitlist app, restaurants now have everything they need to make managing their wait lists easier and more secure than ever before.

When Scott Wise launched Scotty’s Brewhouse in 1996, he was 22 years old with little restaurant operating experience. He had graduated with a degree in marketing and public relations from Ball State University and had just returned home to Muncie, IN, after a stint as a copywriter in Houston.

“I had always waited tables and bartended, and after college, hated my 9-to-5 job. I came back to my hometown and was drawing up the idea of what I wanted to do when I heard there was a bar for sale,” Wise said. “The owners asked me to put a business plan together. Then, months later, I went to the owner and bought the business.”

That business was Mugly’s Pub & Eatery, a local Ball State University student hang out with a pool table, three beers on tap and a burger on the menu.

For the next three years, Wise worked on the restaurant’s revitalization, changing the name to Scotty’s Brewhouse and eventually hiring enough staff to handle the growing clientele. That’s when he decided to open a second location. He was only 25, and already was building a restaurant chain.

Well, maybe not.

“I got the food service bug and just loved what I was doing,” he said. “But at 25 I thought it was easy and the second restaurant failed miserably.”

Undeterred, Wise decided to take the equipment from his second endeavor and open another Scotty’s Brewhouse location in Bloomington, IL. The year was 2011. The restaurant was a hit. A franchise was born.

Today, Wise and his executive team operate eight locations throughout Indiana. Their biggest store, in downtown Indianapolis, holds 450 guests.

The technology solution

With locations throughout the state and a continuous rise in customer visits, Wise was looking for a way to increase operational efficiencies while reducing costs. This led Wise and his team to NoshList, a waitlist app designed to simplify restaurant operations and improve the guest experience. The app runs on iPad and Android tablet and mobile devices and replaces old-fashioned paper lists and expensive buzzer waitlist tools.

“For the majority of restaurant operators who use our waitlist app, the switch was made because of the ease of our technology and its ability to cut down costs while improving the guest experience,” said Craig Walker, founder of NoshList. “Our tool gives restaurant operators the ability to seat guests faster, which increases table turns and improves restaurant profitability.”

NoshList, available as a free or paid Premium service, works by sending guests text messages to their mobile devices alerting them that their tables are ready. If a guest doesn’t have a mobile phone, they can still be added to the waitlist and the host can locate them once their table is ready.

More importantly, however, is that NoshList’s Premium users can utilize the app’s ability to collect analytics based on diner history. Additionally, Premium users have access to a two-way communication system for dine-in guests, so customers can let a restaurant’s host know if there are changes to the party.

“The ability to gain consumer insights based on visitor history is a huge step forward for users of our NoshList app,” Walker said. “And the ability for two-way communication further enhances our restaurant support.”

Wise had long been considered an early adopter of restaurant technology, a reputation that placed him on the industry speaking circuit for many years.

Scotty’s Brewhouse first started using tablets at the table in 2010. The move was a premature one in regard to customer acceptance. While the tablets didn’t work for his customer base he continued to look for new and emerging technologies that would push the brand forward.

“With the use of technology, you don’t do something that you think is cool or looks good. It has to save an operator time and money,” Wise said. “The reason why I got into tablet waitlist technology was because I was frustrated with how many pagers got stolen, or broken or lost.”

After the failed tablet experiment, Wise decided to use NoshList as a way to increase sales and reduce operational costs even though he wasn’t sure customers would give out their cell phone numbers.

“In the beginning I was nervous,” he said. “I don’t believe in text marketing and I wasn’t sure if people would give us their cell phone numbers. We had a little pushback from customers, but it wasn’t enough to stop using the technology because we were saving money on broken pagers and streamlining our seating capacity,” Wise said.

To date, WaitList has seated more than 34 million diners through its free and Premium versions and in May launched an updated version specifically for iOS 7.

“The app continues to ramp up and is proving to be a great technology. With some of the bigger software companies, they are so slow in incorporating new technology that by the time they do it the next wave is out,” Wise said. “For my staff, the reaction was initially ‘how do I do this?’ But once they got it, they loved it. This is one technology that I didn’t have to push at all and was not too difficult to put in place.”

Additionally, Wise and his team were concerned that customers would walk away once their names went on the waitlist because there was no buzzer that would tether them to the restaurant.

“We worked with NoshList on a number system that let staff know if customers had gone somewhere else,” Wise said. “And if people are wondering about their wait, they can now look at their phone and see how much time they have left. This lets the hostess focus on other things and it doesn’t make guests feel like someone forgot about them.”

Over the past six months, Scotty’s Brewhouse guests have embraced the NoshList technology. And because it’s an app-based system, the waitlist keeps running even if internet connectivity is lost.

“The best thing is we don’t have pagers anymore. That cost was huge for us,” Wise said.

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.

With stay-at-home orders the law of the land in most cities and states across America, dining out is quickly becoming a distant memory. But delivery and take-out? Restaurants from Tacoma to Charleston are figuring out how to keep their kitchens open, and Waitlist Me is helping with this process. 

Waitlist Me is the waitlist and reservation app that’s intuitive to get started and start using within a few minutes. It’s built for people, not techies, so you can learn it in minutes. We made sure that Waitlist Me isn’t just easy to use; our entire service is user-friendly, from usage (unlimited on multiple device) to customer service (prompt and friendly) to billing (simple and transparent, guaranteed). And it’s flexible enough to use on different devices in different business environments. You can install the Waitlist Me business app on Android and iOS devices, and use it in a browser on computers. 

Here are a few tips on how restaurants can use Waitlist Me’s features to keep their kitchens open, their employees working, and their customers well-fed during the coronavirus crisis.

#1. Manage a smoother pick up process 

Under normal circumstances, you would use Waitlist Me’s text notifications to alert guests once they’re added to your restaurant’s waitlist and again when their table is ready. During the COVID-19 pandemic, though, you can customize them in another way: Use the first notification to confirm an order. Send the second notification to let customers know when their order is ready and waiting for them.

Bonus: Thanks to our public waitlist feature, guests can also check on their order and see their estimated wait time. That way, they can plan their arrival based on where they are on the list. 

#2. Communicate simple no-contact pick-up instructions

Head off panicked phone calls and take-out containers that go cold before their ride arrives. How? By using Waitlist Me’s customization features to share your pick-up policies with your guests. These could include asking your customers to pop their trunks to facilitate no-contact pick-up, or to direct them to a particular area to gather their order.

We recommend adding these instructions to your…

– Website order form or Waitlist Me’s add-yourself web widget, which customers will see when they submit their orders

– First notification text, which you’ll send to confirm the order

– Second notification text, which will let guests know when their order is ready for pick-up

Bonus: Because Waitlist Me’s interface is a cinch to navigate on any internet-enabled device, you can update your instructions in seconds.

#3. Improve communications with two-way texting

Waitlist Me makes it easy to keep track of how long people have been waiting and when you have sent them notifications. You can also see when people reply with text responses and what they say.  There are a couple built in behaviors triggered in the app that are usually used to cause different parts of the app to flash if a customer is coming soon or cancelling. These can be repurposed in other ways, like for knowing when customers arrive, by changing the instructions in the text notifications. 

Waitlist Me Pro has a two-way texting feature that allows you to send open text responses to customer texts. You can answer questions, specify details on their order, and keep them updated on when their food is expected to leave the kitchen.

Tip: To ensure prompt pick-ups, ask your guests to text you their car model and color. That way, you can run their food out to them without second-guessing whose take-out bag belongs with which vehicle.

Those are several things we have seen helping with take-out and pickups, and not just for restaurants. Similar strategies are being applied for picking up products and waiting for services at other businesses.