When coronavirus hit America, some side-eyed the “essential” classification for medical marijuana dispensaries and those that support them, like grow sites and edible producers. Of course, if you own or run a dispensary, you know better.

An estimated 3 million people in the U.S. and its territories depend on medical marijuana. Because a large percentage of dispensary customers already have compromised immune systems, it’s especially important for businesses to protect shoppers.

Waitlist Me is helping do exactly that during the COVID-19 crisis. Here’s how some cannabis businesses are using our waitlist and reservation app to keep their doors open and their customers safe.

Enforce occupancy restrictions

If your dispensary is scant on square-space, consider creating a restriction on the number of people allowed inside your business at one time. Station a staff member outside to function as crowd control—and to add customers to your waitlist—and another employee inside, behind the counter. You’ll be able to provide excellent one-on-one service while still protecting those that matter most: your employees and your customers.

Tip: Use Waitlist Me’s text notification feature to encourage guests to wait in their cars. Reassure them that their place in line is secure, and that you’ll send them a text when it’s their turn to go inside.

Encourage social distancing and touchless service

With scores of new customers coming in the door—not to mention the new products on offer—questions abound for cannabis industry pros. And that’s the way it should be! But a queue for customer service isn’t a safe situation during a pandemic.

To avoid a cluster at your counter, add the Waitlist Me widget to your website. Direct customers to add themselves to your waitlist from their phone, so they can start the waiting process while en route to your store or wait in the parking lot from their car.  

Tip: Head off ETA questions right at the start by adding the link to your dispensary’s public waitlist to your website. That way, people can check their place in line with just a single glance. Or use the web widget features to show how many people are currently waiting.

Make pickup as quick and easy as possible

Even though it’s nice to get out of the house during these difficult times, those you serve still want to make their trips in public as speedy as possible. To help them do that, encourage customers to make an appointment to shop or to add themselves to your waitlist before they arrive. Waitlist Me’s web widget lets them do both. When they check in, they can specify what the goal of their shopping trip is (i.e. to refill a prescription, pick up an online order, or shop for a certain type of product) so your employees can expedite their visit.

Waitlist Me Pro users can even use our flexible two-way texting feature to respond to customer questions, clarify details, or let someone know if their prescription isn’t ready yet.

Tip: Upgrade your curbside pick-up with contact-free service, which will be a boon for your immune-compromised customers. Update the custom text notifications to include pick-up directions, like where to park and to roll down a passenger window for no-touch delivery.

We are getting ready to head to NRA, and are happy to have reached 11 million diners seated through the NoshList waitlist app.

We have also added three key features to improve restaurant efficiency, which include customizable text message notifications, multi-restaurant management, and a customer-facing waitlist display. These are now available on iPad, iPhone, and Android devices.

The customizable text message notification feature gives restaurants the ability to modify their text messages for waitlist notifications and allows managers to better engage customers by adding a link to their website or menu, or to inform their diners about specials and promotions.

With the multi-restaurant management feature, new admin accounts allow owners or companies with multiple restaurants to login and see how each restaurant is doing from one account. We work with a number of large chain restaurants and wanted to give them more powerful tools to manage all of their stores’ waitlists. These new multi-restaurant administrative features are an introduction to all the advanced analytics and other tools we can provide to restaurant operations managers and owners of multiple restaurants.

The third new feature released this week lets any restaurant using NoshList display a public view of the waitlist that customers can check from their phones to see where they are in the list. The mobile version uses a custom link in the notification message to highlight each individual customer’s position in the list on his or her mobile phone.

NoshList will also be attending the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago this weekend, May 18-21, and will be located in the Technology section in the North Hall, Level 3 in Booth # 5867.

As you deck the halls and adjust your playlists, you should seriously consider giving your waitlist and table management system an update, too. With holiday parties a-plenty, this is no time for clutter and inefficiency!

You need to reboot your hostess stand and kick that datebook-and-grease-board duo to the curb. We have a shiny digital solution that will keep your season truly merry and bright—and save you plenty of woe (and money) to boot. We’re talking about a waitlist app that brings your queue, your reservations, and your resources together on one easy-to-use interface. It’s called Waitlist Me Pro.

Why do you need it? Let us count the ways:

#1. You need an intuitive way to balance walk-ins and reservations

What’s worse than losing a reservation fora twosome on date night? Losing a reservation for a 12-top the week before Christmas. Yikes. Still, it happens.It’s easy to forget a group—yes, even a big one—when you’re struggling to handle the nightly dinner rush.

When you upgrade your restaurant to a digital waitlist and reservation system, you say “goodbye” to misplaced reservations.With Waitlist Me Pro, you can use our flexible reservation views to see what your restaurant has in store for the holiday season and beyond. Plus, we built the app to incorporate reservations and walk-ins seamlessly. That makes it a cinch to navigate your guest list, no matter what.

#2. You need to visualize the best places to seat parties in your restaurant

Forget about peering behind the hostess stand to survey available seating options. Your hosts won’t even have to squint at hard-to-decipher grids anymore, either! With simple, digital table and resource management, confusion over where to seat your large and small parties is a relic of yesteryear.

Waitlist Me lets you view your tables indifferent ways, including by availability, by size, and by server. They’recolored coded so that you can immediately tell what’s open and what’s not. The Pro-level version of the app also gives you access to our layouts and sections feature, which allows you to build more detailed floor plans that are still easy to read.

#3. You need to keep bringing in foot traffic, no matter how busy you are

A wall of waiting guests in your lobby is intimidating to newcomers. To them, one large group waiting for a few tables to be pushed together can look like a dozen parties—and that’s enough to make anyone want to try the restaurant down the street rather than risk a queue.

Technology can transform your vestibule and the way you run your restaurant. With Waitlist Me’s text notification feature, you can set your guests free. Instead of lingering around your hostess stand, waiting for their name to be called, they can hang out at the bar or wander around the area without worrying about losing their table. When they’re next in line, you can let them know, no shouting necessary.

#4. You need to ensure that all your guests have a great experience

With a paper waitlist and reservation system, you’re constantly flipping back and forth and scrabbling around for notes. It’s unprepared and unprofessional, and that’s frustrating for your hosts and for your customers. And ETAs? Let’s not even go there.

Our app brings a new level of sophistication to eating out. We designed it to be easy to use from the get-go,which will decrease employee training time. And because Waitlist Me is so simple, hosts can focus their attention where it should be: on the guests,rather than on the paper they use to keep track of them.

For businesses that manage a lot of reservations, it is important to have the right tools to view availability and prevent double bookings. Waitlist Me recently added some advanced scheduling features for managing tables and tracking customer visit times, and here is a quick video on how it works.

Want to do more with Noshlist? Now you can. More features are now available with NoshList Premium, the expanded version of our restaurant waitlist management app for iPad.

NoshList Premium features the same capabilities as NoshList, including unlimited SMS text and automated phone call notifications to diners, while new services have been added to increase functionality and provide diners with the ability to interact directly with the restaurant via text. NoshList remains free, while NoshList Premium is priced at $49 per month per restaurant.

NoshList Premium features include:

• Unlimited Two-Way Texting
• Table Number Assignment
• Large Party Functionality
• NoshGuest Auto?ll
• In-App Statistics
• Designated Local Phone Number
• 30-Day Exportable Analytics
• Weekly Email Summaries

“With NoshList Premium, we get an expanded set of features that help us deliver an even better guest experience including unlimited two-way texting that our customers really like, as well as a designated local phone number,” said Garrett Schmidt of Buffalo Wild Wings. “We benefit greatly from analytics and in-app statistics, which allow us to measure our waitlist performance in real time relative to past shifts. NoshList has made managing our waitlist much more efficient and given us valuable insight into an aspect of operations we never had before.”

NoshList notifies diners via text messaging that their tables are ready and improves their dining experience by replacing paper lists, microphones and alert buzzers with text messages sent directly to their cell phone. Since the February launch of the free service, nearly 4.5 million diners have been seated with NoshList.