True or false: Customers hate waiting.

Answer: False.

No, really: Customers don’t hate waiting. At amusement parks, they’ll wait all day. What customers hate is where they do all the waiting. Stick them in a bland doctor’s office waiting room and they’ll get twitchy in 2 minutes flat. Give them an area to explore, a space that’s an experience in itself? Well, then the wait becomes part of the ride. And you don’t have to run a theme park to tap into that kind of magic.

Why your waiting room is terrible

Most queueing areas are like purgatory. They’re awkward spots your customers dread sitting around in while they await the main event. They’re a no man’s land. They don’t look or feel particularly like your business, and they don’t look or feel like any place your customer wants to spend time in.

That’s not good for your bottom line. The moment your guests begin feeling uncomfortable or unhappy is the exact time you start losing money. They become frustrated, and they take that frustration out on you and your staff. Sometimes, they walk out the door without giving you the chance to win them over.

Why?

Because whether you intend to or not, a bland, uncomfortable waiting area signals that your business doesn’t prioritize the experience of your customers. The waiting room is the first chance you have to wow them. And right now, you’re squandering it.

How to make your first impression a good one

Forget about hiring an interior designer and picking new paint colors. We have a different change in mind, and it doesn’t have to cost you a penny.

Waitlist Me is an app that handles waitlists and reservations for all sorts of different businesses, including restaurants, retail stores, and doctors’ offices.

How can a waitlist app transform your waiting area, win over customers, and help you make more money? Easy: by improving the first interaction they have with your business and making the time they spend waiting better.

Here’s how Waitlist Me changes your customers’ waiting experience for the better:

Wait from anywhere

Your customers are busy. With Waitlist Me’s same-day reservations feature and add-yourself web widget, they can jump on line without wasting time.

Set them free

Untether your guests from your hostess stand or check-in desk thanks to our text notifications feature. It lets them window shop or run errands without losing their place it line.

Make your business more attractive

Fewer customers standing around in your waiting area means fewer walk-outs due to long, visible lines and a less cramped, more inviting space for those who do prefer to wait inside.

More flexibility

Running behind schedule is stressful enough. With our simple response feature, guests don’t have to worry about missing their spot. When you notify them by text, they can respond and let you know they’re on their way.

Smarter wait times

What’s worse than a long wait? A wait that’s even longer than the estimate. As hosts use Waitlist Me and can see their quoted times next to actuals, it becomes easier to quote more accurate waits.  

Contact us for a free trial and see how Waitlist Me can help improve your customers’ waiting experience today!

The NoshList wait list app closed out 2013 with more than 22 million diners seated across 5,000 restaurants!

This past year was one of tremendous accomplishment for NoshList. From our integration with Clover to the addition of several new features to our app, our focus in 2013 was to provide the best wait list experience for our restaurant clients and their guests. We have exciting plans for 2014 and will continue to raise the bar on wait list functionality.

New features added in 2013 included a multi-restaurant management tool, the first of its kind for the restaurant industry, and a public wait list that lets restaurants display their current waitlists to guests.

Moving forward in 2014, we see huge opportunity for wait list apps to increase operational efficiencies and extend beyond just restaurants. These functionalities could take the wait list feature to any establishment where people have to put their name on a list. This includes waiting rooms at doctors’ offices and other similar places

Another technology trend restaurant operators will see this year: using one tablet to run several different restaurant applications.

In the long run, operators will stop using multiple devices, such as a POS in the dining room and a tablet wait list by the front door. Instead, everything will be conducted from one general-purpose, POS-based tablet, which will lead to several different apps all accessible from the same place.

It has been a great year, and we are shooting to seat nearly 100 million diners in 2014!

Building on the set of resource management features we rolled out a couple months ago, we have added more flexibility for creating and tracking custom resource statuses. These statuses can be used to visually highlight different stages of your occupied resources in different colors to help make assignment decisions faster and easier.

Here is a new video on resource management, including the new custom statuses:

For example, say you are managing restaurant tables and using Waitlist Me to view what tables are available or occupied. You can sort tables by the times they have been occupied for a better sense of which ones will become available first. Now with custom statuses you could improve on those estimates even more by changing the states of tables that are waiting for their bill or being cleaned. Marking tables with customers waiting for their checks as “billing” can give your bus boys a heads up on which tables would need cleaning soon. Similarly, you can change the status of tables to “cleaning” when they are being cleared and prepped. Using more detailed statuses can help your staff at the front of the house know what tables will be available soon, which means they can quote better wait time estimates and seat customers faster. This means more revenue for the restaurant through more table turns and improved customer satisfaction.

This is just one example of how it might work in a restaurant, but the flexibility of the naming and usage of statuses means they can be tailored to different processes in different businesses.

To change a status in Waitlist Me, all you have to do is press on the resource and an action bar will appear at the bottom of the screen. This area shows information on customers currently occupying and waiting for the resource, and has actions for moving and clearing customers. Pressing on the status on the left will bring up a list of statuses, and selecting one will change the status and color of the resource. In the list view, just tap on the status color to change it.

Note that when you choose a custom status you can see both the total time a resource has been occupied as well as the time spent in the current status, which is shown in parenthesis. This makes it easy to see total visit times and times in specific statuses at a glance, so you can tell if a certain stage is causing more delays than others and how that might be affecting total wait times.

Accompanying the custom statuses are a couple of new sorting options in the Grid view, where you can view your resources grouped by Status. Select “Status the ABC” to have all the statuses grouped together and then ordered alphabetically by the resource name or “Status then Time” to have them ordered by the length of time they have been in that particular status.

To customize your statuses, go to your Settings and then press on “Manage Resources” and then again on the “Statuses” in the upper right. In addition to the default “available” (green) and “occupied” (red) statuses, you can add four of your own statuses. Just add the names and move the sliders on the right to turn them on or off. Statuses will show alphabetically in the options when you select them, so you can set the naming accordingly. The green and red statuses for available and occupied resources are always required, and custom statuses are treated as states of an occupied resource.

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.

You don’t have to act like a drill sergeant to bring a touch more productivity to your 9-to-5 life. Whether you’re a manager, a department director, an executive, or a small business owner, you get more done when you aren’t waiting on things holding you up.

Waitlists aren’t just for restaurants. People waste a lot of time waiting around in business environments, even if they aren’t standing in lines. Here are four ways you can put a waitlist app to work in an office setting:

Run a help desk more efficiently

Forget about dragging equipment to a different floor or wondering if the IT guy has read your email yet. A waitlist keeps everyone in the loop and no one standing in line, laptop in hand. Your tech support can send text alerts to employees when it’s their turn, cutting down on dead time spent twiddling their thumbs.

Bonus! Waitlist Me Pro offers analytics that let you check up on different data points, like which employee is spending how much time taking care of which problem. You’ll be able to track your service times—and see if you need to adjust the schedule or size of your team, based on the hours your crew is currently clocking.

Answer “Do you have a minute?” questions

Administrators, HR, designers, unofficial office gurus—there are all sorts of people who field questions from colleagues 24/7. A waitlist gives them an easy way to help out with information requests without derailing projects and meetings.

Bonus! Our public waitlist feature lets staffers check in to see where they are in line, which means no more passive aggressive follow-up emails, check-in calls asking if you’re free in five, or awkward hovering outside your office door. Phew!

Manage office hours with managers, teams, or departments

An open-door policy is great for your office culture but not so hot for productivity. A better choice: consistent office hours. Employees will know when it’s their turn to poke their heads in for advice or project input. Got a line growing outside your office? Waitlist Me can help you wrangle it. Let employees add themselves and then chill at their desks ‘til it’s their turn, without worrying about missing their chance to meet.

Bonus! Waitlist Me works on the web as well as iOS and Android devices. That means it can go wherever you do. Use it in your office on a desktop computer, from a coffeeshop, or wherever else your job takes you.

Oversee on-site employee services and benefits

Everyone loves a perk, whether it’s on on-site yoga studio or food trucks in the parking lot every Wednesday. But sometimes, those perks come with wait times that keep employees at bay. Keep your employees happy—and enjoying the benefits that are part of their compensation package—by employing a waitlist that lets everyone have a go at the good stuff. Waitlist Me lets staffers add themselves to a list from wherever they are, whether they’re at home, on the train, or walking in from the parking deck, making it even easier for them to use the services you offer.

Bonus! With Waitlist Me, a 5-minute wait really is a 5-minute wait. Our app offers wait time estimates based on historical averages, and seeing estimated times next to actuals helps people improve their quote estimates. It’s just one more way we’re helping you and your employees use time wisely.