Using a paper floor plan has been common in the restaurant industry for a long time, and many software applications have incorporated spatial floor plan concepts into their designs. Floor plans are deceptively complex to use, however, and can cost you time and money in ways you may not expect. Waitlist Me CEO, Brian Hutchins, was recently featured in an article published on RMagazine, and goes into detail about 5 main reasons that floor plans are more complicated than they seem.
1) Key information is scattered in different directions
2) Comparing apples and oranges is difficult
3) Tables are static, but demand is not
4) Bad decisions lead to unhappy customers and frustrated employees
With Memorial Day Weekend behind us, it’s all tourists, all the time, for restaurants in vacation destinations. Are you ready for the crush?
While the boom can be terrific for your bottom line, a mid-summer dinner rush can be a nightmare situation for your host. And the only thing worse than a frazzled host is an unhappy vacationer. Avoid the panic and frustration with Waitlist Me, a waitlist and table management app that’ll help you run things more smoothly and bring more smiles to your customers’ faces.
Here’s our step-by-step guide to nailing your summer service:
Step 1. Greet ‘em with a smile—and an accurate wait-time
The one thing diners hate more than walking in to a wait-time is being given a wait-time that doesn’t pan out. Waitlist Me provides smart wait-time estimates that adjust as you use the app—and you can check ‘em in a glance.
Bonus! Since the app displays actual wait times right next to the estimated wait times, your team can see how they are doing and adjust as needed for lulls and surges in traffic. This simple feedback loop makes it easy to quote times more accurately.
Step 2. Ask if your guests need anything special
A highchair? Crayons for the kiddos? An accessible spot for Gran’s wheelchair? Waitlist Me allows you to make notes for every party you add to your waitlist, ensuring that no detail is forgotten.
Bonus! This is also the perfect time to ask if they’re celebrating a special occasion. If the answer is a big Y-E-S, give your servers a heads-up so they can make the groups experience at your restaurant one to tell the world (and Yelp) about.
Step 3: Encourage them to explore the area while they wait
Text notifications mean your diners don’t have to hover around the hostess stand. Once they’re added to your waitlist, they’re free to check out nearby shops or stroll down the block ‘til their table is ready.
Bonus! As soon as you add a party to your restaurant’s waitlist, they’ll receive a text confirmation with a link to your public waitlist. Let them know the link is there and that they can use it to check their place in line directly from their phone.
Want to see how other restaurants are using Waitlist Me to manage their summer rush? Click here.
For businesses using Waitlist Me’s public waitlist feature that allows people who’ve joined your waitlist to check their place in line from their phones, there is a new way to enhance the customer experience.
Now, an integration with the Perklist AI Assistant makes it possible for these waiting customers to explore your menu and ask questions directly from that public waitlist page.
When enabled, a simple message and link will appear above their wait time information. Clicking this link opens a chat with an AI Assistant capable of answering questions about your menu and business in real time. You can find more details and an overview video here of how the Perklist AI Assistant works.
Setting up the AI Assistant involves providing it with your menu and other relevant details, a process that generally takes a few minutes. There are also options to customize the text of the message and link shown on your public waitlist page. Additionally, you can choose whether customers see only the AI Assistant chat or both your menu and the chat window when they click the link.
Perklist is a service developed by Waitlist Me, aimed at helping businesses improve their digital interaction with customers, and includes features beyond just the AI Assistant.
Waitlist Me makes it simple to know the best place to seat your next customer. Our unique approach to section management blends psychology, data science, and cutting-edge design principles to create an intuitive tool that restaurant staff can pick up in a few minutes and enjoy using. See how it works in this video:
The old way of scribbling on a laminated floor plan with a grease pen is messy and inefficient. It’s hard to estimate wait times and optimize table assignments without seeing key information like how long tables have been occupied.
Most apps that try to use data to improve on the grease pen approach make the mistake of clinging to the old-fashioned floor map diagram, which is deceptively complex. Why? Searching the whole map for the information you need is slow. Comparing different clusters of shapes, colors, and symbols is complicated. And interpreting a bunch of unordered data, like little progress bars, spread across all the tables, is very difficult. To name a few reasons.
All this extra complexity is unnecessary. Wait staff shouldn’t need a map to find tables after a couple days on the job. What they need is a fair, easy, intuitive way to know where to seat the next customer.
Look how much simpler it is when you group tables into a framework where the data can work for you, and you can read key information naturally like a book, in ordered lines, from top to bottom and left to right.
Tables are grouped by sections, and sorted by availability to make comparisons and decisions simple. The open tables for each section stand out in green on the left. Tables that have been occupied the longest show first, with the time displayed in the lower left. So it is easy to do a quick scan within a section to see how busy it is, as well as compare across sections.
Tapping on a table will bring up an action bar for adding customers to tables, clearing tables when done, changing table statuses, and more. This page has a good overview and video of the other table management features.
If you organize your tables and sections differently by day or time, Waitlist Me also gives you the flexibility to switch between different layouts. For example, you might divide tables into 6 sections for a busy weekend night, but only need 3 for a regular weekday night. By tapping on the Layouts link in the top right, you can choose from among your saved layouts and regroup your tables and sections on the fly.
Creating and editing sections layouts can be done in the app settings under Manage Assignments. There you can also choose to have different colors represent different sections or special tables within a section or layout as well.
With Waitlist Me’s table management features, your customers will get better service, with less waiting. Your employees will get their fair share of the work, and the tips. And you’ll have a more efficient restaurant, and a more profitable business.
Stop struggling with floor maps. Take control of your tables, and your business, with Waitlist Me.
Sometimes if you press the notification button to send a text message to a customer and don’t see them right away, you may press the notification button again to trigger an automated call notification. Premium subscribers have a list of several pre-recorded messages to choose from. Pro subscribers have all these options, and now have an additional option to type in their own message and have it played using text-to-speech. This provides more flexibility for what you may want to tell your customers when you notify them.
Changing these settings can be done on the Waitlist Me website, under Account > Settings > Notifications. Here you can select one of the pre-recorded messages, or create your own by flipping the switch to On under Custom Phone Notification. Use up to 160 characters to craft a message that fits your business, pick a voice option, and save! Now your customers will hear this message when they receive a notification call.
Waitlist Me assigns a unique phone number to your account for sending text and call notifications. If customers try to call back, they will hear a message instructing them to call the business directly. This message can also be tailored to reflect your needs. Simply type in the message you would like clients to hear, decide on a voice, and save your work.
