Friday, January 13th, 2017 .

Start the New Year with a new way to manage appointments

appointment-calendarIn 2017, don’t get another paper appointment book. Waitlist Me’s appointment management options can help you manage your time and customers better than pen and paper ever could. Whether it’s a salon, barber shop, or similar business, you can leave your scheduling nightmares behind and make managing appointments simple. With a quick set up and easy to learn interface, we can help you start the new year on the right foot.

When the phone rings, instead having to look everywhere in an appointment book, Waitlist Me lets you see your availability at a glance in an intuitive digital calendar. Monthly and weekly views show counts of your scheduled customers so it is easy to see the big picture on when you have availability. Then in the daily view you can see appointments broken out by time and stylist. When scheduling appointments for a team of employees, simply check one screen to see who has an opening. You can easily find the best appointment times for your clients and send them text confirmations and reminders.

When a potential client walks in without an appointment, you don’t need to scramble to figure out if you can fit them in. Quickly see your availability for that day and give them an accurate estimate of how long it would be until you can help them.  You can even give them the freedom to walk around while they wait and text them when you are ready for them. Waitlist Me will help you improve your guest’s experience and make smarter business decisions faster.

Another great benefit of going digital with Waitlist Me is the flexibility to check your appointment calendar from any computer, tablet, or smartphone. So if a valued client calls when you aren’t at the salon and asks when you can squeeze them in, you don’t need to head back to look at your appointment book.  Or if one of your stylists calls in sick on your day off, you can do all the rescheduling from home. With Waitlist Me, you won’t have to worry anymore about carrying around your appointment book, driving back to the salon, or even worse, losing your appointment book. Try it out for free today.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Monday, February 7th, 2022 .

Search Feature Now Available for Reservations

In addition to robust waitlist features, Waitlist Me offers scheduling features for reservations and appointments. View and manage your schedule anywhere from the Apple or Android app, or by logging into the website.

Making changes to future reservations is even easier with our new search feature. Now if a customer contacts you to change their reservation, you can simply search by their name, phone number or email address. This option is available on all platforms by using the search icon on the main reservations page. From the search results, press on the customer’s row to open the desired booking and make any changes needed.

A toggle switch at the top of the page will also allow you to simply search for a specific customer, whether or not they have an upcoming reservation. You can use this to see past visits and upcoming reservations as well as to edit the customer’s information. For example, if the customer’s name was spelled incorrectly or if they changed their phone number, you could update those details. When you use the auto-remember names feature, that customer’s information (name/email/phone number) will populate as you are creating bookings. That feature can be found in the app settings under Customization > Adding Customers.

To view other recent reservation enhancements, check out this page on new sorting options available and this page on email confirmations.

Friday, August 26th, 2016 .

50 Free Apps for Restaurant Operators

You know there are ways you could be using technology more in your restaurant business, but with millions of apps to choose from, how do you know where to start?  Well now there is a comprehensive new resource on the top free apps from the people at Orderly.  They definitely know their stuff when it comes to restaurant technology and have their own free Snap App for paperless invoicing that lets you capture, manage, and share invoices online.

The ultimate list of 50 Free Apps for Restaurants has a lot of great ideas for making managing your restaurant easier. These free apps will help you talk to your customers, organize your to-do list, hire the right people, speed up your processes, and market your business. You’ll find descriptions, features and benefits for your restaurant under each listing and links to download the apps for free.

Orderly_eBook_50-Apps_Cover

 

They are also divided up into categories to help you focus on specific areas of your business that you might want to improve.  The categories are:

  • Top 10 Must Have Apps (Waitlist Me is one of these!)
  • Best 12 Apps for Restaurant Organization & Productivity
  • 6 Apps for Phenomenal Customer Service
  • 9 Apps to make restaurant marketing 10X Easier
  • 6 Must-Have Apps for Recipe Planning & Organization
  • 7 Apps for No-Hassle Stock Photos, Images and Design

 

Check out the report.  You’ll be glad you did.

Thursday, May 10th, 2018 .

Whether it is Mother’s Day or Mothering Sunday, Waitlist Me is helping with waits everywhere.

Mother’s Day is coming up this weekend in the US, so it is a great time for restaurants to use Waitlist Me to manage the surge in families hoping to treat mom to a special meal.  With the recent launch of Waitlist Me in over 60 countries, it is now being used for different holidays at different times.

Interestingly, over 150 countries that celebrate Mother’s Day and the holiday has the deepest roots in the UK, where it is called Mothering Sunday.  Since the 1500s, young apprentices and domestics would walk home on Mothering Sunday, carrying special cakes and picking wildflowers for their mums before going to church.  This year people in the UK already celebrated Mothering Sunday on March 11, and here are some of the ways Waitlist Me is helping businesses in the UK.

Let patrons relax rather than queue

Brits may take pride in their queueing capabilities, but that doesn’t mean they enjoy waiting in queues, especially on holiday outings. Waitlist Me takes the queue out of the equation. Whether customers make a reservation or walk in on the big day, they can drop their name at your hostess stand and get back to enjoying time with their loved ones without fretting about losing their place.

Bonus! One of Waitlist Me’s core features is the public queue list, which lets your guests see for themselves exactly where they are in the queue and how much more time they have kill before it’s brunch time. You can set it up to display on a monitor or telly in your vestibule.

Easily accommodate walk-ins and reservations

Every holiday has its planners and its skivers. Waitlist Me makes it easy to welcome everyone without any fuss or frustration. The app integrates a standard queue with made-in-advance reservations, all on the same screen. There’s no need to panic over squeezing somebody in, and your guests will never see your hosts sweat. Plus you can toss your grease pens, sticky notes, and messy reservation books in the bin. Ta, clutter!

Bonus! Waitlist Me is all about making work easy for you and your staff. The app’s interface was designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. That makes training time minimal for your hosts and helps them stay calm and professional during busy periods.

Set your queuers free

If your restaurant is in an area stuffed with shops or historic landmarks, giving customers the option to wander while they wait is a happy surprise. In the UK, Waitlist Me text notifications are completely optional. It’s a feature that lets you—or your guests—decide when to use it. An example: When you add a customer to your queue, you can let them know they can wait in your lobby or you can text them when their table is ready if they’d prefer to walk around.

Bonus! International text notifications are offered as a prepaid, pay-as-you-go system. Sending a text is as easy as tapping a button on the app, but it’s always your choice to send. Or not—whatever works best for your restaurant.

Impress customers with accurate wait estimates

Sure, your guests might not tell you they’re annoyed by a long queue or a poorly judged queue time, but one bad experience waiting for their turn can keep them from coming back. Waitlist Me shows average wait stats and real time waits next to quoted times, so it is easy for your staff to give more accurate estimates and make guests happier.

Bonus! Waitlist Me’s public waitlist feature makes it easy for guests to check their place in line from their phone, so they worry less about how much longer they must wait.  It also cuts down on repeated questions to your hostess on the remaining wait.

Remember special requests

Birthdays or anniversaries? Food allergies? A highchair? Wheelchair accommodation? A preference for patio seating? Waitlist Me offers a simple Notes feature to help you, your hosts, and your servers keep track of whatever it is your customers want and need to make their meals enjoyable. Input these details when they walk through your door, and you’re set.

Bonus! Waitlist Me offers real-time sync across multiple iOS, Android, and web-enabled devices. That means everyone on your front-of-house staff and your management team can be clued in 24/7.