Peanuts and Crackerjacks are just scratching the savory surface of food and beverage offerings available at ballparks this summer.

With everything from craft beer and swanky cocktail bars to gourmet hot dogs and full-service restaurants, baseball stadiums are redefining what it means to take in a ballgame with family and friends. Fans don’t have to splurge on box seats for a VIP experience—and with Waitlist Me on tap at your hostess stand, you can treat every guest to a top-notch experience, guaranteed.

Here’s how a waitlist and reservation app can help you hit this summer out of the park.

Let customers shop, wander, and snap selfies while they wait

Your diners have better things to do than to tap their toes outside your restaurant or give your host the ol’ stink-eye. With our signature Text Notification feature, Waitlist Me sets them free. They can stroll through the concourse, take pictures with players, try on new snap-backs—it’s all fair game. When they hit the top of your list, you can let them know with the push of a button. How’s that for easy?

Attract new diners despite long lines

Because our app lets you alert guests by text when it’s their turn to take a seat, there’s no reason for them to cool their heels in the 10 feet waiting area surrounding your restaurant’s entrance. While your waitlist grows, the line outside your door doesn’t have to. That means new customers can hop on your list without being deterred by other diners.

Allow guests to hop in line from their seats

Whether their stomachs are growling before the first pitch or they get the munchies at the bottom of the fifth, Waitlist Me’s Add Yourself feature lets diners join your waitlist from wherever they are, whenever they want. Thanks to our app, there’s no need to for customers to beat the crowd. They can eat on their own time, without missing a single play.

Ditch constant ETA questions

When’s the table going to be ready? Is it our turn yet? Where are we on the list? We don’t have to ask if you’re tired of these questions. We know you were done with ‘em a couple seasons ago! That’s why we built a Public Waitlist feature—so that guests can check their spot in line straight from their smartphones or from a handy monitor or TV display you can set up in a snap. Phew!

Eliminate clutter and confusion at your hostess stand

Trash your mess of sticky notes and dog-eared memo books and say buh-bye to the grease pen. Waitlist Me is an intuitive, easy-to-use solution to losing reservations and keeping track of your waitlisted parties. Our app is designed to give your front-of-house staff the information and tools they need to manage your guests’ dining experience with just one glance.

We are here at the National Restaurant Association Show, and what better timing than to hit our one millionth diner seated using the NoshList free waitlist app for iPad that notifies diners via text messaging that their tables are ready. NoshList helps restaurants easily and efficiently manage their waitlist and improves the dining experience by replacing paper lists, microphones and alert buzzers with text messages sent directly to the diner’s cell phone.

“We are thrilled to celebrate our millionth diner seated using NoshList. We are extremely happy with the high rate of adoption by restaurants since our launch a little over two months ago and seating over one million diners in that short time has exceeded our wildest expectations,” said Craig Walker, CEO and founder of Firespotter Labs. “Diners want an easy, convenient way to know when their table is ready and restaurants need an efficient solution that improves the experience for their customer. That is what NoshList delivers.”

NoshList launched in February 2012 to restaurants in San Francisco and has since gone nationwide to independent, multi-unit and casual dining restaurants alike.

“NoshList has provided Umami Burger an efficient and streamlined way of managing our waitlist,” said Jason Berkowitz, Vice President of Hospitality at Umami Burger. “Our patrons appreciate the ease of NoshList’s text messaging when their tables are ready and we appreciate the unlimited free texting and phone calls to patrons.”

As the calendars roll over to a shiny new year, your fitness business is approaching wave after wave of busy seasons. With January comes the New Year’s resolution crowd, followed by the spring breakers and the bikini body-seekers. Make sure you have the right tools to optimize your memberships and customer service when things get busy.

Waitlist Me is the app that can help you run your gym or fitness studio better this new year. Its core features are a great place to start—learn more about them here—and here are a few additional benefits of what Waitlist Me Pro has to offer:

Get the most out of your special equipment

Specialized equipment like massage chairs, red light therapy, and tanning areas can be a big investment. Waitlist Me’s resource management feature helps you get a better return on that investment by using it more effectively.  You can set up your equipment, rooms, or special services as resources, and assign customers to those resource.

Our resource management features allow you to easily track what is in use and for how long, so you can give your customers better time estimates for availability and improve your utilization rates.  Combined with our built-in analytics system, you can get a better sense of your usage patterns.  Not sure if you should invest in another purchase? The data the app gathers automatically can help you make decisions based on facts, not guesses.

Maximize your people resources

Experts on your staff, like trainers and massage therapists, are assets you want to make the most of. Chances are you can boost their productivity—and the value they add to your gym’s customer experience—by tweaking their scheduling or the way they interact with your clientele. Waitlist Me helps you do that.

While the regular version of the Waitlist Me app lets you schedule appointments and add customers to the waitlist to meet with different members of your staff, the pro-level follows customer activity once they get off the waitlist. The downloadable reports chart the data over time, and lets you see when you need to increase (or decrease) staffing levels and if a certain specialization or individual is in high demand.

Let customers make appointments and reservations on their own time

A waitlist is all well and good, but what if your customers could go straight from the locker room into a session with a personal trainer? With Waitlist Me Pro’s appointment widget, they can.

The web widget is an easy-to-install addition to your website that lets customers send appointment requests for staff or reservation requests for special equipment or rooms. The widget allows you to set business hours for the appointments—perhaps you only want to take them during typically quiet hours, or maybe you want to use them during peak workout periods. And, unlike old-school reservations that tether an employee to the front-desk phone, Waitlist Me Pro reservations are available online 24/7, freeing up your staff and making life convenient for your clientele.

Promote specials and events

Hosting a competition? Running a sale on merchandise? Running a bring-a-friend special? Let your customers know! Waitlist Me Pro’s customizable public waitlist feature lets you display custom messages and promotions when they check their place in line.  You can bring your branding to your waitlist and include graphics, coupons, discount codes, announcements, videos—just about anything you can think of.

NoshList continues to be used by more industries beyond restaurants. From urgent care centers to educational businesses and bowling alleys, the wait list app is forever changing how businesses interact with their customers. To make the experience even better, WaitList has just released a number of new features for customizing the waitlist and notifications process.

Customized Waitlist View

Many places serve individual customers rather than large groups or parties, so we have included an option in the settings that will simplify the waitlist view and flow for adding customers to not show party size. Similarly, many places will assign customers to a person or something that isn’t numerical like a table number, so we have made it easier to add and display longer descriptions. For example, a salon can assign customers to the name of a salonist rather than a number. There is more space in the waitlist view to display names and you can enter all the people or resource names you want to assign customers to in the “Manage Assignments” part of the settings. We still have the old view for any restaurants or places that track group sizes, and you can change this in the “Customize Waitlist” part of the settings. You can also change the display of the “Reservations” section if your business makes appointments rather than reservations.

Example of waitlist for individuals, with no parties column and more room for assignments:

Example of waitlist for parties, with group size column:

Customized Notifications

We have had the ability to customize text and phone notifications from the NoshList website, and now we have also added that to the settings in apps. Just go into the Settings and choose the “Manage Notifications” option.

View for customizing text notifications:

View for customizing phone call notifications:

Simpler Waitlist

Instead of having separate buttons to seat and remove customers, we have combined these into a single check button for checking people off the list. When pressing on that you can choose to “Check off” the people that have been seated or served or you can choose to “Delete” them if they canceled or walked away before it was their turn. To make the waitlist history easier to find, we have changed the toggle for displaying history to appear below the waitlist, where the history will actually appear rather than in a button in the upper left that was often missed in our user testing.

All of these updates are currently in the latest version of the NoshList Waitlist app and in the online waitlist on www.Waitlist.me and the customizable waitlist is in the Android app. Changing the notifications and the new history view will be coming to Android soon.

If there’s one thing social media has shown us, it’s that skincare, makeup, and hair products aren’t going out of fashion. Everyone wants to look good and feel good in their own skin, and this niche helps them do exactly that.

There’s great news for cosmetics retailers, too. While other industries are beating back e-commerce competition, beauty counters, branded boutiques, and local bath and body shops alike have a major advantage: their customers crave professional advice and want to try before they buy. That advantage keeps shoppers walking through doors rather than logging in online. The best way to keep them coming back, though, is to wow them with stellar customer service.

Want to gain an edge on your local cosmetics store competition? Check out Waitlist Me Pro.

First, let’s talk about waitlists

Waitlists are more common in restaurants than in retail stores, but Waitlist Me is changing that one customer experience at a time.

The thing about waitlists is that they make every situation during which customers might encounter a queue smoother and more positive for everyone involved. Whether they’re in a makeover line or need the help of a sales associate to make a decision about a product, waitlists let stores cut frustration out of the equation (along with the line-cutters that drive customers nuts).

At its most basic level, our app lets businesses add customers to a waitlist and text them when they reach the front of the line. Except with a digital waitlist, there is no line! Guests are free to roam about your store and look at different products they might be interested in, or to walk down the block and return when a sales associate can focus on them one-on-one.

Read more about how cosmetics stores can use waitlists here.

Why Waitlist Me Pro 

Superior customer service is more than a guessing game. To gain insights on how to improve your business, it helps to have data to back up your gut instincts. That’s where Waitlist Me Pro comes in.

The Pro-level app, which is compatible with Apple, Android, and web-based devices, comes with several valuable reports. Just by using the app you’ll be saving information in the background while you and your employees are working. When you’re ready to create new schedules, you can quickly download these reports to see when you need more help and when you can get away with less.

Waitlist Me Pro helps you track your customers from the minute you add them to a waitlist to when they walk out the door. That makes it easy to see where you need to allocate time and resources, and how you can improve your store’s efficiency and productivity.