While fine dining might grab more press and shinier awards, fast casual is the largest growing restaurant sector around the world—and has been since 2015.

The name of the game isn’t just speed or price; if it was, fast food will still be earning top honors. Nope, fast casual continues to soar because it offers a superior customer experience. It’s all about serving great food to busy people on a budget.

Sounds good, right? Well, there’s one way to make it even better—and to ensure that your fast casual restaurant scores top marks on review sites like Yelp: make your guests’ dining experience more convenient.

Here are three ways to increase convenience at your fast casual restaurant starting right now.

#1. Go for mobile notifications

Waiting to pick up your meal at a counter is one of the few downsides to fast casual. Even worse? Perching on the edge of your seat trying to figure out if your name has been called. Hello, anxiety!

With a waitlist app like Waitlist Me, you can now text your guests when their meal is ready for pick-up. That means they can sit down and relax while they wait to nosh. It’ll cut down on noise in your restaurant and decrease customer stress (and the amount of food growing cold on the counter). No more crowding impatiently around the counter? That’s a win in our book!

#2. Take your waitlist online

Sure, the food might be worth the wait, but a wait isn’t what fast casual diners are looking for (see the “fast” in “fast casual”). From breakfast to lunch and dinner through late-night, nobody’s looking to stand around and watch other people scarf down goodies. That’s where an online waitlist comes in handy.

Waitlist Me offers a widget you can easily add to your restaurant’s website. Once it’s there, diners can hop on-line digitally, and walk through your door at just the right time. Bonus? Use our option to let customers join your list straight from their Google search, no website updates required.   

#3. Offer easy take-out and delivery options

Not every diner wants to park it in-house. And you know what? That’s just fine for your bottom line. An emptier restaurant gives newcomers the idea that you’re ready and waiting to serve them without requiring you to sacrifice orders. In their mind, they’ve arrived ahead of the crowd. In yours, you’re still busy fulfilling orders without needing the tables and chairs to accommodate them.

Make this a reality by setting your fast casual restaurant up online for easy take-out ordering. If your area offers delivery options—think: Postmates, UberEats, Seamless, or Grubhub—create special pick-up zone for delivery drivers. That way, they can get in and get out, and your diners can enjoy hot, fresh food from the comfort of their own home.

Remember, every time you make a change, you need to let your customers know! Add it to your website, have employees mention it when guests order, and post it around your restaurant.  

Our favorite way to ensure diners are in the know 24/7 is to post updates on an in-restaurant monitor, along with your waitlist. Waitlist Me Pro lets you do this easily, and there are no limits to what you include! Whether you’re celebrating your 1,000^th 5-star rating, are offering a limited-time special, or you’re launching a loyalty program, anything goes. (Hint: funny cat videos work, too.)

We are happy to announce that our iOS and Android apps are now fully localized in Spanish for customers with plans in over 20 countries where Spanish is the local language.  Now it is even easier for businesses and their employees in Spanish-speaking countries to manage their waitlist and reservations with Waitlist Me.

This added localization follows our international launch in December where we started with the translation of all the customer facing parts of the Waitlist Me service in 30 languages, and we will be translating more parts of our websites into Spanish in the upcoming weeks.

We started with Spanish for a number of reasons, and while doing this initial localization of our service into a foreign language we have put into place a framework for flexibly managing updates to the translations and for plugging in additional languages in the future.

Building on our launch of table section management features a few months ago, we have added some new features to make it even easier to know where to seat the next customer.  Labeled mode displays valuable activity metrics, section notes help you track servers covering each section, and additional waitlist integration makes it faster to do more from the table management screen.  Here is a video that highlights some of these new features and shows more on how to set up your section and layout management strategies:

Labeled mode

In “Labeled” mode, you’ll also see additional details about each section.  The “Open” metric shows the number of available tables as well as the total available seats at those tables.  The “Filled” metric shows the percentage of seats occupied in a section along with the counts of the occupied and total seats.  These key stats help make smarter decisions faster.  For instance, when a group comes in that’s too big for one table, you can instantly see which sections have enough empty tables, with enough empty seats, to accommodate them.  And you can also see how many of the seats in each section are filled, and ensure that each server gets their fair share of the work, not just their fair share of the tables.  These metrics are also visible in the “Size” and “Status” sorts for seeing breakdowns of availability by table size or overall status.

Section Notes

You can add comments to each section—for instance, to identify who’s working where, or to leave a reminder about a special event.  Just tap “Add Notes,” fill in your remarks, and then tap “Save.”  Instead of having to set up complicated server scheduling or other section tracking processes, the notes feature lets you make updates faster and more naturally.  It’s as easy as the common practice of writing server names on a laminated floor plan, but with all the advantages that our app has to offer for seeing real-time data, easily knowing where to seat the next customer, syncing information across devices, and more.

More Waitlist Integration

If you like working within the table management view of the app, it is nice to be able to assign customers from the waitlist, notify them their table is ready, and seat them at the table without having to switch back to the waitlist view.  Now you can.

From the action bar, when you tap on add, you can choose someone who’s already on your waiting list, and serve them at that table, right now.  If the table is already occupied, this removes the old party from the waitlist, and seats the new one, with one tap.

Or, if you’re not ready to seat them yet, you can just “assign” them to use that table next.  If the new customer has stepped away, you can even make the assignment and also send them an SMS text message, asking them to come back.  When they’re ready to take their seats, just tap on the table, and then tap “Next.”

You can also add a new customer by tapping a table.  Just fill in their name, phone number, and other details.  The table has already been selected, so you can go ahead and seat the customer right now, or add them to your waitlist, or even make a reservation, all in one place.

Quick Seating

When you aren’t crowded you probably seat customers at tables without taking their name.  You can still track that the table is occupied and for how long by using the status button in the action bar.  This makes it easy to keep track of your availability without having to create a customer for each table.  You may want to start tracking your table availability at a certain time, like before it gets busy, and you can mark all your tables that are currently occupied all at once.  Just press and hold on one table to use the multi-select feature, then tap on all the tables that are occupied, and then tap the status button to make them occupied.

The move-in rush. The “can we meet for 5 minutes to sort out my schedule?” emails. The all-at-once campus crush as students, faculty, and staff jockey for rooms and resources. There’s nothing like back-to-school season on a college campus. This year, give your “welcome back” spiel with a hearty dose of “we got this!” and then take a well-earned breather. When you tap a waitlist management app like Waitlist Me, you’ve got this back-to-school thing completely under control.

Not sure how to put a waitlist to work at your college or university? Here’s how schools are already using Waitlist Me:

Schedule counseling appointments with academic advisors

With the first day of classes coming up quick, every student’s scheduling concern is a top priority. Add on a new class of freshmen who are just settling in, and you’ve got a slew of counselors who need a better way to manage the onslaught of appointment requests. Waitlist Me keeps every appointment in one place and lets anyone (a receptionist, a student, the counselor in question) book time from wherever they are (a coffeeshop, an office, a dorm room at 2 a.m.). That means no email back-and-forth and no begging for a drop slip while you’re in the lunch line. Win-win, right?

Manage professors’ departmental office hours

Office hours from 3 to 5 p.m. on Mondays and Thursdays sounds great—until you pop by the office in question and realize you’re one of 50 students who had the same brilliant idea. Waitlist Me eases the line, allowing students the opportunity to get the help they need on classwork without spending their entire afternoon holed up in a hallway. The public waitlist feature lets them check on their spot in line and allows professors to shoot them a text when it’s their turn, ensuring that appointments aren’t forgotten and nobody’s time is wasted.

Divvy up access to student activity areas

There’s nothing relaxing about a game of ping-pong when there are two other groups of potential players tapping their paddles just a few feet away, waiting for you and your friends to hurry up, already, geez. Instead of calling dibs on the next game and then defending marked territory, a waitlist system lets everyone enjoy their free time—and know exactly when it’s their turn to crush their roommates at pong or pool or whatever it is the kids are playing these days.

Book writing centers, computer labs, and other resources on the fly

You’re continually striving to give your students and your teachers the best resources money can buy. Now, give them a chance to use them to fullest. Waitlist Me lets your entire school community see if there is a wait for popular resources and how many people are waiting.  The add yourself features let them join the waitlist instantly, no matter where they are or what sort of resources they need to utilize. Leaving their dorm rooms for the library? Easy. Making plans to meet up with a group in the middle of the quad? Consider it done. Checking to see when they can meet with a writing fellow? Not a problem.

Streamline student appointments in financial aid and administrative offices

Students struggling with intricate administrative problems aren’t one-time, five-minute stop-ins; they’re repeat visitors who are frustrated that they’re back in your office again. Waitlist Me lets your admin staff keep tabs on on-going issues with a notes feature built right into the app. Before a student walks into for a meeting, you’ll know immediately what it is your team has already tackled and what’s left to fix, freeing you up to address the problem rather than rehash it.

At Waitlist Me, we focus on helping businesses transition away from pen and paper or overly complex services. Making waiting less painful is a win for both the guests and the staff. Of course, waitlist management is only one way to streamline operations and work smarter, not harder. In this article from Dumpsters.com, check out a few more resources that show how to use technology to improve the guest experience.