Aromatherapy facials, deep tissue massages, seaweed body wraps—all things R&R are on our radar this summer.

While your guests sip champagne and slip into jacuzzi tubs, we’re setting aside our cucumber slices. Why? Because dare-to-bare beach season is here! We’re revving up our waitlist and management app to help you handle the hustle and bustle of weekend trips, girls’ getaways, and long afternoons of head-to-toe pampering.

Here’s how Waitlist Me can help spas and salons crank up their customer service.

Balance walk-ins and reservations

There’s no need to fuss over the different types of clients you serve! Waitlist Me lets you handle them all with ease—and see where you can squeeze in a walk-in among a slew of reservations.

Keep tabs on multiple locations

Waitlist Me ensures that owners and managers of multiple locations don’t have to twiddle their thumbs wondering how business is going or tie up the phone lines. Our Multi-Location Management lets them check in 24/7/365 from wherever they are.

Let guests check themselves in

A line at your check-in desk can turn customers off. With Waitlist Me, though, you can quickly set up a Self Check-In Kiosk where guests can DIY instead of stand in line (and get to the R&R part of the visit way faster).

Offer accurate wait times

No more hazy estimates about how long it’ll take to finish up those French tips. Tracking actual waits next to estimates helps your staff learn to quote waits more accurately and know when things are running behind.

Ensure that every front desk attendant is in the loop

Forget about sharing a single reservation book with three hosts! Multi-Device Sync lets you put Waitlist Me on as many devices as you want, letting you ramp up staffing (and dial it down) whenever you need to.

Check availability at-a-glance

Waitlist Me is designed to be intuitive to use. That means your front-of-house staff can spend more time on customer service and less time scrolling through a zillion complicated screens.

Enable guests to wander while they wait

When a customer reaches the front of the line (or their masseuse becomes available), Waitlist Me lets you text them for free to let them know. And if they’re a few minutes away? No sweat. They can text back (and never have to worry about losing their spot).

Allow customers to make appointments on the fly

A spontaneous pedi? Why not! Our Add Yourself Web Widget is a second-tier feature that lets guests add themselves to your waitlist from wherever they are, no phone call necessary.

Offer a public waitlist

With Waitlist Me, there’s no need for toe-tapping impatience. Pop the public waitlist feature on a monitor or TV screen in your lobby, and guests can see for themselves where they are in line.

Track your ROI on-demand

Our app’s Pro-level analytics run in the background 24/7, making it easy to spot trends in the popularity of your services or employees.

The last thing all of us at Waitlist Me expected to see on the evening news was Build-A-Bear. But alas, there they were, stuffing and all.

No need to check your calendar, folks. It’s not Black Friday—phew!—and it’s not International BYOB Day (that’s “build your own bear” for the uninitiated). Nope, it was the day Build-A-Bear launched a one-day-only offer that backfired spectacularly…and resulted in lines that wound through shopping mall corridors and wrapped around city blocks. You don’t need to see the video footage to know what happened next: fury, frustration, and injuries.

We know your customers come first, and you don’t want to see anybody angry, aggravated, or harmed on your watch. We’re with you. All of us at Waitlist Me hope that every last Build-A-Bear customer is doing OK.

Situations like this are why crowd control is essential. And that, my friends, is where Waitlist Me comes in.

Waitlist Me is a waitlist and reservation app that any small business can use

That’s right, waitlists aren’t just for restaurants anymore. Our customers include everyone from department stores and big box chains to salons, doctor’s offices, and gyms. If you have guests that need to wait for something, you have a reason to give Waitlist Me a try.

We’re not exaggerating when we tell you that Waitlist Me can save your business’ hide on a busy day—and its reputation. Nothing kills foot traffic like a 1-star Google review, a nasty comment on Yelp, or making the local news for all the wrong reasons.

12 ways Waitlist Me can save your day

Whether you manage a store that’s part of a national chain or you’re a business owner with a brick-and-mortar that’s all your own, our waitlist app can be the hero you never thought you’d need. Maybe you’re running an end-of-the-season sale, or maybe’s it’s just a regular ol’ Wednesday night when your biz takes a turn. Whenever you need us, Waitlist Me is here to help.

Here are 12 ways we’ve already helped small businesses manage long lines and crazy crowds:

–   Manage a rush of sick patients during summer cold season at an urgent care facility

–   Ensure every prom-goer gets a makeover at a beauty bar

–   Keep track of who’s in line for bling next during jewelry store holiday sales

–   Give employees the time they need to train customers on safe firework handling before the 4^th of July

–   Text footy fans when their table is ready at a sports bar during the World Cup

–   Shorten changing room lines by letting customers shop while they wait during a blow-out sale

–   Juggle street traffic and phone orders during the lunchtime rush at a downtown deli

–   Manage meeting times during marketplace shows and expos at a convention center

–   Allow eager diners to wander while they wait for a table at a surprise pop-up dinner

–   Keep track of first-come, first-serve customers during a door-buster day at a department store

–   Take same-day reservations at a family photography studio

–   Book tours and activities from a boardwalk over a long weekend

Taking advantage of new technologies can have a big impact on your bottom line. Here are a few pro tips:

Crush Your Rush

No one likes to wait, but when things get busy you can reduce walkaways by improving your customers’ wait experience. Waitlist Me is an app that helps you provide better wait estimates and send customers text notifications when their tables are ready. You can even display a dynamic view of the waitlist for customers to check on a digital sign or TV with solutions like Enplug and BrightSign.

Leverage the Cloud

As the quality, price, and usability of hosted technology have improved dramatically in recent years, businesses are dumping old hardware for cloud-centric solutions. Clover is a new all-in-one POS system with an elegant design that replaces the cash register, payment terminal, receipt printer, and barcode scanner and has an app market for easily customizing features. Another example, Switch, is a cloud-based business phone system you can set up and customize in minutes, and
provides the type of features you’d want from a PBX at a fraction of the price.

Work Digitally Like a Pro

Just as email revolutionized regular mail for many of our communications, there are now more online documents, apps, and tools that can improve your business productivity. Google for Work is a powerful set of apps that let you communicate, create, share and collaborate, from any device with ease. Evernote is a popular consumer app that has recently added more team and admin features to help businesses manage digital workspaces. Finally, UberConference is a simple way to make unlimited conference for free from a computer or a phone.

Muslims around the world are entering Ramadan, the holiest time in the Islamic calendar. No matter what type of business you run—a big-box retailer or boutique, a restaurant or bar, a gym or studio, a salon, a spa, or a resort— you may see changes in your business traffic during this time.  Here are some tips for using Waitlist Me to improve customer service during the month of Ramadan.

Take walk-ins and reservations

Ramadan observants fast during daylight hours, but once the sun sets, they’re all about big family dinners packed with delicacies. If you run a restaurant that doesn’t usually take reservations, Waitlist Me makes it easy to start—or to take them when you need them, like when a large party is ready to dig in.

Bonus! Our Free-level version lets you take same-day reservations, and our Premium-level app offers more robust reservation features, like a calendar view and a web widget.

Use waitlists to accommodate every client, every time

From haircuts to yoga classes, urgent care visits to mani-pedis, if your business is in a Muslim community, you’ll probably see more foot traffic after dinner. Waitlists can help you keep up with the changing traffic patterns and ensure that you keep all of your customers happy, day-in and day-out.

Bonus! The Premium-level Add Yourself Web Widget lets customers join a waitlist for a particular service or piece of equipment from wherever they are, whether that’s the office, a restaurant, or the next block over.

Post special offers, events, and changes to your hours where everyone can see them

Whether you’re offering celebratory 2-for-1 appetizers or are starting trivia a little later this month to accommodate your Muslim guests’ daylight restrictions, Waitlist Me’s public waitlist view lets you keep all your guests in the know on how busy you are.

Bonus! With Waitlist Me Pro, your public waitlist is completely customizable. Add your brand colors, your logo, even a silly video. It’s up to you!

Manage multiple locations from one account

There’s no need to sign in and out of different accounts, or to check up with your store managers to ensure they’re on the ball. Our Multi-Location Management feature lets you make whatever changes you want to your public waitlist, feedback surveys, and business hours.

Bonus! Curious to see if your changes are making an impact? Multi-Location Management lets you see how your businesses are fairing in real time and check each location’s traffic analytics.

Get feedback in a snap

Are your customers loving your changes? Is there something you could be doing better? Waitlist Me Pro lets you send a link straight to your guests’ smartphones after their visits so they can leave a rating and tell you how much you rock (and what you can do better in the future).

Looking for an easier way to take reservations?  Waitlist Me has a new feature for customers to schedule reservations (or appointments) from your website, and it as easy as adding a link or line of code to set up.

You don’t need to set up any complicated rules for how many reservations are available at what times, as reservation requests will come to you for quick approvals within the Waitlist Me app.  You’ll receive a notification alert so you know when to check, and reservation requests will be highlighted at the top of your main waitlist page as well as on the daily reservation views.

When you approve a request in the app, the customer automatically gets a confirmation text with their time, and the request becomes a confirmed reservation and appears in the reservations area of Waitlist Me.  If you decline it, the customer receives a text notifying them that it could not be scheduled.

The new remote reservation feature builds on the previous remote adding functionality for waitlists, so now businesses can choose between options of allowing customers to add themselves to the waitlist, schedule reservations, or both.

To enable the feature, log into Waitlist Me, go to the Settings area, and then choose to customize the Public Waitlist Page.  From there you can turn on remote reservations and customize things like the information you require from customers, whether you’d like to skip the approval step to have them automatically scheduled, and more.

Here is how the Settings look:

The Public Waitlist is one are where customers can see the Make Reservation option.

And when they press on that it will allow them to enter their info and requested reservation time.

Another option is to use the Widget on your own website.  Here is an example of how that looks and you can customize the look and feel of the web widget in the Waitlist Me settings.