We are excited to announce a new POS integration for our popular wait list app that will allow restaurant operators to better manage their guest experience. Working with Clover, an all-in-one POS solution with an open platform, NoshList is one of the first apps available on the Clover app marketplace. NoshList is exhibiting with Clover and First Data at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in booth #80203. CES takes place Jan. 7-10 in Las Vegas.

“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to show off NoshList with Clover at CES,” said NoshList CEO, Craig Walker. “It makes sense to tie the POS and wait list management pieces together and we love how Clover’s open-platform makes it possible to improve the guest experience in completely new ways. We are already working on a number of new features that would only be possible through their platform.”

The NoshList app on Clover makes it simple for any restaurant owner, operator or general manager to manage their wait list and POS all from one place. The app makes getting started with NoshList a snap, and will automatically pull the merchant’s information into NoshList when signing up. More features using other integration touch points are coming soon.

“NoshList adds tremendous value to our restaurant customers,” said Mark Schulze, vice president of Business Development at Clover Network Inc. “By replacing buzzers and shouting with text messages, our customers can not only give better service to their diners, but also get valuable data about frequent diners and past visits.”

As the United States enters its second year living through the coronavirus pandemic, we’re all beginning to reach our limit. Individuals—including you, your customers, and your employees—are battling monumental levels of stress and burn-out, while businesses are still facing sink-or-swim moments.

An essential element of keeping our heads above water while the COVID-19 vaccines are distributed and herd immunity is achieved is finding ways to balance safety and living our lives. As a restaurant owner, you can help folks in your community reclaim parts of their normal, pre-COVID lives while being safety conscious.

Here are some ways to encourage customers to return for happy hour, date night, brunch, and beyond.

Make your safety protocols easy to access

Uncertainty around your safety protocols can influence concerned customers to stay home instead of visiting your restaurant, even if it’s just for take-out. 

Waitlist Me makes it easy to communicate important information to your customers via text message. Once they join your waitlist or make an appointment, you can remind them to mask-up, let them know where they can wait safely, inform them of food pick-up procedures, and more! Our public waitlist feature and add yourself features are also customizable.

Because we understand that your business needs can change, we make it easy to update your messaging. Whether it’s a dish-of-the-day or a new safety notice, you can tweak your text messages and your public waitlist quickly from the Waitlist Me settings.

Note: Remember to make your protocols (and everything else, like your menu and your payment system) easy for everyone to access. Have alternate delivery methods prepared and train your staff on how to use them. This accessibility guide from Toast can help you get started.

Enforce your business’ safety rules consistently

These days, there are few experiences more disheartening than finding a local business with solid COVID-19 safety protocols in place, only to visit in-person and observe that management isn’t enforcing those protocols.

Quality control is essential for small businesses. It’s what transforms your best dishes from one-hit wonders to house favorites. And, during a pandemic, it’s what gives your restaurant a five-star reputation for health and safety, both for your employees and your customers. Communicate your safety measures frequently, and make this communication and enforcement visible and audible to your visitors, too.

Note: Be clear with your management team and your staff about the safety protocols, how you will enforce them with your employees, and what enforcement powers they regarding guests. Spend time on this training. Indignant guests can be intimidating, and your team needs to be able to confidently and calmly diffuse tension while still enforcing the boundaries you’ve set.

Eliminate other sources of stress

Many areas are repeating the pattern of tightening restrictions, watching case levels decline, and reopening, which has guests and employees alike feeling like they can’t control their day-to-day life.

Waitlist Me can help you help them stress just a little bit less. When we first launched, our goal as a waitlist and reservation app was to set customers free from a designated waiting area. Thanks to our text message notifications and publicly visible waitlist, guests can wait where they’re comfortable—and can join your queue from wherever they are via our add yourself web widget.

Many of the features we’ve added over time empower business owners to help their clientele stress even less. Guests can save their place in line by texting your restaurant when they’re running late, and you can reply to them to clarify additional requests. You can also prevent last-minute confusion by providing menus and COVID-related changes on your website, add yourself page, and public waitlist page. 

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.

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.

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 worldwide coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated just how important it is for businesses to manage what we used to consider minor details: the spaces we occupy, the items we touch, and the people we come into contact with.

But for manufacturers, distributors, and logistics professionals, there’s no detail too small to be optimized—and that’s been true for far longer than the modern world has combatted highly contagious illnesses like COVID-19, SARS, or Swine Flu. Since the 1960s, supply chains and production lines around the globe have adopted a leaner operation. It’s called just-in-time manufacturing, or JIT. 

What is JIT?

Just-in-time manufacturing is built on the principles popularized by Toyota’s production processes in Japan. It’s also known as continuous-flow or demand-flow manufacturing.

No matter the name, its goal is the same: JIT seeks to make production more efficient by ensuring that materials and finished products are always in transit rather than sitting around, waiting to be used. This decreases business overhead because goods in this system require less storage space.

It also makes for a smoother production process. Raw materials arrive the moment they are needed. Finished goods are shipped out as soon as they’re completed. There’s no lag time, no costly delays, and no square footage going to waste.

How to use just-in-time principles to fight COVID-19 (and improve your customer’s waiting experience)

Other businesses, from retail stores to restaurants, doctor’s offices to mechanic shops can put the principles that power JIT to work for both their bottom line and the overall safety and satisfaction of their customers. Watilist Me is a simple tool to make some of these concepts easy to implement.

Here are five ways your business can use Waitlist Me today to smooth out the kinks in your waiting process:

1. Let customers wait elsewhere. Waitlist Me makes it simple to text customers when ready for them and see their replies. That means you customers don’t need to be crowded in a waiting area. They can wait in their car or somewhere nearby. 
2. Keep queuers in the know. Our public waitlist feature lets your customers check their spot in line from their smartphone. With just a few taps, they can see their ETA and plan their arrival at your business just in time to be served.
3. Add guests on the go. With the add-yourself web widget, individuals can hop on your waitlist from wherever they are, whether that’s home, in transit, or in the car in your parking lot.
4. Educate customers on pick-up policies. When you add someone to your queue, Waitlist Me can send an automatic text confirmation. You can customize the information in this text to include coronavirus-specific instructions, like how to facilitate your no-contact pick-up service.
5. Confirm details using two-way texting. Waitlist Me Pro and Platinum allow businesses to send custom text responses to their customers. You can use this feature to clarify orders, pick-up instructions, or any other questions guests may have.