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.

The hunt for must-have Valentine’s Day gifts is officially on. Whether you manage a big-name retailer or a small business storefront, a waitlist and reservation app is the 10-minute tech upgrade you need to keep your stress levels low and your customers’ shopping experience smooth and enjoyable this February 14^th.  Here’s how busy retail outlets are using  some of our app’s top features as Valentine’s Day approaches.

Text notifications

When you’re dealing with intimate purchases like lacy underthings or personal scents, sales associates and shoppers need privacy, not a looming line of other customers looking for assistance. That’s where a waitlist comes into play.

If individual service is a must, a waitlist is a boon no matter what products fill your shelves. Add text notification, and you’ve got a system that will bring calm to your store’s shopping and sales experience and create the one-on-one atmosphere you’re looking for. It’s an easy, unobtrusive way to let shoppers know when it’s their turn. And with Waitlist Me, they’re simple to set up and use, whether you need them once in a while for holiday rushes or sales, or 24/7 to keep up with your foot traffic.

Perfect for…lingerie stores, perfumeries, large retailers, big-ticket department stores, and other outlets where customers want to browse but also appreciate one-on-one assistance

Customer service

No matter the price tag, you want your customers to feel like friends, not another credit card number.

Say hello to two Waitlist Me features that’ll make your customers feel welcome and remembered: notes and wait time tracking. When you add shoppers to your waitlist, you can add notes, like what they’re wearing, what they look like, and what they’re shopping for. These details let sales associates greet them personally.

Tracking the times that you estimated you’d be ready to help a customer next to their actual waits helps you give accurate quotes.  It can be more frustrating for customers to not know how long the wait will be or have to wait longer than they were told.  Waitlist Me helps you overdeliver on their expectations.

Perfect for…boutiques, designer stores, luxury retailers, and other shops that rely on personalized service and a good rapport between sales associates and shoppers

People management

When you’ve got a mixed crowd of traditional rose-buyers and “I want something a little different” custom arrangements, balance is essential. Waitlist Me can help you achieve it.

The app allows you to add each shopper to a waitlist and note what sort of product the shopper is looking for. As a staff member specializing in each area becomes free, they can take on customers according to the type of bouquet they’re looking to give. Splitting the workload will maximize your resources—and prevent a bottleneck thanks to that one indecisive customer who just isn’t sure what he wants.

Perfect for…candy stores, flower shops, wine stores, and business whose customer base is often split between people who know exactly what they want and those who need more personal attention

Integrated appointments

Got the heart-shaped boxes stacked and ready to go? Filled your refrigerators with flowers by the dozen? Great! Now it’s time to focus on creating a stand-out shopping experience.

To nix a long line and take advantage of lulls, try taking phone orders in addition to walk-ins. Waitlist Me lets you manage advance orders (think of them as reservations with pick-up times) alongside walk-ins, which you can add to a waitlist when business picks up. The app keeps both neatly organized and accessible. That means you can focus on the people you’re serving, not on finding random bits of paper you scribbled an order on three days ago.

Perfect for…chocolatiers, flower shops, and businesses who offer call-in orders for quick pick-up in addition to walk-ins

We are happy to announce some exciting new ways waitlist technology is being used to help restaurant operators better serve their customers.  Through the use of the Waitlist Me API, these new solutions will be on display for the first time during the National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show. The app will be showcased during the show, May 16-19 in Chicago, through partnerships with BrightSign and Clover.

With BrightSign, the global market leader in digital signage players, restaurants can now display a public view of their waitlist on their digital signage so it is easy for customers to check their place in line without needing to bother the hostess. The flexibility of the BrightSign integration lets restaurants fully customize the look and feel of their waitlist so it looks like a natural extension of their menu board or other digital signage.

Restaurants operators can also tailor their customer-facing experience to their brand while using the Waitlist Me apps and service to easily manage their waitlist and page customers with text and call notifications.

It is exciting how well the BrightSign integration empowers restaurants to create displays with designs limited only by their imagination. We are very happy to be working with a company like BrightSign that shares our values of building scalable and reliable solutions that are easy to use and maintain.

Clover is another Waitlist Me partner that will have new things to show off at this year’s NRA Show.  The new Clover Mobile device, announced in April, lets businesses add customers to the waitlist right at the door as well as allowing status updates to be made from other parts of the store or restaurant.

Clover is at the forefront of creating better and more elegant POS hardware and solutions for businesses, and has a robust App Market for third-party developers. Because of the deeper integration Clover allows, Waitlist Me is able to offer more efficient tools for businesses and better experiences for their customers on the Clover platform.

Waitlist Me just recently announced its API earlier this year with Enplug as the first partner, and has several more projects in progress.

We want to help improve wait experiences everywhere, and integrations with companies like BrightSign and Clover highlight the power of the Waitlist Me platform.  By extending our waitlist management features and best-in-class text and phone notification infrastructure to work in other products, we can solve a wider set of needs together than with our service alone.

For more information on partnership opportunities, contact [email protected]

Want to improve how efficiently you do table management? NoshList makes it easy to assign parties to tables, either when they are first added to the list or when they are seated. The table numbers are displayed in the waitlist view, so you can scan the list at a glance and know which parties go where.

Table numbers appear in a spinner for quick selection, and by default the numbers will be from 1 to 50. Most restaurants will want to change these numbers to match what they use in their restaurant, and this can be done individually in the app, or all at once on the NoshList website.

If you aren’t a restaurant, you can even change table numbers to represent what makes sense for your business. Think of them like a resource that can be assigned to a customer. They could represent the initials of a salonist or salesperson, a number for a barber chair or bowling alley lane, a rental rental ID or code, among others.

You can edit Tables in the app settings individually:

Or you can update them all at once in the settings on the NoshList website. If you have multiple devices the changes will synch so they are the same across all devices, but you will need to just go to the settings page on the other devices to trigger the sync.

Waitlist Me makes it easy for your customers to let you know with a quick text response whether they are cancelling or on their way, so you know whether to expect them or not and can plan accordingly.  We are now combining that simplicity with more flexibility for handling other types of text responses, so you have more visibility into what your customers are thinking and can make smarter decisions faster.

Customers can send two pre-defined responses to text messages to let you know whether they are coming or not. If a customer texts back a “2”, you will see a “coming soon” message in the notes area of the waitlist view. If they text back a “3” the message will say “not joining” and the row will flash. The default notification that is sent to customers when you press to notify them explains these options and looks like this (you can always edit):

If people text back something other than a 2 or a 3, you’ll see “text reply” in their row on their waitlist.

Tapping on their row will open up the Edit Party screen, which will show their text. You can see things like if they mentioned how long they would be, if they had a quick question, or didn’t understand whether to use a 2 or a 3 and just replied back with something like “Cancel”. You can also see other important details in the Customer Visit section, such as when you notified them it was their turn, how long they were quoted, and how long they have been waiting.

Pro users have the additional feature to send custom text responses to texts received, up to three times per customer visit. The point is to keep things simple for you and your customers rather than get into a long chat with them that could be time consuming.

If a customer tries to call the assigned phone number in response to the text or call coming from that number, they will hear a message explaining that the number is only used for notifications and it will provide them your regular business number to call. Pro users have the option to create a custom text-to-speech message for handling these inbound calls.

Here is more on customizing notifications.