Forget display advertising for a sec. The best thing you can do for your business this spring is to build your store’s reputation by offering unrivaled customer service.

Want to beat the competition? Download Waitlist Me and transform the wait experiences customers have when they visit.  By adding them to the waitlist and sending them text notifications when you are ready for them, you can show you care about their time and give them the freedom better use their time while they wait.  They’ll thank you for it with more purchases and repeat visits.

Consider this: Your customers are awash with ways to unload the results of their spring cleaning purges. There’s the drop-it-and-forget-it ease of Goodwill and Salvation Army, the millennial comfort with Craigslist, and the DIY thriftiness of “oh, I’ll fix it up at some point, just toss it in that pile over there.”

As a consignment boutique owner, you’re struggling against years of customers swapping stories about long wait times and nonexistent communication for mere pennies on the dollar. Your store is great! But the industry you’re in? Well, there are some ghosts in that closet.

You need one easy way to break free from the brush that tars you—and set yourself apart from the half-dozen other consignment stores in your zip code.

7 ways Waitlist Me will revolutionize the way you work with customers:

– Text and call notifications let you notify your customers when their appraisals are ready.

– Public waitlist allows clients to check and see where they are in the list without stopping by (or tying up your phone lines).

– Status color coding lets you see at a glance where a client’s items are in the pipeline. No more fumbling for lost bits of paper!

– Loyalty tracking shows you who’s new to the store and who’s a repeat customer, letting you know in an instant when a VIP walks through the door.

– Built-in analytics run in the background, letting you track traffic and activity patterns and delegate your resources efficiently.

– Multi-device sync lets you use one business account on multiple devices. That means no more calls on your day off about what’s going on with so-and-so’s check.

– App compatibility for iOS, Android, and Web means you can use Waitlist Me on a device you already have.

The solution: Start using Waitlist Me, stat.

It’s time to get rid of Post-It notes and legal pads. It’s time to stop losing customers’ contact information (and their trust and business along with it). It’s time to bring your store into the 21^st century with Waitlist Me.

Second-hand retailers across the country use Waitlist Me to manage their clientele and their in-store resources. Waitlist Me offers simple software that’s intuitive to use as soon as you start it up. There’s no training and no hefty user guides. Just download it and get back to work.

Consider it spring cleaning for your small business.

Where did NoshList go? It is now Waitlist Me. But don’t worry, everything you loved about NoshList is still there, plus a lot more.

As more and more businesses from all types of industries have been signing up to manage their waitlists, reservations, and appointments, we decided having a name that was broader and less tied to food would be better. As Waitlist Me, we are excited about all the opportunities for helping people that are waiting everywhere.

The road to Waitlist Me was paved with a number of features and user experience improvements. It started with enhancements for customized notifications and waitlist views. Table management was made more flexible so customers could also be assigned to people or other resources. Later, more prioritization was put on features such as reservations and appointments that were essential to many businesses. Finally, we invested more resources into making Waitlist Me cross-platform, so it would work on iPads, iPhones, Android tablets and phones, and even computers.

Being truly cross-platform is key to bringing the services to businesses everywhere. Some businesses don’t have Wi-Fi or have concerns using an iPad because of possible damage or theft. Now, even businesses with computers plugged into the Internet can use WaitList Me for their waitlists and reservations. The Android app also runs nicely on Clover, which is revolutionizing the way businesses think about POS systems.

In addition to the name change, we have redesigned and improved our iPhone and Android phone apps, and made a number of usability improvements in our tablet apps and online waitlist. Waitlist Me is also launching with a few powerful new features, such as the post-visit feedback surveys. Premium users can now customize and enable feedback surveys to go out after customer visits. Customers can easily send quick numerical ratings back in text messages or take surveys to rate their experiences in more detail, leave comments, an even request a manager to contact them about their visit.

Waitlist Me is also rolling out its first major API integration with Enplug, a company that helps businesses better engage their customers with smart digital signage devices and software.

More details on these new features will be coming soon.

Animals are much more sensitive to external stimuli than their leash- and carrier-holding counterparts. If you’re running a pet-focused business, that means the systems and tools you use to keep customers moving through your office are doubly important. Using a waitlist app like Waitlist Me can help you and your pet-owning clients keep your visitors calm, collected, and happy, which leads to a better visit today and repeat visits in the future.

Here are five ways veterinarians, groomers, shelters, and clinics are using the app to ensure smooth customer service and positive experiences for pet owners and their furry, scaled, and feathered friends, alike.

Allow pet owners to wait in the best place for their pets

Some pets are happy stretched out on the tile in your waiting room. Others are more content roaming around outside. Waitlist Me lets you send pet owners a text once it’s their turn, which means they can stop hovering around your reception area while they wait.

Bonus! If they’re a few minutes away, they can let you know they’re on their way using our simple text response feature.

Speed up appointment scheduling and check-in

When you’re juggling a full waiting room and your customer is being tugged away by a Great Dane, you don’t have minutes to spare flipping through a paper schedule. Waitlist Me’s intuitive interface operates from a simple single screen. A few swipes is all you need to make a new appointment, check someone in, or add a walk-in to your waitlist.

Bonus! Waitlist Me’s Premium service has a feature that lets customers check the current wait on your website and add themselves to the list from home, which cuts down on call time and the bottleneck in your waiting room.

Quote accurate wait times—every single time

When a loved one is sick, a 15-minute wait can feel like 45. Waitlist Me helps ease pet parent anxiety (and the frustration they’re turning on reception staff) with intelligent time quoting. Being able to see actual wait times next to quoted times has been proven to improve accuracy, so your staff will quickly become pros in giving the right guidance on expected waits.

Bonus! Our public wait list feature lets them check their place in line from their smartphones, which means fewer “how much longer?!” questions thrown your way.

Squeeze emergencies into a busy schedule

Faced with a skunked dog in need of a bath tub? How about a cat whose curiosity requires a little medical intervention? No matter the emergency, Waitlist Me’s visual layout lets you quickly see how your day is shaping up and which of your staff members is free to handle your walk-in when.

Bonus! Waitlist Me also lets you book different types of pet care appointments by assigning your customers different colored statuses. It’s an easy, visual way to track the services you offer, the time you need to set aside for them, and the staff required to man your office.

Reduce the rate of no-shows

Your customers aren’t flakes; they just forgot! Waitlist Me helps you significantly cut down on no-shows and last-minute cancellations through our text and call reminders. And you barely have to lift a finger! Just press a button.

Bonus! Forget about scheduling nightmares. Waitlist Me’s Pro service has a number of resource management features for tracking how long your rooms or staff have been busy with customers.  This helps you see exactly which people you need to assign where—and when it’s OK to send someone home or call for back-up.

Due to significant fee increases from US mobile operators for sending text messages, we will no longer be including unlimited notifications in the subscription prices of US plans. Instead, we will include a bundle of notifications each month and the ability to pay separately for messages sent above this monthly allotment. These changes will affect all new signups from September 6, 2021 and apply to existing customers from Oct 4, 2021.

Our goals continue to be to offer the best value in waitlisting and scheduling services, while providing the flexibility for different businesses to send as many notifications as they need. It is important to note that the increases in mobile carrier fees affect all services sending text messages, and we believe that even with our latest plan updates that Waitlist Me will continue to be the price and value leader in its category.

The Premium plan includes 1,000 notifications per month, Pro includes 2,500 and Platinum 5,000. For businesses with heavier messaging needs, additional text and call notifications can be sent at a rate of $0.02 per notification, deducted from a prepaid balance. 

Monthly notifications reset when monthly subscription payments are processed. For users on annual plans, they reset every 30 days starting from the original payment date. Payments for adding to the prepaid balance can be made from the Account area of the Waitlist Me website, and there are settings to make it easy to auto-refresh the balance when it gets low.

Most businesses currently using our services would not hit these notification limits, and thus would not be affected by this update. Waitlist Me has several settings and options for sending notifications, so businesses can control when they don’t need to be sent. There are ways to monitor the usage of both the notifications that are included in the plan each month as well as the ones that are charged separately. The number of monthly text and call notifications sent can be viewed in the Settings area of the apps or in the Account area of the website. The website also shows a record of messages sent and the associated costs in the Messaging Costs area of the Billing History. 

WiggleWorks kids is a popular destination for children and their families, being the only indoor playground that caters strictly to kids who are 48-inches tall or less. Weekends can be very busy, and Waitlist Me helps WiggleWorks kids reduce wait times, increase the number of kids they serve, and make parents happier.

WiggleWorks kids provides soft, moveable, interactive play equipment for children at its two Washington State locations, one each in the towns of Bellevue and Puyallop. The equipment is used to help children build motor skills and the unstructured play area gives them an opportunity for social interaction with children their own age.

“We limit the number of children who can play at one time and we are first come, first serve. There was no way for someone to get on the waiting list unless they called in or came into the store,” said Bellevue store manager, Kristen Deskin. “We had a lot of complaints about our wait list system because there were opportunities for a lot of user error and it often got confusing.”

That confusion was compounded by the fact that employees were responsible for taking down names and phone numbers, which were sometimes misprinted or missing key letters or numbers. Troubled by the many customer complaints, Deskin and her team looked for a better way to manage their waitlist. In 2013, they turned to WaitList Me.

“When we launched Waitlist Me we immediately felt more in control of our waitlist and felt like we had more opportunities to serve the public. This is because we could accommodate the number of people wanting to get on the list,” Deskin said. “It also has freed up an employee because they are no longer tied to taking names.”

Deskin likes how WaitList Me is easy to use and provides a simple way to keep track of store waitlists and whether customers walk in or add their name from home through the WiggleWorks kids website.  Since making the switch, customers have been happier and are more excited to come into the locations.

“We have had wait times of up to two hours in the past and WaitList Me has reduced those times so no one waits now for more than 45 minutes to an hour,” Deskin said. “I also use it to see and track how many children are coming back into play after waiting compared to how many names we are having to delete. That was one big improvement I was able to track that enabled me to make some good business decisions with the owner.”

– By Valerie Killifer, special to WaitList Me