Rates of stress, depression, and anxiety have only increased across the globe thanks to a variety of factors, from work to politics to personal matters. And guess what? Most people aren’t actively working to alleviate the causes of their symptoms. That means that on a good day, one out of every two people walking through your door is one big stress mess. Yikes.

What does all that mean for you and your business? Nothing good. Stress, anxiety, and depression…

• Encourage customers to stay home
• Turn people into penny-pinchers
• Make them put off maintenance-type appointments, like healthcare and car servicing appointments
• Prevent guests from enjoying themselves when they do go out

Sure, you can’t eliminate the sources of their stress. However, you can make your place of business into more of a refuge from the stress of their everyday life. Keep reading for tips on how you, as a business owner or manager, can help your customers stress less.

Rearrange your space

No one wants to be in the way. Unfortunately, if you haven’t thoughtfully designed your waiting area layout with your waiting customers in mind, chances are someone will be.

To solve this problem, spend some time watching the way your guests use the space you’ve given them. Where do they tend to stand? Where do they most frequently sit? What space isn’t being utilized? When do people look awkward or uncomfortable? Then, change up your waiting room’s layout based on those observations.

Offer up directions

The momentary panic of walking into a new destination and having no clue where you should go or who you need to check in with or what the heck is going on is real. That same panic sends adrenaline coursing through your veins, which elevates your stress levels and dings the effectiveness of your immune system—all because there was no clear signage!

Forget that. Ensure your guests know what to expect and where to go when they arrive if there isn’t someone to greet them. A sign on the door or on a placard placed in the entranceway or by a check-in desk or kiosk is an excellent improvement.

Turn down the volume.

You don’t have to run a spa to provide your guests with a calmer experience when they walk inside. If your business is in a busy area, consider window coverings that will dampen the sound of outside traffic. If you receive a lot of phone calls, try switching your desk attendant to a headset or using flashing lights rather than a loud ringer.

Also: ditch clocks that audibly tick, oil squeaky door hinges, and put felt pads on the feet of screeching metal chairs.

Change the channel

If your waiting area includes televisions, select programming that’s more likely to take your customers’ attention off whatever is worrying them. Instead of news, finance, or health-related shows, go with lighter fare. Think: home design, cooking shows, or sitcom reruns.

Radio more your style? The faster the music is, the more stress it will cause your guests. Instead of more jarring pop hits or dance beats, go with oldies, singer-songwriters, or classical music.

Rework your waiting system

Want your guests to enjoy every minute in your place of business? Looking to prioritize their needs and prove that you’re really listening to them? Seeking to cut walk-outs and improve the overall efficiency of your enterprise?

We developed Waitlist Me to help you hit all these goals. Waitlist Me is a free app that lets you manage your waitlist and reservations better. It lets you notify guests by text when they’ve reached the front of the line, eliminating the fear that they’ve missed their moment. It also lets you take notes on their special requirements or concerns, so you can make sure they aren’t forgotten.

And that’s just the beginning! Our full set of Premium and Pro features are crafted to give your customers the best experience possible, all while helping you run a better, faster, more cost-effective business. Decrease customer stress, make more money—how does that sound? Answer: Awesome!

We announced an exciting new integration in January with Clover that puts our NoshList waitlist app directly in front of restaurant operators across the country. NoshList was one of the first apps to appear in Clover’s newly developed app marketplace. This is new and exciting for us because technology such as the Clover POS is leading the way for restaurant operators to efficiently update and integrate their front-of-house and back-of-house operations. Never before have waitlist apps been able to sync up with a restaurant POS, providing sales analytics based on waitlist names and phone numbers. Now, they can.

Clover, owned by First Data, is going after restaurant operators with modest businesses in an effort to treat them like large brands by giving them what they’re asking for: something more from a technology provider without the high price tag to match.

Clover is answering this call is by offering a merchant-driven technology tool based on the Android operating system. It’s smarter, more flexible and secure than what many of these operators have been using, and the fact that NoshList is featured as a tool within this technology makes what Clover is doing that much better.

For Clover users, the toolkit is future proof and includes a printer, cash drawer and credit card terminal. Additionally, it includes preloaded apps such as ours intended to give restaurant operators the ability to control and customize the tools best suited to their needs.

Additionally, we have recently made several new enhancements to our NoshList waitlist app. These updates let restaurant owners and management define pre-set notes, such as dates of birthdays and anniversaries, in the Quick Notes feature. The notes can be viewed in the wait list for easy reference and can be synced across each device used in the restaurant. The new app features a seating history display below the current list and people that add themselves to the list show up at the top with special highlighting to alert the hostess.

In addition to the new app features, the NoshList website now has several powerful analytical reports for paid premium users. The reports include an activity overview that highlights diner trends seated by the day, week or month, a visitor breakdown by age and gender, activity logs for custom analysis and loyalty metrics comprised of guests who visit your place when, how often, and their average length of wait.

The NoshList and Clover technology is based on flexibility and is a valuable tool restaurant operators can leverage to make their operations more efficient. And integration is easy!

When someone installs NoshList from Clover, it immediately pulls their merchant account information and links table orders directly to the table numbers entered into the POS. Restaurant staff can then view the customer’s name, order and visit history, giving them an opportunity to elevate the guest experience through rewards and direct marketing campaigns.

Here is a summary of the latest features that will be on display:

New Free features available to all:

• Quick Notes – Easily create a list of common notes to use when adding and seating parties.
• ETA – Choose an estimated arrival time for same-day reservations and larger parties.
• Seated View – View notes and parties seated in the main waitlist view.

New Premium features:

• Rich Analytics – Download activity, demographics, party size, and loyalty reports.
• Table Management – Customize and assign table numbers when adding and seating parties.
• Customizable Public Waitlist – Add information on daily specials, loyalty programs, coupons, and more to the public waitlist that guests can check from their phones while waiting.

With partners such as Clover, we will continue to push the boundaries of waitlist technology because we believe in doing things differently. We are a team of professionals focused to innovate an antiquated aspect of the industry,one we understand, appreciate and are passionate about.

For businesses looking to automate more of the reservation acceptance process, Waitlist Me has new ways to restrict how many reservations you accept by day and by hour. With a Waitlist Me Proo subscription, you can set reservation limits on the number of groups and people that you’d like on an hourly and daily basis. For example, if you don’t want any more than 4 groups to schedule themselves per hour, you can quickly set up that rule.

Simply press the gear icon in the app and head to Add Yourself > Scheduling Rules. Choose a day and you will be able to set the maximum number of people and groups you’ll allow by day and by hour.  There are four different options, but you can pick and choose the ones that work for your goals in managing capacity at your business. You can avoid having too many people schedule at the same time without all the work of tracking the usage of every single table at your restaurant or resource at your business. You can use the Copy Rules button at the bottom to apply these rules to every day, or set up each day separately.

That’s it! Your rules will apply to self scheduling done through the Web Widget and Kiosk, where customers will see a message when there isn’t availability for a particular time or day.  They wouldn’t be able to book that time, but could still check other times.

The rules will also trigger warnings within the Waitlist Me app if you try to schedule above the limit to make it easier to know when you might be overbooked.  Though it won’t block you from scheduling above the limits for cases where you know you can handle the booking.

COVID-19 hit the United States hard in March and shut down many businesses. Along with closures came new safety regulations for restaurants, for those that were able to stay open at all. When dining rooms and patios were forced to close, many restaurants moved to take-out only and created elaborate plans to ensure the safety of customers and staff. As cities and states have begun to slowly allow businesses to reopen, restaurants have been faced with a multitude of new regulations and guidelines for ensuring the safety of their operations.

What To Think About Before Re-Opening:

There are quite a few factors to consider when starting to re-open restaurants. Building trust is key. Although most people are itching to return to their normal life, many also want to make sure that places they go are upholding strict guidelines and rules to ensure the safety of guests, employees, and families. A few ways to build this trust and keep customers and happy and coming back to your restaurant:

    –   Maintain distancing guidelines between guests and staff.

    –   Increase the amount of cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting that is done on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

    –   Update your illness policy to include fever and respiratory symptoms and ensure that sick people are staying home.

    –   Have staff wear masks when possible.

    –   Ensure that existing and new employees are trained on proper hygiene, health policies, and guidelines for cleaning and disinfecting.

    –   Follow recommendations from the CDC as well as local and national public health authorities.

This might seem like a lot to implement, and it might take a bit of time to adjust, but there are apps, such as Waitlist Me, that can help with some of these challenges

Keeping Crowd Sizes Down with Waitlist Me

Another important factor to a smooth re-opening is ensuring that there are rules in place to limit the crowd sizes in the restaurant. Currently, no one wants to eat with someone hovering next to their table waiting for a seat, nor do people want to be stuck in a crowded waiting area. Waitlist Me can help in a couple ways.

Guests can put their name in with the hostesses and then freely wait elsewhere to be notified of a table opening via text. When a guest is added to the waitlist, they will receive a confirmation text message that will include a link to the restaurant’s public waitlist, allowing them to see where they are in line. They will also receive a text message when their table is ready. This type of consistency not only improves the waiting experience, but also helps with social distancing during the Coronavirus Era. Your customers can wait where they like, with more room to breathe and relax, without fear of missing out on a table.

Allowing Remote Check In

Waitlist Me also offers Self Check In as an option for guests to check wait times and add themselves to the waitlist. This feature can be enabled for Google as well as integrated into a website with the Waitlist Me Widget. Customers can also send reservation requests via the widget, cutting down on the need for phone calls to take reservations, and saving your staff time.

Creating New Floor Plans with Waitlist Me

Maintaining social distancing guidelines is very important to guests and employees. States are implementing rules and regulations that uphold these guidelines, such as limiting dining rooms to 50% capacity or keeping tables at least 6 ft. apart. With these new challenges, it can help to have a flexible way to update and manage floorplans. Waitlist Me lets you easily adjust your available tables to your capacity. The floorplan view can also help visualize a new plan prior to moving the tables to ensure the set up makes sense and allows for proper distancing.

These are a few of the ways Waitlist Me can help, and more can be found on our website.

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