It is probably not a surprise that Valentine’s Day is one of the busiest days of the year for restaurants. According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute, Valentine’s spending tops 13 billion dollars, and of the people that celebrate the holiday, more than a third of them head out to restaurants. When you’re making the special preparations to set the right ambiance for your restaurant, don’t forget about the experience your customers will have before they make it to their tables. For those guests who didn’t call ahead to make a reservation, take the pain out of waiting with Waitlist Me.

Customers are happier when they can check their place in line and have the freedom to leave the hostess area, which translates into less walkaways and higher customer satisfaction. Waitlist Me can also speed up table turns so you can seat more people each day. So you win on both sides, being better able to manage the surge in visitors on Valentine’s Day and offering superior customer service in the process.

In search of something romantic, many guests will try someplace new on Valentine’s Day instead of their regular hangouts. Make a great first impression that will keep these first timers coming back. Let Waitlist Me help you today.

Earlier this month, Clover added two new devices to their Point of Sale solutions, Clover Mini and Clover Mobile. As an early app developer for Clover, we are very excited about this launch because it opens new ways for businesses to use Waitlist Me for their waitlists and reservations.  Clover Mobile is a perfect fit for Waitlist Me because it lets businesses add customers to the waitlist right at the door as well as update statuses and check people off the list from other parts of their store or restaurant.

Clover Mobile is a wireless device, so merchants can do a variety of activities from anywhere. They can place orders, take payments, scan inventory, manage employee hours, sync sales data with accounting software, and other activities from where it is most convenient. The Clover Mini is designed to be a simple but powerful replacement to the traditional credit card terminal, so it does the core credit card processing and receipt printing needed for payment transactions, plus a lot more.  Both devices have the sleek designs Clover is known for and the flexibility of customizing functionality through their integrated App Market.  Waitlist Me is available and optimized for both of the new devices.

POS terminals have changed over the course of several years, and Clover is at the forefront of creating better and more efficient hardware and solutions for businesses in this category.  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.

Running a successful restaurant means juggling a lot of moving parts, and managing the dining room floor is often one of the most challenging. Double-bookings, awkward overlaps, and unpredictable table turnover can quickly turn a great service into a stressful one.

Enter Duration Rules—a smart feature within Advanced Scheduling Rules designed to automate and optimize your table management.

Here is a breakdown of what Duration Rules are, how they work, and how they help your business.

What Are Duration Rules?

At their core, Duration Rules allow businesses to automatically control exactly how long a table is reserved based on the size of the party or the time of day.

Working seamlessly with your Table Management and Capacity Utilization tools, these rules calculate availability and assign tables automatically. This means your system can make reliable, split-second decisions during customer self-scheduling without any manual math or intervention from your staff.

The Magic Behind the Scenes: How They Work

When a customer attempts to book a table through your self-scheduling portal, the system follows a precise, automated logic:

1. Identifies the party size: The system notes how many guests are arriving.
2. Applies the rule: It looks at your predefined settings to find the correct duration for that party size.
3. Blocks the table: The specific table is reserved for that exact calculated time limit.
4. Checks availability: It instantly ensures no other reservations can overlap with this block.
5. Updates the customer: If no suitable table is available for the full duration of their requested time, that time slot is hidden or marked unavailable to prevent double-booking.

Customizing for the Rush: Time-Based Duration Rules

Not all service periods are created equal. Customers might want a quick bite during their lunch hour, but prefer to linger over a multi-course meal at dinner. Duration Rules can be customized to reflect these different dining habits.

By creating separate rules and applying them to specific blocks in your Business Hours settings, you can maximize efficiency.

Why Duration Rules Matter

By implementing Duration Rules, you ensure that the availability your customers see online perfectly matches the real capacity of your dining room, even during the Friday night rush.

The immediate benefits for your business include:

• Preventing double bookings: No more apologizing for a table not being ready.
• Reflecting realistic dining times: Tailoring your turnover expectations to the actual time of day.
• Improving the guest experience: Customers are seated promptly, and dining rooms feel well-managed.
• Reducing staff workload: Hosts can focus on greeting guests rather than playing calendar tetris.
• Enabling reliable self-scheduling: You can trust the system to run on autopilot.

Being sick is no fun for anyone. And when you are sick, one of the top things on your mind is how to get better as soon as possible. It isn’t surprising that having to wait to talk to a physician can be a frustrating experience, but ProHealth Care Medical Associates found that using Waitlist to give patients a better sense of their wait made patients and physicians happier.

ProHealth Care Medical Associates is an award-winning regional specialty and primary care system with services throughout Southeastern Wisconsin. As part of the ProHealth Care program, the system has an integrated network of closely aligned independent physicians. Services encompass nearly all aspects of health care and includes hospitals, medical clinics, home care and hospice, integrative medicine, well-being and fitness centers, and more.

The centers have eight urgent care facilities within a 25-mile radius and see patients on a walk-in basis, which means wait times to see doctors can take anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes.

“One of the things we were hearing from our patients is that they weren’t happy with our wait times,” said Kelly Tolson, Director of Operations at ProHealth Care. “During cold and flu season, it can be anywhere from a 90 minute to two hour wait. Two hours is unacceptable.”

Tolson and ProHealth site leader, Maureen Sensiba, were looking for a way to make wait times easier to manage for patients, when they were approached by a patient who had seen the NoshList wait list app in use at a local restaurant.

“One of our patients had been added to a waitlist and notified when their table was ready at a Red Robin restaurant, and she said it was an awesome feature,” Sensiba said. “She raved about it. So afterward, I did some research on my own and contacted NoshList to see how we could make it work for our situation.”

The customer was specifically pleased with how the wait list app gave her the ability to shop while she waited for her table at Red Robin. That also caught the attention of Tolson and Sensiba, since it would be nice for patients to not have to be constrained to the waiting area.

Before getting started, the app had to be shown to the company’s patient experience officer and corporate compliance officer attorney to ensure the app wasn’t in violation of any patient privacy issues. Because the app only shows patient initials, it does not violate HIPPA rules or any other privacy rule, and Tolson was given the ability to then launch the app at the Medical Associates Brookfield, Wisc. location.

“Brookfield was a great place to start because it’s a small community. People could go home, have lunch or run errands while they waited to be seen by a doctor and get back in a short amount of time,” Tolson said. “It has worked so well that we have expanded it to another location and have plans to roll it out to the remaining six within the next six months.”

How it works

When ProHealth first started using NoshList, it was more popularly used as an iPad app, so they had to be a little creative in getting to fit their needs for an urgent care waitlist from a computer. Tolson and Sensiba realized that they could customize the public waitlist web page and the Add Yourself feature that restaurants normally use to allow diners to add themselves to a list, and they adapted this functionality for their staff to enter the information.

The patient names are put into a computer once they arrive at the center, and they can check their place in line from a phone or computer. When other patients look at the waitlist to determine where they are in line, only the patients’ initials are visible. Then when it is a patient’s turn, the ProHealth staff uses the regular waitlist view to trigger the text and call notifications and remove people from the list.

Since that time, NoshList has added the ability to do everything in one place in the browser, and early adopters like ProHealth Care that started using the system in new ways and sending feedback helped drive these product improvements.

“It was very smart how Tolson and Sensiba figured out how to use the NoshList public waitlist page, which was designed for other purposes, to serve as a simple entry form that could be used by multiple people on computers,” said NoshList CEO, Craig Walker. “We were all very impressed at NoshList, and have been building more and more improvements into our service to make it better for cases like these and for solving the wait problem everywhere.“

While the facility operators have yet to determine how the app has impacted wait times, customers appear to be happy with the solution.

“I don’t know if their wait times have decreased, but patients are more satisfied because we are being more respectful of their time,” Sensiba said. “We know they have other things they could be doing and we’re giving them an opportunity to do those things if there is a long wait.”

The physicians also are happier.

“We expected the patients would appreciate the new waitlist options, but we didn’t anticipate that the physicians would also be happier, because the patients are happier when they get into the room,” Tolson said. “That has been a very nice surprise.”

At Waitlist Me, we are always working on making the service better. We aspire to help more businesses improve wait experiences and customer service, and ultimately improve their business results. And we hope to help more of their customers save time, have a better day, and be happier.

It is a challenge for any company developing software or apps to know and execute on the most important ways to build a great product and service. There is no single correct path to take, but for us we think it takes a talented team, a focused mission, a lot of passion and hard work, some luck, and a few other things.

For a peek into the history and culture of Waitlist Me, check out this article. Waitlist Me CEO, Brian Hutchins, was recently interviewed as part of The Charleston Digital Corridor’s Leadership Profile Series, which is focused on the individuals who are driving the Charleston tech scene forward.