At Waitlist Me, we focus on helping businesses transition away from pen and paper or overly complex services. Making waiting less painful is a win for both the guests and the staff. Of course, waitlist management is only one way to streamline operations and work smarter, not harder. In this article from Dumpsters.com, check out a few more resources that show how to use technology to improve the guest experience.
When your time is money, how you manage that time makes a difference. For many CEOs and executives, an ace admin team or executive assistant manages the schedule with aplomb. But regardless of how good your support staff is, there are always ways to make your office run more efficiently. Waitlist Me is one of those ways.
Waitlist Me is a waitlist management app that ensures everyone who needs face-time with the boss gets it, whether they need a 30-minute meeting or 60 seconds for a signature. Here are five ways Waitlist Me can transform your office.
Squeeze in meetings between appointments
Traditional calendars can make it difficult to spot and best utilize smaller blocks of open time. Waitlist Me makes it easy—and we let you color code everything according to, well, whatever you want. Supply each department with a color, or each type of appointment, and create the schedule that makes sense for you.
Set up office hours for drop-ins with staff
An open-door policy—or an occasional open-door policy—can do wonders for company culture, but it can also turn your hallways into long lines of employees who want CEO input. Waitlist Me helps create order by letting employees stay at their desks until go-time. Our text alert feature lets them know exactly when to knock on your door.
Give CEOs more control over who to see when
First come, first serve? That’s up to you. Waitlist Me lets you see key information at a glance on all the people needing your attention. If you spot something urgent further down the list, it is a cinch to take that one first by sending a quick text to that person. Or you may select items to clear off your list based on how much time you have available, whether you can cover an item in another meeting, how often you already see a particular person, or whatever you like.
Let employees book themselves into free time
Most assistants have far more on their docket than fielding requests for 5 minutes of your time. Take those calls off their plates by letting employees request quick appointments themselves. Waitlist Me’s Add Yourself feature lets them do just that—and you (or your admin) can quickly add them to your waitlist without turning the request into a full-blown conversation.
Keep employees from losing work-time waiting around
Nobody wants to see a parade of toe-tapping employees outside their office door. Nix it starting now thanks to our public waitlist feature. Staffers can check their place in line right from their work stations, which means they can increase their productivity without sacrificing the opportunity to get the input they need from you.
While fine dining might grab more press and shinier awards, fast casual is the largest growing restaurant sector around the world—and has been since 2015.
The name of the game isn’t just speed or price; if it was, fast food will still be earning top honors. Nope, fast casual continues to soar because it offers a superior customer experience. It’s all about serving great food to busy people on a budget.
Sounds good, right? Well, there’s one way to make it even better—and to ensure that your fast casual restaurant scores top marks on review sites like Yelp: make your guests’ dining experience more convenient.
Here are three ways to increase convenience at your fast casual restaurant starting right now.
#1. Go for mobile notifications
Waiting to pick up your meal at a counter is one of the few downsides to fast casual. Even worse? Perching on the edge of your seat trying to figure out if your name has been called. Hello, anxiety!
With a waitlist app like Waitlist Me, you can now text your guests when their meal is ready for pick-up. That means they can sit down and relax while they wait to nosh. It’ll cut down on noise in your restaurant and decrease customer stress (and the amount of food growing cold on the counter). No more crowding impatiently around the counter? That’s a win in our book!
#2. Take your waitlist online
Sure, the food might be worth the wait, but a wait isn’t what fast casual diners are looking for (see the “fast” in “fast casual”). From breakfast to lunch and dinner through late-night, nobody’s looking to stand around and watch other people scarf down goodies. That’s where an online waitlist comes in handy.
Waitlist Me offers a widget you can easily add to your restaurant’s website. Once it’s there, diners can hop on-line digitally, and walk through your door at just the right time. Bonus? Use our option to let customers join your list straight from their Google search, no website updates required.
#3. Offer easy take-out and delivery options
Not every diner wants to park it in-house. And you know what? That’s just fine for your bottom line. An emptier restaurant gives newcomers the idea that you’re ready and waiting to serve them without requiring you to sacrifice orders. In their mind, they’ve arrived ahead of the crowd. In yours, you’re still busy fulfilling orders without needing the tables and chairs to accommodate them.
Make this a reality by setting your fast casual restaurant up online for easy take-out ordering. If your area offers delivery options—think: Postmates, UberEats, Seamless, or Grubhub—create special pick-up zone for delivery drivers. That way, they can get in and get out, and your diners can enjoy hot, fresh food from the comfort of their own home.
Remember, every time you make a change, you need to let your customers know! Add it to your website, have employees mention it when guests order, and post it around your restaurant.
Our favorite way to ensure diners are in the know 24/7 is to post updates on an in-restaurant monitor, along with your waitlist. Waitlist Me Pro lets you do this easily, and there are no limits to what you include! Whether you’re celebrating your 1,000th 5-star rating, are offering a limited-time special, or you’re launching a loyalty program, anything goes. (Hint: funny cat videos work, too.)
In today’s age of social distancing, some businesses are using QR functionality to increase ‘touchless’ options for customers. For example, it has become more common for restaurants to place QR codes on tables so that customers can use their cell phone to quickly access an online version of their menus.
Waitlist Me has a new feature for generating a QR code to make it easier for customers to join the waitlist while standing outside of a business. All of the Waitlist Me subscriptions include options for businesses to use the Add Yourself Web Widget to let customers join waitlists remotely, and usually customers would access these features from business websites. However, in cases where a customer has already arrived at the business and your staff is unable to greet them in person, adding a QR code to a flyer or sign posted near the front door with some simple instructions can be an easier way to get customers to the web widget and join the waitlist. Using a QR code to open up a link to the web widget in their phone browsers is easier than having them type in the web URL directly.
The widget can be configured in the settings online by going to Account > Settings > Add Yourself. Once you’ve tailored the options to fit your workflows, generate your unique QR code by using the link at the top of the Add Yourself settings page.
From there, you can print or download your QR code and add it to whatever signage you have for customers. Using the QR code feature can provide a touchless option instead of a sign-in kiosk, or simply save your staff time from needing to enter each customer’s information into the waitlist app.
Waitlist Me makes it easy to let customers add themselves to your waitlist or reservations with our web widget, and we recently added features to our Pro service to control business hours this feature is available or accepts reservations. Complementing these settings for regular business hours, there is now a feature to set specific blackout dates for holidays or days you might be closed or not taking reservations.
Simply login to the Waitlist Me website and navigate to Account > Settings > Customize Settings (under Add Yourself) > Blackout Dates. Press the green Add button, and choose the date you desire to restrict. The drop down menu lets you select whether you are closed and not taking reservation or waitlist requests or if you just aren’t taking one of these options like you normally would. For example, on Christmas you might be closed, but on Valentine’s day you might be open but so busy you don’t take reservations that day.
Once a blackout date is set, you can see and manage the upcoming blackout dates on this page. If you need to remove a restriction, just hover over the date and press the red X that appears on the right. Or click on the row to edit it.
Once you have blocked off a date, if a client tries to make a reservation they will receive a message letting them know that no reservations will be accepted:
