Any diner can appreciate black-and-white tile and chrome fixtures. Retro is always in, baby! But there’s a line between old-school cool and remarkably outdated.

Wondering where your restaurant falls? One easy way to tell is to check what’s waiting for queuers at your hostess stand. Is it a mobile device with a waitlist app, like Waitlist Me? Totally this-century. Is it a grease board and a dirty rag? A little grody looking, but still sitting on the fence. Is it a basketful of buzzers? Time for an overhaul!

Don’t believe us? Listen in to what your customers have to say when they’re handed a buzzer and told to wait ‘til it goes off.

“I’m not holding it.”

At 5, a buzzer is a novelty. It vibrates! It lights up! You get to be the first to know when it’s your turn! Unlike watching a cat chase a laser pointer, though, it’s a novelty that grows stale with age. While many customers are totally down for coloring alongside the kids—um, if you’ll upgrade that crossword puzzle, please—they’re ready to leave the buzzers to the grade schoolers.

“Gross! I don’t want to touch it.”

When was the last time you cleaned those greaseballs? Even though customers get them before their food, buzzers tend to be streaked with dust, grease, and who-knows-what else. In the age of germaphobia and a rising spate of super-bacteria, customers would really rather not come that close to a buzzing petri dish, thanks.

“Darn, what if I don’t hear it buzz?”

You’d think a hand-held buzzer would be easy to notice but often times, they aren’t. In fact, if customers set them down on the bar or slide them into a jacket pocket, the flashing lights and rattling plastic are easy to miss. To prevent this, one or more guests will disengage from the social atmosphere you’ve worked hard to create, all to ensure that they don’t miss out on their table.

“Someone needs to hold my drink.”

Short of a menu taller than a toddler, there’s nothing clunkier than a restaurant buzzer. Customers either need to set them down (where they tend to be forgotten), balance them on a limb (where they tend to fall), or hold them in one hand (where they take up much-needed real estate). For those that are keeping tabs of coats, bags, children, phones, or beverages, this becomes a nuisance they quickly resent.

“How close do you think we need to be?”

Will a buzzer work outside the lobby? How far from the front doors can customers wander? Being handed a buzzer on a crowded evening puts guests in a precarious situation: They need to pinpoint a space where they can comfortably wait and where the buzzer will still work. For long wait times, this can create anxiety. With every minute that ticks by, they wonder if maybe they missed their table. Cue constant check-ins with your staff, which defeats the purpose of the buzzer in the first place.

A better solution

Replace those outdated, expensive buzzers with a more up-to-date solution. Waitlist Me is so simple you can get started in a few minutes, and your guests will appreciate receiving a text instead of a clunky buzzer.

Nobody knows better than our pandemic first responders how important it is these days to safeguard patients and healthcare workers. Doctor’s offices, urgent care facilities, and medical centers are also taking new steps to ensure the safety of their patients and staff. 

Waitlist Me makes it easy to improve waiting experiences and cut down on crowds and lines.  Here are some ways doctor’s offices and medical facilities are using our waitlist and reservation app during the coronavirus crisis.

#1. Make waiting safer for everyone

The fewer people you have in your waiting room, the better, whether social distancing policies are in place or not. From restaurants offering take-out to retailers promoting curbside pick-up, there’s been a tremendous uptick in businesses encouraging customers to spend as little time as possible inside their brick-and-mortar locations.

Healthcare facilities can do the same. When patients arrive for their appointments, they can be added to your waitlist and asked to wait in their cars until they can be seen by a medical professional. When a doctor, nurse, or P.A. is ready for them, simply send them a text alert to let them know to come inside.  Some places are even doing simpler screenings or check ups in the cars to avoid patients having to come inside at all.  

#2. Decrease the amount of contact required

With highly contagious illnesses like coronavirus spreading through cities like wildfire, office staff must be cautious about all the little things that were standard just a month ago, like sharing pens, passing clipboards, and opening doors.

Limiting contact between individuals, whether they’re patients, caregivers, or administrators, is key. Automating doors is one way to upgrade your office with an eye toward the future. Going digital with your paperwork is another. It also has the added benefits of decreasing in-office wait times and freeing up staff from data entry tasks.

With our add-yourself web widget, you can add Waitlist Me to this list of helpful no-contact improvements. Patients can check themselves in using their smartphones from anywhere and receive a confirmation message.  Text them when you are ready and you can even view their replies if they are running a few minutes late or letting you know when they have arrived. With Waitlist Me Pro there are also options to send custom responses to the texts patients send, like to reply with an update on the estimated wait remaining.

#3. Improve the overall waiting experience

We’re pretty sure no one really enjoys sitting in waiting rooms for their turn to see a physician. Flipping through months-old magazines amid who-knows-what illnesses? That’s not anyone’s idea of a good time.

Many offices are using Waitlist Me’s online features that can be viewed in phone browsers to give patients more control over how long—and where—they wait. With the widget, individuals can check in for their appointments (or for open clinic hours) from the comfort of their homes. Then, they can check the public waitlist feature to ensure a timely arrival when a healthcare provider is ready to see them. The public waitlist lets them know how many people are ahead of them in line and how long the estimated queue time is.

In addition to robust waitlist features, Waitlist Me offers scheduling features for reservations and appointments. View and manage your schedule anywhere from the Apple or Android app, or by logging into the website.

Making changes to future reservations is even easier with our new search feature. Now if a customer contacts you to change their reservation, you can simply search by their name, phone number or email address. This option is available on all platforms by using the search icon on the main reservations page. From the search results, press on the customer’s row to open the desired booking and make any changes needed.

A toggle switch at the top of the page will also allow you to simply search for a specific customer, whether or not they have an upcoming reservation. You can use this to see past visits and upcoming reservations as well as to edit the customer’s information. For example, if the customer’s name was spelled incorrectly or if they changed their phone number, you could update those details. When you use the auto-remember names feature, that customer’s information (name/email/phone number) will populate as you are creating bookings. That feature can be found in the app settings under Customization > Adding Customers.

To view other recent reservation enhancements, check out this page on new sorting options available and this page on email confirmations.

NoshList was excited to return to this year’s National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show (NRA) in Chicago from May 17-20, marking the company’s third year as an NRA exhibitor. There are a number of trends that are changing the way restaurants manage their businesses better with technology, and NoshList has been at the forefront of these innovations.

Since last year’s event, NoshList has tripled the number of people seated through the NoshList waitlist app. The NoshList wait list app closed out 2013 with more than 22 million diners seated across 4,000 restaurants. In the first quarter of this year, NoshList seated another 10 million diners, as growth continues to accelerate. We also were one of the first apps to integrate with the award-winning Clover POS device.

NoshList got a chance to show off several design improvements and new features in its new iOS 7 and Android apps, and gave a special preview of its new reservations feature for the first time at NRA. Adding reservations to the NoshList app is another way the company is building the simple and intuitive tools that restaurants need to improve their guest experience and operational efficiencies. The reservations feature will be live in the App Store and Play Store within a few weeks.

We had a great time at the event, spoke to a lot of interesting potential customers and technology partners, and were thrilled to have a chance to be interviewed by Turn & Burn on the NRA Media Stage.

We also had a couple Armor Active stands, which work great with NoshList. Here is a blog post on how they looked.

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 support@waitlist.me