We have recently added some new sets of features to Perklist, the new service we have been developing to make loyalty and customer engagement simple and effective for small businesses.

Better Manage Your Online Reputation with Review Public Tracking

In today’s digital landscape, online reviews can make or break a business. Perklist empowers you to take control of your online reputation by streamlining review management from Google and Yelp.

With Perklist, you can:

Increase Personalized Engagement with Customer Profiles

In today’s competitive market, building strong customer relationships is vital. Perklist’s customer profiles empower you to do just that, offering a centralized area for tracking interactions and preferences.

From feedback and perks to visit history and private messages, these profiles provide a multi-dimensional view of customers. This information allows you to tailor your engagement strategies, anticipate their needs, and create personalized experiences that keep them coming back for more.

With easy onboarding and seamless integration into your existing workflow, Perklist makes it simple to unlock the power of data-driven insights. Embrace the future of customer engagement and help your business thrive.

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.

We are happy to announce that our popular table and resource management features are now available for the online version of Waitlist Me that can be accessed on computer and tablet browsers.  Previously the resource management features were only available in our iPad and Android apps.

Whether you assign customers to tables, staff, or other resources, Waitlist Me resource management features help you make smart decisions faster and leads to better overall customer service.  Here is an example of how a salon might track which of their employees are available and who would be coming available soon.

It is simple to see availability with the color of the status, and there is a count of minutes for how long they have been with a customer.  Notes and customer names give more context to how customers are being served at any given time.  Estimate times of customers waiting or with upcoming appointments with specific people or resources will also display to help know when to be ready for the next customer.

Customers can be moved between resources if needed, and when a customer is done they can be easily cleared.   Assignments are integrated with the waitlist so that when a customer that has been assigned a resource is checked off the waitlist, that resource will automatically switch to taken in the assignment view. If a customer was using that resource it will switch them with the new customer without any additional steps.

Customers can be assigned to one or more resources upon arrival or while waiting. When choosing assignments, available resources will show with a green status. Resources that are already assigned will have a red status and show the number of minutes they have been occupied with the current customer.

If a customer is already assigned to a resource from the waitlist or as a reservation, the estimated serving time for that customer will show along with any notes that were added. Businesses that serve groups of customers can also define resource sizes and view those sizes in the status areas. For example a restaurant hostess seating a party could scan for open table sizes that would seat six or for smaller tables that could be combined.

The more you use Waitlist Me to manage assignments, the more data you will have on how well you are managing your resources, and there are a number of new downloadable reports that can be run in the Analytics section of the Waitlist Me site. Look for trends over time with the Assignment Overview, do deeper analysis with the more detailed data in the Assignment Logs, and see results split out by assignments and sizes in other reports.

Before you skip out the door for a little winter vacation, try to take 10 minutes to ponder the actions you can take in the new year to make your business more efficient, more beloved by customers, and more profitable. Whether you’ve got a long list of must-dos or are scratching your head, we’ve got one for you to consider: Download the Waitlist Me app.

Have nary a clue as to how one app can revolutionize your business in 2018? Here’s exactly how Waitlist Me will help make your business goals more achievable this year.

Resolution #1: Simplify your waitlist system

Forget grease pens and messy paper planners. Waitlist Me’s signature waitlist feature nixes hostess stand clutter. Now, your front-of-house staff can see your business’ waitlist in a single glance and add customers to it with a swipe.

Resolution #2: Neatly integrate a waitlist with your reservations or appointments

The premium-level Reservation feature offers seamless waitlist integration. In one app, you can track appointments as well as walk-ins and offer accurate wait time estimates to both types of customers. It’s the best of both worlds for restaurants, offices, service providers.

Resolution #3: Impress customers with great service

With Waitlist Me, even a rookie host can quote accurate wait times and set the right expectations. The app shows real-time waits next to quoted times to make it easy to improve and know when things are running ahead or slow.  You can’t always control the wait time, but you can improve the wait experience by serving customers on time, when you say you will.

Resolution #4: Take the frustration out of long wait times

Our Text and Call Notifications combined with our Public Waitlist are designed to take headaches out waits for everyone. Customers are free to roam around the area, not worried about losing their place in line, and your staff can do their jobs without hungry diners asking when it’ll be their turn.

Resolution #5: Get it right the first time

Every level of Waitlist Me, from free to premium to pro, offers a Notes feature. Have a family that needs one high chair, two coloring pages, a gluten-free menu, and a wheelchair-accessible table? Make a note so that the party’s needs are front-and-center, no matter who seats them.

Resolution #6: Streamline your management

The Waitlist Me app was created to make your business easier to run, no matter how large or small. Multi-Device Sync lets you manage one account on extra computers, smartphones, or tablets—perfect for on-the-go businesses or large facilities—while Multi-Place Management lets regional and company-wide managers connect multiple locations to one (or more) Waitlist Me accounts.

Resolution #7: Become more customer-friendly

The premium-level Add Yourself widget and kiosk features and the pro-level business hours settings are easy-to-use tools that allow customers to join your waitlist or create a reservation without sitting on hold or waiting until you’re open. They’re available 24/7 from wherever your customer has internet access.

Resolution #8: Monitor your business’ productivity

Waitlist Me Pro allows you to track your resources. Whether you rely on table turnover, staff, special equipment, or something else entirely, our pro-level Resource Management feature tracks it for you, making it easy to see who and what is performing well and where you can make positive changes.

Resolution #9: Get more customer feedback

Comment cards not doing it for you? Our pro-level service incorporates Text Message Ratings and Customizable Survey features into the user experience. With a single text message reply or the click of a link, customers can quickly let you know what went right and what went wrong during their last visit.

Resolution #10: Make smarter business decisions

Don’t leave your biggest decisions up to guesswork. Waitlist Me Premium and Pro are loaded with our Reports feature. The in-app statistics track average wait times, business activity, demographics, customer loyalty, group size, and more. Plus, you can automate how you access the information via weekly email summaries or downloadable reports, making data one less thing you need to think about.

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