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.

With legalization on the legislative docket across the company, cannabis businesses are the retail industry’s rising stars. Dispensary success stories dot the landscape from the forests of Maine to the beaches of California. In fact, Business Insider names marijuana-related businesses as the fastest growing job sector in the United States.

What does that mean for you? One word: competition. The key to coming out on top? Two words: customer service.

Adding a waitlist and appointment app like Waitlist Me to your arsenal of business tools is an easy way to improve customer experience and loyalty and to increase your referral clientele. Plus, you can get started today for free!

Read on for five ways Waitlist Me can help you run a better marijuana business.

Let customers browse while they wait

A store loaded with interesting edibles feels like a grown-up candy store! Indulge your customers’ desires to take it all in without forcing them to give up their spot in line.

With Waitlist Me, guests can add their names to a digital queue. Then, they can delve into your merchandise, exploring their options and coming up with questions for your staffers. When one of your sales associates is free to assist them, customers will get a text on their smartphone letting them know their turn has arrived. Waiting has never been so simple!    

Welcome new customers to your store

A dispensary isn’t like other stores offering consumable goods. There are all sorts of variables new customers need to be educated about. Who better to guide them than your expert staff?

Waitlist Me frees up your staff so they can worry about one customer at a time. The app keeps track of your line—and lets queuers know their ETA—so that your employees don’t have to. This ensures that each person who steps into your store feels special and can ask every question they have about your products, no matter how small.

Bonus: Eliminating the need for staffers to juggle all the customers in your store will cut down on stress and improve sales results thanks to personalized, one-on-one attention.

Eliminate the wait for walk-ins

For regulars who know what they want and are on a tight schedule, Waitlist Me is what they’re waiting for.

Our app offers a web widget that businesses can easily place on their website. The web widget lets customers jump in line from wherever they are, like their office cubicle or a bar a few blocks over. That means less waiting around in your store for a clerk and more time enjoying life.

Introduce new treats

As the cannabis industry continues to grow, new products continue to pop up every day. Hosting in-store parties and tastings for these fresh goodies let your local community know what’s new. Waitlist Me lets you manage these crowded events with ease.

With Waitlist Me’s kiosk mode, you can let guests check themselves in as soon as they enter your store. Then, they can browse and mingle until you’re ready to show off your new wares. Our public waitlist feature, which customers can access on their phones and on in-store monitors, keeps them updated on their place in line.

Match shoppers with expert staffers

Have customers looking to ease medical complaints? How about newbies not sure where they should start? While some can help themselves, others need more guidance. Waitlist Me is here to help you help them.

Waitlist Me allows you to assign customers to certain employees. If you have associates with expertise in different areas, you can make sure that they help the customers who have questions they can answer best.

You’re a small business owner. You shouldn’t have to be a tech whiz. Forget all the training hassles. Forget the painful user manuals. There’s no reason for you to waste your time and money on waitlist management software that’s anything less than plug and play.

Here are seven easy ways to figure out if the tool you’re eyeing is more trouble than it’s worth.

You can’t buy it without talking to a sales person.

If a product is straightforward and user-friendly, it sells itself. You should be able to watch a quick video, then just jump in and start using the product. When a demo from a slick sales rep is required, it’s not the simple solution you’re looking for. Remember: You want to buy the product, not the pitch.

The pricing comes with more fine print than a cell phone contract.

Start-up fees, 24/7 support fees, usage surcharges, complicated pricing tiers, contracts that lock you in for a certain amount of time—these are sales tactics companies use to hook you with a low upfront price and milk you down the line.  Your bill should be simple to understand.  It should be predictable and not change from month to month.  And most importantly, there shouldn’t be any surprises.

Or, even worse, there is no pricing.

One reason a tech company would make you inquire to discover the price of its software is that it knows a salesperson is more likely to get your credit card number than the product itself.  Another reason is to figure out how much money you can afford or are willing to pay so they can extract more money from you.  Throwing out a high list price (that isn’t actually listed anywhere public for fear of scaring people away), and playing the discount game to make you feel like you are getting a bargain is a common sales tactic with complicated software.

There’s a training program, and you probably have to pay for it.

You don’t train someone to use a simple product, you just use it.  Look at great technology companies like Google, Amazon, and Uber as a few of many examples where simpler solutions are less expensive…  The more complex and detailed software is, the more time you need to spend learning it, training your employees on it, and retraining your employees on it when there’s an update. Plus, there’s an increased likelihood of mistakes and complaints. You should get help when you need it, not need to get help just to be able to use a service because it is complicated.

Installation requires you to do 37 other things

A good solution doesn’t require multiple trips to electronic stores. A simple solution doesn’t keep telling you to download more programs to make it work correctly. A good, simple solution is the one that fixes your problem now, without a tacked-on to-do list.

Your customers need to download it, too, in order for you to use it.

Software shouldn’t just be easy foryou to use; it should also be a no-brainer for your clientele. When you add another barrier to use, whether it’s downloading an app or creating a unique login, you’re making customer service harder on yourself.  Everyone has a phone that receives text messages and calls.  They shouldn’t need to install an app.  And most won’t go through the extra effort so you are limiting the number of people than can receive better service with a simpler solution.

Figuring out which button does what feels like decoding your car’s dashboard icons.

When business is busy, you can’t afford to waste time fumbling with your software’s interface to access a certain feature. The line stretches out the door, the customers’ toes start to tap, and the person you’re trying to serve thinks you look like a doofus. And that is not how you want your next Yelp review to read. You should be able to know what every single button does instantly, not after countless seconds of deliberation.  And you shouldn’t have to navigate through all sorts of options and secondary information when greeting a customer.  Eyes on the customer, not the iPad.

Listen: We get it ‘cause we’ve been there.

That’s why we took simple and traditional tools —paper waitlists, reservation books, and grease-board floor plans—and transformed them into one intuitive app that you can download now and use now. Find it in the App Store and Google Play Store, or sign up at www.waitlist.me.

As you deck the halls and adjust your playlists, you should seriously consider giving your waitlist and table management system an update, too. Reboot your hostess stand and kick that datebook-and-grease-board duo to the curb. We have a shiny digital solution that will keep your season truly merry and bright. We’re talking about a waitlist app that brings your queue, your reservations, and your tables together on one easy-to-use interface. It’s called Waitlist Me Platinum.

Why do you need it? Let us count the ways:

#1. You want an intuitive way to balance walk-ins and reservations

What’s worse than losing a reservation for a twosome on date night? Losing a reservation for a 12-top the week before Christmas. Yikes. Still, it happens. It’s easy to forget a group—yes, even a big one—when you’re struggling to handle the nightly dinner rush.

When you upgrade your restaurant to a digital waitlist and reservation system, you say “goodbye” to misplaced reservations. With Waitlist Me Platinum, you can use our flexible reservation views to see what your restaurant has in store for the holiday season and beyond. Plus, we built the app to incorporate reservations and walk-ins seamlessly. That makes it a cinch to navigate your guest list, no matter what.

#2. You want to quickly see the best place to seat parties in your restaurant

Forget about peering behind the host stand to survey available seating options. With simple digital table management, confusion over where to seat your large and small parties is a relic of yesteryear.

Set up a spatial floorplan, including saving different layouts and sections, so you can quickly adjust by time of day or day of the week. If you do a server rotation, we’ve got that option covered too. You can also flip to the grid view to see your tables in efficient ways, including by availability, by size, and by server. They’re color coded so that you can immediately tell what’s open and what’s not. 

#3. You want walk-ins in addition to reservations scheduled

A wall of waiting guests in your lobby is intimidating those looking to avoid a crowd. To them, one large group waiting for a few tables to be pushed together can look like a dozen parties—and that’s enough to make anyone want to try the restaurant down the street rather than risk standing in a line.

Technology can quickly clear out your entryway when you use Waitlist Me’s text notification feature to set your guests free. Instead of lingering around your hostess stand waiting for their name to be called, they can grab a seat at the bar or wander around nearby shops without worrying about losing their table. When they’re next in line you can let them know with a text, no shouting necessary.

#4. You want to ensure that all your guests have a great experience

With a paper waitlist and reservation system, you’re constantly flipping back and forth and scrabbling around for notes. It’s unprepared and unprofessional, and that’s frustrating for your hosts and for your customers. 

Our app brings a new level of sophistication to eating out. We designed it to be easy to use from the get-go, which will decrease employee training time. And because Waitlist Me is so simple, hosts can focus their attention where it should be: on the guests, rather than on the paper they use to keep track of them.

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 1,000^th 5-star rating, are offering a limited-time special, or you’re launching a loyalty program, anything goes. (Hint: funny cat videos work, too.)