Efficiency is key to a profitable restaurant, especially during peak hours. Waitlist Me’s “Capacity Utilization” feature is an advanced scheduling tool designed to solve a common headache for hosts and managers: the inefficient use of tables.

Here is a breakdown of how this feature helps businesses optimize their seating automatically.

What is Capacity Utilization?

At its core, this feature is an automated gatekeeper for your table assignments. It allows you to set “minimum party size” rules for specific tables. When a customer schedules a reservation online, the system checks these rules in real-time to ensure that small parties don’t block large tables.

Key Benefits:

1. Prevent Inefficient Seating: Stops a party of two from booking an eight-top, saving that inventory for larger, more profitable groups.
2. Reduce Manual Work: Hosts no longer need to play “table Tetris” or manually intervene to move reservations around; the system assigns the best-fit table automatically.
3. Smart Self-Scheduling: If the only tables available are too large for a requested party size (based on your rules), the system will simply hide that time slot from the customer, preventing a bad booking before it happens.

How It Works in Practice

Imagine a busy Friday night between 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM. You have two large tables (Table 1 and Table 2) that fit up to 8 people, but you’ve set a rule that they require a minimum of 5 guests.

1. Scenario A: A customer tries to book for 5 people. The system sees Table 1 is free and fits the criteria, so it instantly confirms the booking and assigns them to Table 1.
2. Scenario B: A second customer tries to book for 2 people. The system checks the inventory. While a large table is free, the customer does not meet the “minimum party size” rule. The system shows no availability for that time slot, preserving your large tables for big groups.
3. Scenario C: A third customer tries to book for 8 people. The system sees Table 1 is taken but Table 2 is free, so it assigns them to Table 2.

Why You Should Use It

This feature is ideal for restaurants with predictable table layouts who want to “set it and forget it.” By automating these decisions, you protect your revenue-generating large tables, stabilize kitchen flow, and ensure your staff can focus on service rather than reservation management.

Waiting is never fun wherever you are. NoshList started as an app to help restaurants manage their waitlists and send text and phone notifications to guests when their tables were ready, and is now used by many types of businesses to improve the customer experience whenever there are waits. Here is a great example of a smart business owner at Kumon that uses NoshList not only to to shorten wait times for students ready to be picked up, but also to improve child safety, performance excellence, and business efficiencies.

Kumon® Learning Centers have an after-school academic enrichment program designed to help children achieve more than they ever thought they could. The centers strive to teach self-learning and achievement in the academic areas of reading and math through an enrichment program that outlines steady goals for each student.

Most students spend 30-60 minutes during their individual sessions and are required to attend sessions two times a week.

“The philosophy of Kumon is to build mastery of the subject. Each subject is divided into a series of levels and each level is focused on a learning fundamental built on top of the previous ones,” said Krishnadas Kootale who partners with his wife Geeta Krishnadas as Kumon Franchise operators for the Kumon Denville – South Center in New Jersey. “Because this is a long-term program, we try to make it sustainable over the long haul.”

Each child is required to do homework and each one is given the time and patience needed to build greater mental stamina and focus. The goal, Kootale said, is to help the child build a strong foundation of knowledge and learning skills that they can carry with them throughout their academic career and beyond.

While the program is taught in a safe environment, Geeta and Kootale were a little concerned with what happens sometimes after class. While parents are required to pick up the children from the waiting area and children required to wait in the reception area until their parents arrive once a session is complete, sometimes students would leave the premises into the parking lot looking for their parents.

Since the location was near a state highway, the couple wanted to take extra steps to ensure the safety of their students. “Whenever you have kids, parking lots and roads nearby there are always safety concerns,” Kootale said. “We didn’t want the children to move around unattended.”

While thinking about solutions for the waiting children, Kootale discovered how NoshList was used by restaurants to manage their waitlists. He was able to easily check out the app, and realized it was a perfect fit for his needs.

Now, when a student checks into the Kootale’s learning center, the parent’s contact information entered into the NoshList waitlist. At that point an alert goes out to the parent providing an estimated time to session completion. This eliminates the guesswork involved for parents who may be looking to run an errand or so while their children are in class. Once a student’s session is complete, Noshlist sends a message to the parent’s phone alerting that the child is ready for pick up. Once the parent arrives at Kumon, they enter into a classroom to check out their child and then leave together.

“The primary reason we considered NoshList was to set up a check-in check out system with parent alerts to avoid children moving unattended, which was not something we wanted,” Kootale said. “Parents like the flexibility of being able to leave during their child’s session and then be alerted when the session is completed; and with Noshlist we have such a system helping us ensure that parents drop off and pick up children at the reception area.”

While using NoshList, Kootale realized there were other benefits he hadn’t originally expected. With the analytics features, they are able to track each student’s time used in the center. They then cross reference the student’s study time against their performance, which helps them improve the educational experience for that child.

“At any time, we have the live list of the students in class. Anyone who takes longer on their studies, or who finishes sooner, we have that information in real time. We use that information for class review and plan management,” Kootale said. “This real-time information is quite valuable to us.”

“It’s really a great app!” Kootale said.

– By Valerie Killifer, special to NoshList

We are getting ready to head to NRA, and are happy to have reached 11 million diners seated through the NoshList waitlist app.

We have also added three key features to improve restaurant efficiency, which include customizable text message notifications, multi-restaurant management, and a customer-facing waitlist display. These are now available on iPad, iPhone, and Android devices.

The customizable text message notification feature gives restaurants the ability to modify their text messages for waitlist notifications and allows managers to better engage customers by adding a link to their website or menu, or to inform their diners about specials and promotions.

With the multi-restaurant management feature, new admin accounts allow owners or companies with multiple restaurants to login and see how each restaurant is doing from one account. We work with a number of large chain restaurants and wanted to give them more powerful tools to manage all of their stores’ waitlists. These new multi-restaurant administrative features are an introduction to all the advanced analytics and other tools we can provide to restaurant operations managers and owners of multiple restaurants.

The third new feature released this week lets any restaurant using NoshList display a public view of the waitlist that customers can check from their phones to see where they are in the list. The mobile version uses a custom link in the notification message to highlight each individual customer’s position in the list on his or her mobile phone.

NoshList will also be attending the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago this weekend, May 18-21, and will be located in the Technology section in the North Hall, Level 3 in Booth # 5867.

Waitlist Me Pro keeps the balance between your congenial, community atmosphere and top-notch customer service, by keeping things running smoothly and improving the waiting experience.   It is also designed to be intuitive and quick to use no matter how tech-savvy (or not) you and your clientele are.

Here are 4 customer-approved ways Waitlist Me Pro can help your barbershop:

Keep track of who’s busy (and who’s not)

What’s better than flipping through a paper calendar with scribbled-down availability? Honestly: just about anything. Waitlist Me Pro makes it easy to keep track of appointments for each barber at the same time as you manage your highly variable walk-in traffic.

The app allows you to see your upcoming appointments and the walk-in customers waiting for each barber as well as the customers they are currently serving and how long they have been with them. Waitlist Me’s intuitive visual layout shows the barbers who aren’t “in” as grayed out, while those who are busy are highlighted in red and show a time counter of how long they have been busy.  You can also see who the next person waiting for each barber is and what time they were told they would be served.

Run a more efficient business

Having a good time at work is a bonus. Enjoying your colleagues and your clientele? That’s the cherry on top of the sundae. But you are running a business—and that’s a reality you never forget.

Waitlist Me Pro keeps track of your resources, helping you focus a little more on the work you love and a little less on management. The app helps you keep track of many things: the amount of time your barbers spend on each client, how long customers wait before they hit the chair, who works the most and who works the least. You can run reports whenever you want and use the knowledge they impart to make decisions about staffing, expansion, business hours—anything and everything.

Customize your online waitlist and appointments tools

You know your business better than anyone. That’s why we built Waitlist Me Pro to give you as much freedom as possible over how you set up your waitlist and your appointments.

The pro-level app allows you to set your business hours as well as blackout days for appointments. Clients leave notes for you on their preferences or any accommodations they require. Have a regular client bringing a child in for his first cut? Prefer a certain style that might add on more time? All of that can be added as a note, allowing you to provide top-notch customer service, every single time.

Promote your loyalty program or current special offerings

Waitlist Me Pro offers the highest level of personalization. Whether you want to bring your brand colors and logo to the “add me” website widget or to a public waitlist you display online or in-store, Waitlist Me Pro lets you add custom HTML, change colors, and customize the wording.

If you offer a loyalty program, discounted products, or a new service, the public waitlist is a great way to let your clientele know. You can change the HTML to include graphics, videos, or plain text that keep your customers up-to-date on everything that’s going on in your shop.

For businesses looking to automate more of the reservation acceptance process, Waitlist Me has new ways to restrict how many reservations you accept by day and by hour. With a Waitlist Me Proo subscription, you can set reservation limits on the number of groups and people that you’d like on an hourly and daily basis. For example, if you don’t want any more than 4 groups to schedule themselves per hour, you can quickly set up that rule.

Simply press the gear icon in the app and head to Add Yourself > Scheduling Rules. Choose a day and you will be able to set the maximum number of people and groups you’ll allow by day and by hour.  There are four different options, but you can pick and choose the ones that work for your goals in managing capacity at your business. You can avoid having too many people schedule at the same time without all the work of tracking the usage of every single table at your restaurant or resource at your business. You can use the Copy Rules button at the bottom to apply these rules to every day, or set up each day separately.

That’s it! Your rules will apply to self scheduling done through the Web Widget and Kiosk, where customers will see a message when there isn’t availability for a particular time or day.  They wouldn’t be able to book that time, but could still check other times.

The rules will also trigger warnings within the Waitlist Me app if you try to schedule above the limit to make it easier to know when you might be overbooked.  Though it won’t block you from scheduling above the limits for cases where you know you can handle the booking.