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Waitlist Me adds table management to app

Waitlist Me announced that it is rolling out a new approach to table management designed to help restaurant operators provide faster and better service to their customers.

November 19, 2015

Waitlist Me announced it is rolling out a new approach to table management designed to help restaurant operators provide faster and better service to their customers. The new features are integrated into its waitlist application and make it simple to get key information on table assignments and availability, according to a company press release.  

At the core of this approach is a flexible grid interface for displaying and sorting tables by number, size, status and time occupied. Open tables are spotted by color, and taken tables have time counters to indicate when they will likely become available. Sorting tables by size and time dimensions narrows down the best options for waiting customers and improves the accuracy of estimated wait times, the release stated. When waiting customers are assigned to tables, their seating times are also displayed in the table management view to give more insight into availability and to avoid double booking.

"Table management is a natural extension of Waitlist Me, and we have spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this right,” said Brian Hutchins, Waitlist Me CEO. "We wanted to innovate on the traditional floor map, and dug into how we could design a solution that was optimized for speed and efficiency. By using a more dynamic representation of tables, Waitlist Me helps simplify the amount of data needed in different scenarios, so users can make smarter decisions faster.”

The size of the boxes in the grid layout can be customized to show different levels of information, with larger sizes showing the names and notes entered for upcoming and seated customers. The uniform size and format of table representations allows similar types of information to be scanned quickly, so that different types of users can view what they need in specific ways. For example, a hostess can check estimated arrival times for open tables, a busboy might watch tables that have been occupied the longest for people leaving, and a manager may survey the notes and pay special visits to customers celebrating birthdays or special occasions.

"Beyond serving different needs for different roles within a restaurant, the new resource management features have been designed to be flexible to extend to other types of businesses,” Hutchins said. "Whether your business assigns customers to tables, staff, or other resources, you can serve them better by effectively tracking and managing the assignments with Waitlist Me."

The new table management features are part of Waitlist Me Pro, a new subscription that includes unlimited usage of all the waitlist, reservations and table management features for $39.99 a month, according to the release.