Wednesday, April 25th, 2018

BY waitlistme,

Waitlist Me makes it easy for your customers to let you know with a quick text response whether they are cancelling or on their way, so you know whether to expect them or not and can plan accordingly.  We are now combining that simplicity with more flexibility for handling other types of text responses, so you have more visibility into what your customers are thinking and can make smarter decisions faster.

Customers can send two pre-defined responses to text messages to let you know whether they are coming or not. If a customer texts back a “2”, you will see a “coming soon” message in the notes area of the waitlist view. If they text back a “3” the message will say “not joining” and the row will flash. The default notification that is sent to customers when you press to notify them explains these options and looks like this (you can always edit):

Text received


If people text back something other than a 2 or a 3, you’ll see “text reply” in their row on their waitlist.

Text response waitlist


Tapping on their row will open up the Edit Party screen, which will show their text. You can see things like if they mentioned how long they would be, if they had a quick question, or didn’t understand whether to use a 2 or a 3 and just replied back with something like “Cancel”. You can also see other important details in the Customer Visit section, such as when you notified them it was their turn, how long they were quoted, and how long they have been waiting.

Text visit history


Pro users have the additional feature to send custom text responses to texts received, up to three times per customer visit. The point is to keep things simple for you and your customers rather than get into a long chat with them that could be time consuming.

Text response Pro


If a customer tries to call the assigned phone number in response to the text or call coming from that number, they will hear a message explaining that the number is only used for notifications and it will provide them your regular business number to call. Pro users have the option to create a custom text-to-speech message for handling these inbound calls.

Here is more on customizing notifications.