How to manage your restaurant wait list - and keep your customers happy!

Today no-booking restaurants are fewer and far between and long restaurant queues – the physical ones anyhow – are not seen as often. However, queues at restaurants haven’t disappeared entirely. Sites in high-footfall areas such as city centres, tourist hotspots and shopping centres catering for more spontaneous dining occasions, still rely on walk-ins. And with no-shows still causing issues – 14% of people still fail to turn up for bookings according to a 2021 report by CGA[1] - many restaurants will welcome walk-ins to fill those suddenly empty tables.  

Effective queue management is the key to keeping customers happy even on your busiest days. Here at Access Hospitality we use our reservation management system functionality to enable our clients to optimise their queue management to keep their customers content and reduce the stress on their front-of-house teams as they try to manage a busy service. By the end of this article you’ll learn exactly how you can manage the queues at your venue effectively and the impact on your business if you get this wrong.  

What is a restaurant waitlist? 

A restaurant waitlist is a way of managing queues and bringing order to a potentially stressful situation. Keeping an ordered list, outlining who is waiting for a table and the number of people in their party is the first step in the process and will enable the restaurant manager to keep a handle on who to seat and when.  

 If you want to ensure harmonious restaurant queues, and avoid losing customers at this crucial point, you’ll need to manage them. Thankfully there are plenty of ways you can optimise your processes to make queue management more effective in your venue.  

Why is waitlist management important for restaurants?  

If queues aren’t a regular occurrence, you might well ask this question, but just one badly managed restaurant queue could cause financial and reputational damage to your business.  

• Queue abandonment: If potential Ad diners are stood in line, waiting for a long time with no communication from you or your staff about how long it will be before they are seated, who can blame them if they leave and head to one of your competitors instead?  
• Avoiding negative reviews: Even if they do stick around and wait for a table, a badly managed waitlist will start their experience off on the wrong foot and taint the whole occasion. In an age when social media and online review platforms enable anyone to air their views quickly and easily to the world, you don’t want to give them a reason to publish negative posts about your business.  
• Supports staff: Waitlist management isn’t just about your customers, either. When the system in place works efficiently, it aids your staff. If they know, at a glance, who they need to seat and when, they can plan ahead and help start their diners’ experiences off on the right track.  

 

3 tips to better queue management for restaurants

 We now know the importance of waitlist management, but the question is how do you manage a restaurant queue so it works well for all involved?  

1. Use virtual waitlists 

Customers are used to planning ahead and making use of online tools to book their desired restaurant. But even if they haven’t reserved in advance and want to chance a meal at your restaurant, it is likely they will reference your website before setting foot through the door, or joining a physical queue. The Hospitality Tech Shift Report found that 60% of potential diners look at menus, photos or reviews before visiting.  

Virtual waitlists tap into this growing reliance on technology by allowing your customers to add themselves to a queue online – through a website, using a dedicated kiosk, scanning a QR code, or by sending a text. Some systems allow you to add a waitlist widget to your website, showing the waitlist in real time, so customers know the extent of the wait before committing.  

Once added to the virtual waitlist, customers receive updates on where they are in the line straight to their smartphones, so they have a clearer idea of how long they’ll need to wait. Not only do virtual waitlists provide clarity for customers, they also allow staff to focus on serving those diners already in the restaurant. This way, there’s less need for someone to be manually recording names or responding to queries about the length of time it will take before customers will be seated.  

At Access, we’ve integrated this functionality directly into our booking software so that your customers are able to automatically add themselves to a queue, receive updates on their wait time and remove themselves if needed, all without any manual actions for staff.  

2. Use a restaurant queue management system 

A restaurant queue management system integrates with your reservation and table management systems. These joined-up systems allow for greater accuracy around timings and efficiencies on-site. If a customer finishes their meal earlier than expected, your restaurant manager simply updates their plan, which updates all areas – including the waitlist.  

This system is great for larger sites used to turning tables quickly, but even smaller independents might find it helps them run a more efficient site and reduce the number of front-of-house staff needed.  

 Using an automated system such as this has benefits for both your customers who are kept up-to-date in real time, and staff, who don’t have the added stress of answering queries on wait times.   

3. Create a positive waitlist experience 

Whether your waitlist is virtual or not, you should create the right experience at this stage, so that your customers have a positive impression from the beginning. No-one likes waiting, especially when hungry, but you can remove some of the pain in the following ways:  

• Communicate well – send regular updates on wait times so customers know how long they have before you seat them. This won’t speed up their wait, but it will keep them informed and give them the power to make a decision to stay, or go.  
• Keep waiting guests entertained - If you have the space, create an area for guests to hang out in while they wait. If your restaurant is family-friendly, provide a play table, or colouring packs to occupy waiting children. Sending customers to the bar first could help soften the wait for some customers and offering a seat and a menu to peruse will be welcomed by those unable to stand for long periods of time.  

For those restaurants who have seen queues build in the past and who can expect them in the future, operating a restaurant waitlist is good business sense. 

Using software to improve your restaurant queue management  

In this article we’ve explored the importance of queue management in a restaurant and how failing to deliver an effective service can impact in your reputation and lose you custom. We’ve also looked at the impact of software in queue management and the benefits of digitising your queue management process and waitlist in order to offer a more efficient service to your guests.  

As well as supplying the tools to effectively manage waitlists and queues, we are also helping our clients drive more bookings so they can avoid lengthy queues that might upset an increasingly impatient consumer base.  

If you’re ready to find out more about the software that can help you tackle queue management in your restaurant then get in touch or find out more about our restaurant booking system.

 

You might also be interested in:

• How to tackle no shows
• Should you implement a restaurant deposit policy?
• How to manage restaurant reservations
• How does an online restaurant booking system work?
• Access Collins brochure

 

Sources:

[1] CGA Strategy