This week, we've made some much requested improvements to the Public Waitlist and Public Waitlist Check-in pages.

Here's an example with Resources and Services showing:

Here's how it can look when showing the Estimated Wait for each guest.

→ Enable this under Waitlist Settings > Advanced > Public Waitlist

2. Improvements to Waitlist Closed page

We've also made improvements to the functionality and display of the Waitlist Closed page that shows when a visitor comes outside of your working hours. 

It should now display this page more accurately and instantly redirect the user if your waitlist opens or closes while the guest is trying to sign up.

Waitwhile can finally say "Ahoj" and greet your team in Czech. The entire product interface and customer-facing experiences can now be fully translated to Czech, Dutch and Swedish along with 10+ other languages!

Here's a quick video demo to show you how it works. Plus, we have many more languages coming up in the next weeks and months!

-> To switch language, go to Localization Settings > Languages.

Making Waitwhile's product experience lightning fast and reliable are always at the top of our priority list.

To this end, we've worked hard on some backend changes to improve speed and performance. Changes include:

• Upgraded to the latest Angular framework (V11) 
• Deprecated 5+ old web libraries that we no longer need
• Closed out 30+ minor bugs and glitches
• Improved load time when switching pages

In the months ahead, we will focus on making things even faster, securer and more reliable with a number of under-the-hood improvements.

Resource management in Waitwhile is really powerful to manage which staff member or equipment is used to service a guest. 

We've now made it even more powerful by being able to control how fast your resources operate and if some are faster than others. 

For example, maybe you have two barber resources - Joe and Sam. Joe works his blade super fast and completes customers in half the time it takes Sam, who is more diligent and thorough. By default, Waitwhile will assume that each barber works equally quickly which may negatively impact your wait time estimations.

With today's update, you can now control how fast each resource works versus the standard service duration. You can control this under the Edit Resource dialog with a handy slider that you can drag and drop for the optimal speed modifier!

"Saved Replies" are super handy when you want to quickly respond to your guests' most common questions. You can create a saved reply from the Chat dialog and insert it into a dialog with just a click.

We've now made it easier to organize these and sort them in a way that works best for you. You can move your most common Saved Replies to the top of the list and less common to the bottom. 

→ Learn more about Saved Replies in our help article

We've now moved all settings for how guests join your waitlist or schedule bookings into one simple place: Self Check-in Settings.

Here you can control how you'd like to allow your guests to join your waitlist or make bookings including:

• via web link
• by sending a text message
• by scanning a QR code
• via Google Maps
• via our new search feature on waitwhile.com/search

You can also customize the check-in experience with fine-grained controls:

Check in via SMS 💬

Among the new features we support is to allow guests to register by sending a text message (only for North America and paid plans). You can control what keywords should trigger the SMS check-in action and if a guest should be auto-added to your waitlist or first provide more information.

Check in via QR code 📱

We now let you download a QR code for your links that you can print on signage and collateral that you can share with customers.

Check in via Google or search 🔍

You can now control if your waitlist or booking page can be found on Google Maps, via our new business search on Waitwhile.com or organically in search results online.

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We hope this update makes it easier than before to manage how your guests can join your waitlist and schedule bookings!

You can allow your guests to join as a party to your waitlist or when they schedule an appointment. When they register, they can let you know the size of their party (e.g. 4 people).

We now allow you to set a maximum allowed party size that can be different for your waitlist or your appointments.

For example, you can allow a party of 8 to join your waitlist but only a party of 2 to schedule an appointment.

→ Set your max party size for bookings under Booking Settings > Customer Info > Party Size and for your waitlist under Waitlist Settings > Customer Info > Party size

We've added better support for controlling how your guests can pick "Services" when they join your waitlist or schedule an appointment.

You can now set if a guest can pick multiple services or just one at a time. 

You can also choose if they're required to pick at least 1 service or if its optional and they can register without picking a service. You can even control if a certain Service Category is required but another one isn't.

→ Update Services settings under Waitlist Settings > Customer Info > Edit > Services.

We take security very seriously at Waitwhile. Today, we added the ability to ensure that bots or scripts cannot be used to create fake visits or appointments in your Waitwhile account.

We achieve this by using reCAPTCHA v3 on your public Waitwhile pages. Enabling this will never interrupt your real users - only scripts and bots -  so you don't have to worry about it affecting your conversion rates.

This will be made default for every Waitwhile account in a few weeks but if you want it right now, you can enable it under Waitlist Settings > Advanced > Security > Enable bot prevention.

Happy and safe waitlisting!

We now let you export your waitlist and booking statistics across all your locations in one simple spreadsheet report. It couldn’t be easier to share your great success with the rest of your company!

You can export a summary report with monthly usage metrics for each location, or a detailed report where you get data for every single location, resource and service on a very granular level.