Waitwhile is happy to announce an extremely powerful feature update for automation of the guest check-in flow: QR Serve! This functionality has been around for a while, but has been revamped and improved to better help you provide the most seamless customer or guest experience possible. 

With this improvement, you can streamline your operations by immediately moving guests to the “Serving” state from the Waitwhile app by scanning their QR code. This allows you to move your guests through the customer flow automatically, and easily track which guests have been and are currently being served, all while keeping your focus on providing excellent customer service.

QR guest serving is just one more way that Waitwhile is helping businesses manage their customer flow and enhance the customer experience. We are committed to providing the best tools and features for our customers, and we can't wait to see how this new feature will improve their operations.

This feature is available for all users on Starter, Business, and Enterprise plans. Set up your QR Scan Action and start automating your customer flows by going to:

→ Settings > Location: Serving

We are glad to present a new addition to an old feature for Waitwhile that makes it easier for cafes and coffee shops to manage their waitlists and improve the customer experience. Starting today, companies with the business type "Cafe" in Waitwhile can now enable a new option that allows their guests to join the waitlist directly from Google Maps or Google Search.

This feature was previously only available for companies with the business type "Restaurant", and we're thrilled to now offer it to cafes as well. By enabling this option, cafes can provide an even more convenient and streamlined experience for their guests, and reduce wait times for their customers.

We understand how important it is for cafes to create a positive customer experience, and we believe that this feature will help them do just that. As always, we are committed to providing the best tools and features for our customers, and we will continue to explore new ways to improve the customer experience. 

Enable this by by first making sure your business type is set to “Cafe” or “Restaurant” here: 

→ Settings > Location: General > Business Info 

And then toggling on the feature here: 

→ Settings > Public: Waitlist

We're excited to announce an update in our Developers section - Status tags for webhook requests! Now you can easily track the status of your webhook requests with just a glance. Tags show the current status of each endpoint URL - whether it's Active, Failed, or Disabled - making it easy for you to quickly identify any issues and take action.

With this update, you'll be able to manage your webhook requests more effectively, and have more control over your workflow. 

We're always striving to find new ways to improve our user experience and we believe that this feature will make your experience with Waitwhile more efficient and hassle-free.

This feature is available for users on our Enterprise plans. Check it out by going to: 

→ Settings > Developers: API & Webhooks

User roles and permissions have been fixed AND improved!

You may have previously experienced some confusion with your custom roles. All users would see all product elements, regardless of their permissions and they would receive an “insufficient scope” error message when attempting to take actions that they didn’t have permissions for.

We have now made two important improvements:

1. For those users that don’t have the permission to perform a certain action, we have removed the visual elements leading to that action within the product. Example: If you don't have the permissions to add a new visit, you will no longer see the “Add” button.

2. We have nested any permissions that have a dependency on another one, beneath the dependent one. Example: In order to delete a visit, you also need to have the permission to edit a visit. Therefore, the “Remove visit” permission is nested below the “Edit visits” permission. So when you toggle on “Remove visit”, “Edit visits” automatically gets toggled on too. See screenshot below.

We have some awesome news! We know how important it is to all users of the Waitwhile waitlist to display accurate and updated wait times to their valued customers. Therefore, we have now officially launched our new Wait Time Machine Learning feature which we call "Intelligent" (because it's pretty smart)! 🎉

Going forward, you will now have the choice of two estimation models to help predict your wait times.

You can read all about this in our help article "A Guide For Setting Up Estimated Wait Time".

Intelligent Wait Time Estimation will be available for all our users. All you have to do to enable it is click on the "Intelligent" button when choosing an estimation model. 

--> You can find this feature by logging into your Waitwhile account and going to: Settings > Waitlist > Wait Times

By popular demand, we are now introducing “Follow-up” messages for everyone using the Waitwhile waitlist or the bookings! While users currently can send out automated “Completed” messages immediately after a visit, our “Follow-up” messages allow for an added level of customization. 

These messages can be configured to be sent out at any time following the visit, enabling the users to communicate better with their guest. For example, the “Follow up” message can be set to: 

• Remind previous guests that it’s time for them to book another appointment. This is very useful to drive repeat business and keep customers happy.
• Send delayed “Thank You” messages following a guest’s visit, to make sure that the guest receives the message after they’ve left your premises. 

You can enable follow-up messages for waitlist and bookings by going to: 

→ Settings > Messages > Waitlist messages
→ Settings > Messages > Booking messages  

Printing information about customer visits can be super useful which is why printing capabilities within Waitwhile are getting an upgrade with added flexibility! 

While we have previously offered the ability to print individual visits, you can now also print a list view of a number of visits 🙌  And canceled bookings or blocked slots will be automatically excluded from the printed list.

With this update, we of course made sure to redesign the print-out templates to look clean and easy to read for everyone!

You can find this feature by going to "Customers" in the side menu, clicking on the three dots in the top right corner, and then choosing "Print". 

Customers > “...” > Print

Enterprise customers! While previously you could not choose an authentication method for webhooks, we've now added one: OAuth 2.0 with JWT Bearer Token. This adds an extra layer of security to webhook authentication. 

Webhooks are used to read events happening in Waitwhile, so they can be connected to your other systems. For example: When a visit event is created, you can use a webhook to add that visit to your CRM system automatically!

Stay organized and on top of your Bookings, past, present, and future. You now have the ability to sort your Bookings by all time.

--> Check out your Bookings history!

If you have more than one Service or Resource category, you can now further customize how to display them for your customers and staff when adding a visit. 

For Services, go to Settings > Location > Services

For Resources, go to Settings > Team > Resources

You can now choose from the following options:

• Show all Services/Resources in one list

• Show Services/Resources grouped by category

• Show each category as a separate input field