Waitwhile allows you to manage a large variety of customer flows for your business. Your guests may go from a scheduled appointment, through to your waitlist and track their arrival or delayed status before getting served.
To track where your guests are in their customer flows, we use States and Tags. In this article we will breakdown what this means.
States:
Statuses are a direct result of an action taken by the staff, the guest or an automation. It marks the stages in the lifecycle of a visit.
BOOKED: The visit is a booking, it is active and is awaiting to be served.
WAITLISTED: The visit is added to the waitlist, it is active and waiting to be served.
SERVED: The visit is added to the serving queue, the status changes from BOOKED or WAITLISTED to SERVED and stays in that status till it is completed and no longer in the serving queue.
COMPLETE: The booking or waitlisted visit is no longer active, it has been fulfilled.
Tags:
The tags can serve different purposes. They can be used to notify the staff members of an important update on the visit, and they can also explain how a visit got the status tag it has.
EXPIRED: The visit got completed by the auto-remove rule that can be set up for the visits in the booking calendar, waitlist and serving queue.
CANCELLED: The guest, a staff member or the auto remove automation can add this tag to indicate that the guest cannot or could not attend their visit. This tag does not automatically complete the visit, unless it was added by the automation. A booking or waitlisted visit will stay in the queue or calendar in BOOKED or WAITLISTED status till a staff member clicks on the button to remove it. Then it will change from BOOKED or WAITLISTED to COMPLETED status and CANCELLED tag.
NO-SHOW: This tag works similarly to CANCELLED. However this can only be added by the staff or the auto remove automation. It indicates that the guest did not show up to their appointment or waitlisted visit and they did not notify the business about their absence.
DELAYED: This is an information tag that can be added by either the guest or a staff member. It serves the purpose of letting the business know that the guest is not going to arrive in time. It does not change anything in the visit's status and it is not tied to any actions or automations in the backend.
ARRIVED: This is an information tag that can be added by either the guest or a staff member. It serves the purpose of letting the business know that the guest has arrived to the building and is ready to be served. It does not change anything in the visit's status and it is not tied to any actions or automations in the backend.
CONFIRMED: This is an information tag that can be added by either the guest or a staff member. It serves the purpose of letting the business know that the guest intends to attend their visit (e.g.: DELAYED and CONFIRMED used together is a quick way to let the business know that the guest is late but they will show up, so the staff member shouldn't mark them as NO-SHOW immediately). It does not change anything in the visit's status and it is not tied to any actions or automations in the backend.
FLAGGED: This can only be added by the staff members. It is an information tag that the business can use in any way they wish by associating flagged visits with specific internal processes (e.g.: flagged guests didn't fill the necessary paperwork yet that is required for fulfilling the service, so they should be asked to do so upon their arrival). It can also be used for blocking people from joining the queue or booking an appointment if these options are toggled off:
REMOVED = this tags is either added as a result of a staff member action or by the automation. It indicates that the visit did not go through its natural lifecycle, it was completed by getting deleted.