Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the organization.
Waitwhile is in the business of helping other businesses manage their lines and crowds. Yup. we work all day with the incredibly boring everyday problem of waiting in line.
But it’s a hairy problem to work on: humans spend about 1 Trillion hours every year in pointless lines. And we're quite good at tackling it; our technology has queued over 100M people and saved over 6,000 years of waiting in line. Our customers include IKEA, Louis Vuitton, Amazon, Patagonia, Tribeca Film Festival, Applebee's, SXSW and some of the largest hospitals and government agencies.
I’m the CEO and co-founder, so I get to spend all day working on a number of challenges big and small.
What is the story behind starting this company?
There were a few underlying reasons we felt we wanted to tackle the very boring problem of lines:
- People spend a god awful amount of time in lines and long lines are affecting virtually every industry - restaurants, retail, real estate, offices, hospitals, government, events, to name a few.
- People have become less patient and wait times are a bigger consideration when choosing where to go, eat, play and visit. Searches related to waiting times have been growing very fast over the past years, especially on phones.
- It’s a really boring, everyday problem and so there is still limited competition. Most businesses are still using pagers, buzzers, number slip systems, and really outdated technologies for managing their lines.
We felt that there was an opportunity to build the definitive queue management platform to solve lines once and for all.
What are your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
An in-house team of crack engineers, mostly.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition?
Our goal with Waitwhile is to deliver the best possible waiting experience you can imagine as a service. We’re tackling the problem of waiting in line at a very deep level, both the psychological experience, the wait time estimation, and operational efficiency using machine learning, but also a delightful and really sleek experience on the design level.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
Every conceivable business has some form of a line that can be improved and optimized. Whether it's a store, an office, a salon, a restaurant, a hospital, a tech support hub, a visitor center, a museum, an amusement park... you get it, any place where people wait, Waitwhile can help businesses streamline their crowds.
Our customers include IKEA, Louis Vuitton, Amazon, Patagonia, Tribeca Film Festival, Applebee's, SXSW, and some of the largest hospitals and government agencies.
Please share some of the services that you offer for which clients approach you the most for?
Our virtual waitlist software-as-a-service and appointment scheduling feature, but also our capacity management and occupancy tracking feature have become really popular during COVID-19 with more crowd regulations in place.
What is your customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
We closely track NPS and customer satisfaction through a variety of ways - both quantitative surveys and in-person qualitative interviews. Generally, we have exceptionally high customer satisfaction and loyalty - which also shows in our reviews online.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
We provide real-time chat support, email support, and phone support. Availability is based on the plan - for our Enterprise clients we offer 24/7 phone support, but even our free plan has access to very responsive chat support. We tend to resolve an issue within less than 1 hour.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)
The Waitwhile plans are organized around how many customers you add to your virtual waitlist or appointment schedule every month. We have a forever-free plan that lets you add up to 100 customers per month, and then different tiers for 1000, 10k, and unlimited customers.
We don’t have any contracts or lock-ins. You can cancel anytime and we offer both month-to-month, quarterly or annual plans.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
Waitwhile is a subscription-based service.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2020?
Our standard plans range from free to around $300 per month.
Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?
We believe Waiwhile will be ubiquitous in all sorts of lines and crowd management situations across every conceivable industry. We hope to help to reduce the amount of time that humans spend waiting in lines and making their time more productive.
