At Tock, we believe hospitality tech should always feel as helpful and hospitable as your best team members. When we develop new features, we often follow up with hospitality businesses like you to understand how you’re using our tools. Many times, we ask: “How can we make this better?”
Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek at our recent Notify improvements, including what we learned from 10 restaurants and wineries who had the chance to try these features before they were officially released.
The Waitlist Challenge
Picture this: Doors are about to open for a busy Friday night, and a four-top cancels their 7:30 reservation. Your host is juggling pre-service sidework, making last minute menu updates, and answering the phone. By the time they get around to contacting people on the waitlist, it’s too late – that table sits empty during an otherwise busy service.
This scenario is all too familiar. Before Notify launched last year, managing a waitlist on Tock meant manually reaching out to guests whenever openings appeared. While personal outreach adds a nice touch, we heard loud and clear that it was often too time-consuming to handle consistently.
After we launched Notify’s automatic features, something interesting happened. We noticed many restaurants were still doing some manual notifications alongside the automatic ones. We were curious: why keep doing things manually when there’s a “set it and forget it” option?
Listening to Your Feedback
When we dug into the data, we found that the majority of our active Notify customers were using a combination of auto and manual notifications. On average, 29% of notifications continued to be manual. For some businesses, manual notifications still represented the majority of their efforts.
But more importantly, we learned that in a 30-day period, the combination of manual and auto notifications resulted in 84% more fulfillments than using auto notifications alone. This was a critical insight: there was real value in that manual effort.
So we asked customers: why are you still sending manual notifications? Their answers revealed something important: cancellations weren’t the only way new availability opened up.
The hosts we spoke to were still notifying waitlisted guests when they:
- Moved parties of 2 to larger tables to free up smaller tables
- Removed timeline blocks used to hold tables for private parties
- Shortened turn times on a few reservations to squeeze more covers
…and various other situations that didn’t involve cancelled reservations. We also discovered that while our customers found Notify to be helpful, all of our interviewees said they would like to set customized prioritization logic for who gets notified first from the waitlist. They wanted to prioritize VIPs, guests with higher lifetime value, repeat visitors, and club members.
From Your Input to Implementation
Armed with these insights, we created two simple but powerful improvements:
Notify for All New Availability
Instead of only sending alerts when someone cancels, Auto Notify now catches all types of new availability – whether it’s from reassigning tables, removing blocks, or releasing holds. It’s like having a dedicated team member whose only job is to watch for any new openings and immediately contact waiting guests.
Notify Your Most Important Guests First
Priority Notify is a simple way to prioritize certain guests when availability opens up. Since many of you already use tags like “Friend of Chef,” “Regular,” or “Wine Club Member,” we made it possible to send notifications to these tagged guests first, before alerting others on the waitlist.
Real Results from Real Restaurants*
We tested these features with a few restaurants and wineries for six weeks, and the results were impressive:
- Restaurants sent far fewer manual notifications (they dropped from about 16% to just 8% of all notifications)
- The system caught 70% more opportunities to fill tables
- Some restaurants saw more than double the number of waitlist guests actually booking tables
- Most importantly, restaurants saved staff time while actually filling more tables
And while this experiment only included a small group of businesses, here’s a detail restaurant owners will love: during our trial, guests who book from the waitlist consistently spend more than those with regular reservations.
How Different Restaurants Are Using These Features
These improvements work for all types of operations:
- For high-end, reservation-focused restaurants, the system automatically handles cancellations on closed days, while staff can still manually prioritize special occasions or VIPs when needed.
- For high-volume operations, it’s all about “set it and forget it” – letting the system catch cancellations automatically, with occasional manual intervention during slower periods.
- For wineries and tasting rooms, where out-of-town visitors make last-minute cancellations particularly costly, the system serves as a constant assistant, while staff can still manually prioritize club members for special events.
What we’ve learned through this process reinforces what we already believed: the best restaurant technology shouldn’t replace personal hospitality – it should make it easier to deliver.
Your new and improved Notify is like having a staff member who never takes a day off, constantly watching for opportunities to fill your tables. But it still gives you the flexibility to step in when you want to add that personal touch.
*Results based on Tock data from February to March 2025 for select businesses participating in an early release of Priority Auto Notify.
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Request a demo to learn more about switching to Tock. If you’re already a customer, talk to hospitality about turning on Priority Auto Notify today.
