Mimosa- A Restaurant Waitlist Powered by Twilio and Trello
Out to brunch at a small restaurant during the busy summer season the host was overwelmed checking if tables were ready, answering the phone for reservations, and talking with walk-in customers. While we waited I thought if there could be an easier way to help handle reservations with a SMS system. The result was Mimosa a Twilio powered SMS system that the restaurant can manage with a Trello board!
Mimosa allows customers to manage their reservation through text messages. Customers can:
- Join the waitlist
- Cancel their reservation
- See how many people are ahead of them on the waitlist
The restaurant can use a Trello board to manage the waitlist. Each card on the board represents a customer with information about the reservation collected by SMS (like the number of people in the party). The Trello board informs the restaurant how is on the waitlist, cancellations, seated guests, no shows, and whose table is ready.
Moving cards around the board triggers different actions using the Trello API. For example, when a customer's table is ready moving the card from the "Waitlist" to "Table is Ready" column will automatically send a SMS to alert the customer. In addition, each customer card also has programmable buttons to send reminders to the customer if they haven't showed up for their reservation.
Overall, this was a fun project to build entirely on stream. The project demonstrated how small businesses could leverage APIs like Twilio and Trello to improve their customer experience. The general outline here could also be retrofitted to a number of other similar use cases like managing appointments. You could also follow this template and connect your Trello board to a Twilio Voicemail line. A model could categorize the voicemail and then create a card with a summary of the customer's voicemail so business can quickly sift through the calls they receive. Lots of possibilities!
Anyways, check out the code on GitHub and give it a try yourself!
