Reopening gyms and fitness studios after Covid-19 lockdown - How TIMIFY can help

With many countries beginning to ease lockdown restrictions, it is clear that appointment booking and managing customer flow is going to be a major part of the new reality for many businesses.

TIMIFY’s appointment booking and scheduling software could be a crucial support to control the number and flow of people visiting your business at any given time and to bring structure, efficiency and convenience to how customers reconnect with your business.

In this article, we take a look at the measures impacting fitness trainers and gyms and how TIMIFY could be used to be compliant while maintaining a high quality customer experience.

Wellness & Fitness Sector

The complexity of physical exercise indoors, group classes and changing rooms make the return to business particularly difficult for the health and fitness sector.

At the same time, they will expect high demand from existing customers desperate to return, along with new customers looking to get fit following quarantine.

The first phases in most territories allow for gyms and other health and fitness businesses to offer individual classes only, or outdoor activities. 

Following phases will gradually allow small classes but with understandably strict measures around distancing and hygiene in classes and changing rooms.

Online classes for individuals and groups may remain viable even after quarantine ends, with some finding that experiments during lockdown have opened up opportunities with a whole new customer base.

What TIMIFY can do

1. Offer online booking for individual and group appointments
2. Organise virtual classes or training sessions.
3. Make services and equipment online bookable. 
4. Bring flexibility to your class scheduling and regulate the number of people visiting premises in a certain period of time
5. Automatically include time between appointments to sanitise rooms and equipment. Set different cleaning durations for different services or classes
6. Be prepared for contact tracing. A digital database keeps track of all customer visits and staff schedules in one place.

How to do it

• Easily activate online booking, giving customers the convenience of browsing for their preferred appointment time any time, from any device. By shifting your bookings to online appointments only, you will reduce the number of drop-ins and the possibility of queues forming outside your gym or fitness studio.
• When a client books online, all personal information will be saved to the customer database. If client interactions needed to be traced in relation to Covid-19, you can instantly find the booking and visit histories in the TIMIFY Calendar, as well as a clear overview of the staff resources that were working at the time.
• Manage resource availability in the TIMIFY calendar, including individual employees, enabling customers to easily book an appointment with their favourite trainer
• Make machines or rooms online bookable. You decide on the number of bookings allowed in a certain time period or changeover times in order to comply with social distancing 
• Add buffer times between appointments, allowing space between customer visits and time for cleaning processes. Customers don’t see the buffer time, but it gets auto-added to your calendar when a booking is made
• Set different appointment durations for different classes and add all resources needed for this service to take place: instructor, room and equipment. All resources will be auto booked in the calendar whenever a customer books that service
• Offer online booking for group classes, setting limits on maximum number of attendees
• Activate online payment in advance to speed up visits and limit cash and card handling
• Customise the content of the TIMIFY booking profile page to inform customers of any equipment they must bring or new hygiene procedures to follow
• Promote online booking on Facebook, via newsletters and WhatsApp, or even with QR code stickers in the window of your premises, with TIMIFY's Booking Link App
• Continue to offer virtual classes where possible, using TIMIFY video apps to auto-add video conferencing sessions where required. Manage all types of class in the same calendar.

TIMIFY’s wide range of functions are helping businesses small and large deal with the impact of COVID-19. To learn more about our solution and how it can benefit your business, visit our website and start a conversation with one of our representatives.