As we emerge from the shadows of COVID-19, the chances are that your business will have reopened in some sense. You may be offering limited F2F appointments whilst still employing a virtual first approach. Embracing the ‘new normal’ can be difficult when trying to recover financially from a difficult few months and striking a balance will be difficult.

Adhering to current social distancing measures means that you will need to increase the time between treatments and classes to give your team time to wash their hands, change PPE and clean down any equipment or space before the next treatment or class. Additionally, classes will likely have to run with fewer attendees, meaning those slots should become gold dust amongst your clients. With fewer slots available for both treatments and classes, it’s important that you take full advantage of what you do have available and ensure don’t miss an opportunity to secure revenue.

Analysing service demand with waiting lists

There are a lot of unknowns on the road ahead. None of us can firmly predict how the rest of 2020 will play out across the physical therapy, fitness and wellness industries. In our last blog, we discussed the importance of being reactive to shifts in the demand of your services. Some of your clients may be anxious about returning to appointments or classes. There will come a time when clients will be ready to return but when they do, will you be equipped to handle the increased demand without losing business?

Gauging client demand and allocating resource can be difficult even in normal times. If a class is full, could you confidently schedule another safe in the knowledge that it would fill up? Waiting lists give you vital insight into how many clients are eager to return, when, and for which services. You can also get a sense of which staff members are in highest demand to allow you to tailor your rota. This can be key for scheduling shift rotations and avoiding staff burnout as discussed previously.

Automating waiting list communications

Most clinic and studio management software providers offer some form of waiting list functionality. We have seen some big players in the classes market leaning on Google Forms for waiting lists or practice management software that allows you to add clients to the list manually. Unlike other providers, TM3 Connect allows you to automate and prioritise waiting list slots through our end-to-end solution.

With TM3, if an appointment or class is full on your online bookings site then your clients can sign-up for the waiting list – entering them into an automation cycle. If a slot becomes available, they’ll receive an SMS and/or email with a link to accept the slot where they can also make payment online for the service. This link will remain active for 15 minutes before the offer is withdrawn and sent to the next person on the waiting list.

The typical use case for waiting lists would be to reduce the risk of empty slots at your clinic or studio however during these times – why not use them to estimate demand of services? For example, setup a class with a maximum attendee of 1 – activating the waiting list feature for anyone else attempting to book. Once people browse to your class, they’ll be able to join the waiting list which will give you an insight into demand without committing to running the class. If waiting list sign-ups are high enough you can edit the class in your diary to increase the maximum number of attendees to run the class!

Marketing your services to drive waiting list sign-ups

Having your services sit idle isn’t going to give you an insight into client demand patterns. By coupling the marketing integrations on TM3 with direct service URLs, you’ll be able to execute a multichannel approach. Hook your service URLs up to your social media accounts, email marketing efforts and landing pages/ads to drive signups.

At the end of it all, our Google Tag Manager integration will give you the data required to analyse what channels your sign-ups and conversions are coming from – again allowing you to allocate resource.

If you would like to know more about automated waiting lists, payments and marketing on TM3, click here to get in touch with our sales team to arrange a demo today.