As the calendars roll over to a shiny new year, your fitness business is approaching wave after wave of busy seasons. With January comes the New Year’s resolution crowd, followed by the spring breakers and the bikini body-seekers. Make sure you have the right tools to optimize your memberships and customer service when things get busy.

Waitlist Me is the app that can help you run your gym or fitness studio better this new year. Its core features are a great place to start—learn more about them here—and here are a few additional benefits of what Waitlist Me Pro has to offer:

Get the most out of your special equipment

Specialized equipment like massage chairs, red light therapy, and tanning areas can be a big investment. Waitlist Me’s resource management feature helps you get a better return on that investment by using it more effectively.  You can set up your equipment, rooms, or special services as resources, and assign customers to those resource.

Our resource management features allow you to easily track what is in use and for how long, so you can give your customers better time estimates for availability and improve your utilization rates.  Combined with our built-in analytics system, you can get a better sense of your usage patterns.  Not sure if you should invest in another purchase? The data the app gathers automatically can help you make decisions based on facts, not guesses.

Maximize your people resources

Experts on your staff, like trainers and massage therapists, are assets you want to make the most of. Chances are you can boost their productivity—and the value they add to your gym’s customer experience—by tweaking their scheduling or the way they interact with your clientele. Waitlist Me helps you do that.

While the regular version of the Waitlist Me app lets you schedule appointments and add customers to the waitlist to meet with different members of your staff, the pro-level follows customer activity once they get off the waitlist. The downloadable reports chart the data over time, and lets you see when you need to increase (or decrease) staffing levels and if a certain specialization or individual is in high demand.

Let customers make appointments and reservations on their own time

A waitlist is all well and good, but what if your customers could go straight from the locker room into a session with a personal trainer? With Waitlist Me Pro’s appointment widget, they can.

The web widget is an easy-to-install addition to your website that lets customers send appointment requests for staff or reservation requests for special equipment or rooms. The widget allows you to set business hours for the appointments—perhaps you only want to take them during typically quiet hours, or maybe you want to use them during peak workout periods. And, unlike old-school reservations that tether an employee to the front-desk phone, Waitlist Me Pro reservations are available online 24/7, freeing up your staff and making life convenient for your clientele.

Promote specials and events

Hosting a competition? Running a sale on merchandise? Running a bring-a-friend special? Let your customers know! Waitlist Me Pro’s customizable public waitlist feature lets you display custom messages and promotions when they check their place in line.  You can bring your branding to your waitlist and include graphics, coupons, discount codes, announcements, videos—just about anything you can think of.

As people flock to tourist destinations throughout the Northeast for their summer vacations, local restaurants are using Waitlist Me to handle the surge in demand. According to the National Restaurant Association, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are expected to hire a combined total of 100,000 new employees this summer to address the rush of seasonal customers, and restaurants are turning to technology to help manage it.

Many are using this new text-based app to increase customer satisfaction and improve business results. By using the Waitlist Me app, available on Android and iOS tablets, restaurants can track waiting guests and send them text notifications when their table is ready. This gives customers the freedom to explore the surrounding area while waiting for a table, which leads to fewer walkaways and greater customer satisfaction.

A little ways up the coast from Boston, the Portland Lobster Company is known for its award-winning Lobster Roll that customers can enjoy while sitting outside by the water. Open from May to October, they get about 70% of their traffic from tourists, and run waits of 30-35 minutes per night.

“We use Waitlist Me on a 10-inch Android tablet at the front for the hostess to add people to the list and estimate wait times, and the person bussing the tables has a 7-inch tablet to notify people that their table is available,” said Ethan Morgan, general manager at Portland Lobster Company. “This saves us a few minutes on each table, which adds up to shorter wait times and happier customers.”

With its open-air gazebo and large deck overlooking the Genesee River in Rochester, New York, Schooner’s Riverside Pub is another seasonal restaurant that has a perfect location for summer dining.  “We are slammed during the summer when people are enjoying the nice weather on our dock,” said manager Jake Clawson. “Waitlist Me has been super easy for us to use, our customers really like it, and it saves us a lot of time from having to walk around and track people down,” added hostess Liz.

“With nearly 70 million customers served, we continue to see strong growth among restaurants and other businesses, because Waitlist Me is easy to learn and use without any complicated contracts or training processes. It just works,” said Brian Hutchins, head of product and marketing for Waitlist Me. “We are always excited to see the way businesses are using our service to give their customers a better experience and Waitlist Me at summer hot spots is another great example of using tech to make customers happier.”

If you find that you, your staff, or your customers are more exhausted or more stressed out than usual, you’re not alone. In fact, these feelings are so common right now that the American Psychoanalytic Association has a name for it: PTSE, or Pandemic Trauma and Stress Experience.

APsaA’s COVID-19 advisory team has put together a long list of stressors and fears that those experiencing PTSE generally struggle with. It includes everything from “increased withdrawal, isolation, and fear of others as a source of infection” to “increased altruism, including worry about others.”

And you know what? All the points on this list of fears has the power to impact small businesses like yours.

Read on for four ways you can help customers have less stress when they visit.

Communicate safety precautions clearly

Proactively inform your guests about the precautions you’re taking to minimize the spread of the virus.

Post signs on your door, require hosts and servers to introduce them early in a guest’s visit, and include it on other forms of communication, from menus to social media profiles and posts. These precautions can protect not just your customers, but you and your employees as well.

Eliminate waiting area anxiety

Hanging out in a restaurant lobby wasn’t fun pre-COVID. During a pandemic, being that close to strangers for a long period of time is the stuff that panic attacks are made of.

Luckily, WaitList Me empowers customers to wait where they feel safest—outside in the fresh air, window shopping around the block, or hanging out in the car. Thanks to our text notifications feature, you can reach them wherever they are to let them know when they’ve hit the front of the line.

Cut unnecessary interactions

In this hand sanitizer-soaked world we now live in, many customers are concerned about touching items they never would have thought twice about a year ago. Everything from door handles to menus are suspect.

Eliminating these stressors requires a little bit of ingenuity. Wherever possible, install items like foot-pulls to enable guests to access areas without using their hands.

You can also use QR codes for menus and other ways. Post a QR code of the link to your Waitlist Me web widget and let customers join the list before they step foot in your restaurant, further minimizing lines and crowds.

Socially distance eating areas

For stressed-out customers, seeing a tightly packed dining area is enough to make them turn tail and leave—and may think twice before returning in the future.

You may want to reevaluate your restaurant’s table layout. Waitlist Me Platinum’s floorplan view and table management features are handy for optimizing your dining spaces and knowing where to seat the next customer to keep things flowing smoothly. 

One more thing: While community tables may have been the restaurant trend du jour, pre-COVID, now is not the time to bring them back. In fact, even when herd immunity has been reached, it might take awhile for diners to be psychologically comfortable enough to eat elbow-to-elbow with strangers again. 

We are excited to announce a new POS integration for our popular wait list app that will allow restaurant operators to better manage their guest experience. Working with Clover, an all-in-one POS solution with an open platform, NoshList is one of the first apps available on the Clover app marketplace. NoshList is exhibiting with Clover and First Data at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in booth #80203. CES takes place Jan. 7-10 in Las Vegas.

“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to show off NoshList with Clover at CES,” said NoshList CEO, Craig Walker. “It makes sense to tie the POS and wait list management pieces together and we love how Clover’s open-platform makes it possible to improve the guest experience in completely new ways. We are already working on a number of new features that would only be possible through their platform.”

The NoshList app on Clover makes it simple for any restaurant owner, operator or general manager to manage their wait list and POS all from one place. The app makes getting started with NoshList a snap, and will automatically pull the merchant’s information into NoshList when signing up. More features using other integration touch points are coming soon.

“NoshList adds tremendous value to our restaurant customers,” said Mark Schulze, vice president of Business Development at Clover Network Inc. “By replacing buzzers and shouting with text messages, our customers can not only give better service to their diners, but also get valuable data about frequent diners and past visits.”

These are challenging times with the spreading of the coronavirus. Many businesses are being forced to close their doors or to change the ways they do business to continue serving people.

Asking customers and patients to wait in their cars is gaining popularity as a better alternative than waiting inside businesses. Curbside service has taken on a whole new significance across multiple industries.

Waitlist Me makes it easy to track who is next in line to be served and then press a button to send a text notification when you are ready for them, so people can wait in their cars until it is their turn. There are also options for people to add themselves to the waitlist without even having to leave their car.

Here are some of the industries using Waitlist Me to provide better wait experiences in new ways:

Healthcare Facilities – Medical offices, urgent care centers, dental offices, eyecare centers, and hospitals are some examples where patients often wait in confined areas and may be afraid of getting sick from others. Allowing them to wait outside or in their cars helps to limit cross-infections for patients and healthcare workers.

Dispensaries – As this Forbes article aptly points out, “It should go without saying that medical cannabis patients are the most vulnerable cannabis consumers, and the most at risk of serious complications from Covid-19.” Social distancing strategies like curbside pickup can help reduce the risk to these patients. Even for non-patients, waiting in the car can be better for limiting the number of people in the store at a time or avoiding the need to go into the store at all.

Veterinary and Animal Services – With people spending more time at home and the elevated stress-levels caused by the crisis, pets are going to be an even bigger focus than ever. Vet clinics, animal shelters, and humane centers can keep visitors and staff safer by not having too many customers waiting inside their businesses.

Restaurants – For those restaurants that don’t have to close altogether, shifting to delivery and curbside pick-ups so customers don’t have to leave their cars can be a way to continue serving their clients.

Blood Donation – With people more reluctant to leave their houses, blood supplies have declined. Making it easier to schedule an appointment and wait outside can help encourage more people it is safe to donate blood.

Supply Stores – While many retail stores are closing, some types of supply stores will be important for builders, plumbers, electricians, mechanics and others that perform important home and automotive services. These stores can reduce crowds and offer more touchless systems for picking up supplies.

Grocery Stores – People will continue to need groceries and safe ways to shop. Some grocery stores are already moving towards limiting the number of people in the store at any given time to keep aisles clearer. When a customers finish shopping, the next customers are texted to invite them inside.

People don’t like crowded wait areas, even in the best of times. These days social distancing requires an even higher standard of avoiding crowds, and letting customers and patients wait in their cars can be a valuable option for businesses to provide.