Sports Facilities After Coronavirus: Tips for the New Norm

Over the past few months, many Americans have heard news about the potential spread of the coronavirus at gyms and sports facilities. On top of that, your clients may have grown complacent or found new training options during the pandemic. So, managing your sports facility after coronavirus is important.

According to a recent Washington Post article, polling indicates that your customers will take the decision about returning to your facility very personally. How will you encourage them to leave their home gyms, log out of their online classes, and return to your facility?

While your clients may need some encouragement to rejoin in your facility’s activities. Thankfully, most of them realize that there are physical and mental benefits of group and individual training.

Here are some tips to help communicate the value provided by your sports facility.

Engage with Clients

Hopefully, you have been doing this since the beginning of the pandemic. But it is even more important now to take stock of your client’s requests.

“The success of your business hinges on your ability to gather client feedback and synthesize it into actionable items,” says Mike Meszaros, President of eSoft Planner and the Sports Facility Expert. “When you offer your members the ability to give feedback, you help your clients feel they have part-ownership in your sports facility.”

By listening to your customers and turning their suggestions into policy, every member will become an extension of housekeeping, and every staffer will become an ambassador of compliance.

Utilize scheduling to your advantage

Aerobic exercise requires more intense breathing, enabling respiratory droplets that can allow the coronavirus to travel farther. With this in mind, many facilities have implemented new policies such as operating at reduced capacities and using floor markers to encourage social distancing.

While placing a limit on your capacity might seem like a financial nightmare. This will be one of the factors clients use when deciding when and if they return to your facility. Doing this well can increase the loyalty of your customers. The lower your member density, within reason, the greater peace of mind for your clients.

These restrictions make it necessary to optimize the usage of your facility space. You need to have real-time control over your scheduling processes. Scheduling software will allow you direct control over the headcount for lessons and clinics. While avoiding empty spots as result of cancellations.

Evaluate Membership Options

When you reopen your facility, your members likely will not return all at once. The slower pace gives you the unique opportunity to evaluate and adjust your policies and practices.

You might consider changes or additions to your business strategy based on the new reality – online components of membership and/or new cost and profit calculations based on your current scheduling plans. This might also include getting rid of supplemental services that are not performing well or adding ones that customers have been requesting.

Still, with so many unknown variables in your budget, you might also reimagine some of your existing classes, or push harder on your core competencies.

Conclusion

COVID-19 put much of the country into quarantined isolation. As sports facilities look for ways to reopen successfully, it will be more important than ever to provide valuable options to your clients.

eSoft Planner was built by sports facility owners just like you. Many of our features will help you navigate this new normal. Our team of experts is working everyday with sports facilities like yours on the strategies and changes to their business model – and their software implementation – to meet these challenges.

Many of our built-in features are empowering business owners to do what they need to be successful. For example, our scheduling software makes it easy to gain visibility to available slots for any given day. You can also add, remove or edit membership packages with just a few clicks.

The client dashboard allows facility owners to post messages that customers will see immediately upon login. Like a virtual bulletin board. This could be used to post announcements about a policy updates. Or to ask customers to click if they agree with a particular statement in question. Waiver and release functionality can be used to collect addendums to your existing waiver that include coronavirus language.

The expert team at eSoft Planner has worked with thousands of sports facility owners just like you. We know what it takes to succeed. Our implementation team excels at helping you use the tools to make your dream a success. We love to hear about your plans – your new normal – and we want to be a partner in your vision.

For More Information

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For more advice on managing your sports facility, book a free consultation with our experts.