Re-Opening Your Business: Safety Steps to Take

The day you get to wake up and drive to work will be one worth celebrating. You’ll get to reunite with clients, your team, and regain some normalcy. A few months ago, you gradually heard information of the COVID-19 situation getting worse, and therefore implemented precautions to keep you and your clients safe. When we’re able to start being together again, continue to work within the boundaries of those precautions and gradually get back into the swing of things. Here are a few steps you can take when safely re-opening your business.

Custom Forms

Use Custom Forms to easily create, send, and store consent forms, intake forms, and client questionnaires. Depending on the services you offer, these types of forms may be standard for your clients. In this case, you can utilize custom forms to ask clients basic questions regarding their recent health or things that affect it. Things like if they’ve traveled in the last few weeks, if they’ve had certain symptoms, or if anyone they live with has had certain symptoms. These are questions you should also be asking yourself before returning to work. It’s all in the effort to keep you and your clients healthy. Check out how Custom Forms work in the below video, and see here how Custom Forms look in the Booksy Biz app. 

Health &  Safety Rules

As customers in today's wild world, your clients are likely hearing a lot of new rules coming from places like grocery stores, restaurants, and of course, the beauty industry. It puts them at ease to be aware of the safety precautions that establishments are taking to keep their customers safe. Booksy has created a feature that makes it easy for you to communicate to your clients which rules you're implementing as you reopen your shops. These rules include mask-wearing, facilitating temperatures upon arrival, closing your waiting area, disinfection procedures, and much more. There is also a free form customizable section so you can add anything our list may not include. Find this feature in the Booksy Biz app under More > Business Profile > Health & Safety Rules, or click here. Instill confidence in your clients as we all readjust to coming together again. Read more on Health and Safety Rules. 

Using Message Blasts & Social Post Creator

With the gray area nature of the whole situation, it’s been hard for people to feel certain about anything. Whether they’re allowed to go somewhere or do something, who’s open and who’s not. Clients likely won’t assume you’re back until you tell them! Communication is key. When re-opening your business, utilize the Message Blast feature (Marketing > Message Blasts in your Booksy Biz app) to get the word out. Send via email, push notification, or SMS. The Social Post Creator is a great way to customize your message with an image and then easily share it to your social media channels. You’ll find SPC as the top option in the main menu. Use one of our templated backgrounds or upload your own, and edit the text to let your clients know when you’re coming back to the storefront. Here’s a video on how it works: 

Add Padding Time Between Appointments

Padding time is a feature you can apply to certain services, adding time either before or after the appointment that is unavailable for booking. This is helpful for multiple reasons, say if you want to take lunch, make a phone call or even just step out for a minute. All great reasons to build in padding time, but with a healthy environment in mind, it might be a good idea to build in time for sanitizing your chair and station in-between every client. To set up padding time in your app, go to More > Business Profile > Services > click on the service you want to add padding time to > Advanced options > Padding Time. Padding Time has to be applied to each service individually.

Fill Your Calendar with Flash Sales

Getting back into the swing of things may not be 100 miles per hour off the bat, and as we’ve said, it shouldn’t be. However, you still want to see as many clients as safely possible. Flash Sales can help.  A Flash Sale is a discount or promotion that you offer for a short period of time. The sale applies to all clients who book with you during the flash sale window. You can choose the dates for this window, and when the booking needs to happen in order for the promotion to apply. Note that Flash Sales are only available for those businesses using Booksy Boost. See how setting up Flash Sales looks in the Booksy Biz app here.

Update Your Automated Marketing

If you caught our Lockdown Checklist back when businesses were closing, you may have either disabled or updated any automated marketing messages you had in place. Don’t forget to re-update those as you begin to regularly communicate with clients again. As we re-adjust (again) and stay on high alert to run a clean and safe business, we also celebrate. We’ve been storing a lot of positivity in our mental banks to get us through this time. Booksy strives to provide the features you need to support you in times like these and prepare you for re-opening your business. If you need additional help utilizing any of the above features, don’t hesitate to give our Customer Success team a call at 206-735-3553.

Safely Space Out Clients with the ‘I’m Ready’ feature.

Many of your customers are looking forward to using your services again, but may still be afraid of contacting a large number of people in a small space. Thanks to the new I’m Ready feature, you can easily notify your clients via the Booksy app that they can already come into your salon and start their appointment. Now you can minimize footfall in your salon and reserve some padding time between appointments to sanitize the tools and workspaces, while your client waits outside your salon until you’re ready to go. So if they want to avoid the busier spaces and don't want to cross paths with other people inside your salon, they can wait until you ask them directly to come in. Simply go to the appointment details and click I’m Ready button. Clients using the Booksy app receive an SMS or Push notification telling them that you are ready for their visit and they can now come into your salon, learn more.