Technology Update

It’s been a busy and exciting time for the development and deployment of technology into the business and it’s terrific to see the results of that investment providing tangible results.

The development of Leisure Hub is delivering an additional 100,000 online bookings each month compared to last year and the proportion of online bookings is now consistently above 70% - it was rarely above 40% in the pre-Leisure Hub days! Our next challenge is to ensure that 100% of bookable activity is made available online and this will make a significant difference to our customers. It also allows increased time for our Front of House teams to interact with customers in a positive and proactive way adding real value to the customer experience.

Salesforce has been a ‘game-changer’. We now have visibility over our member acquisition activity and the management of member recruitment alongside the launch of the new membership structure, has seen us achieve membership sales targets in each of the last five months - we hadn’t achieved a sales target since April ‘18! The focus this has provided to our membership services teams has meant that, compared to April of this year, a lead is turning into a sale within one day rather than eight days and lead conversion is up from 60% to 70%.

The great news is that we’re only really using 50% of the software’s capacity! The next phase of its development is to integrate it with Leisure Hub in order to collect the transaction and activity history of each customer. This will enable us to both segment our communications and personalise them so that our customers receive communication that is both meaningful and relevant to them. That’s truly the realisation of “best customer first” and “whatever place you’re into” and will transform our approach to marketing. The really cool bit is that the software has an AI component called ‘Einstein’ which will enable us to properly understand our customers and ‘nudge’ them to increased levels of physical activity and engagement with our brand.

There are some other very exciting next steps to Technology development. In the forthcoming months we will be integrating ‘On-Course’ with Leisure Hub to enable Course enrolment to be fulfilled online (transformational!) and a ‘Ticketing’ component will be developed within Leisure Hub, which will enable activity and sessions to be purchased online and in advance. This, together with an enhanced ‘self-service/check-in’ console in our centres will allow us to properly extend the concept of ‘Placemaking’ ensuring that our teams at Front of House can move away from providing a simple ‘transactional’ service to genuinely supporting our customers in getting the very best experience and additional value from each and every visit.

It’s taken some time, but there’s real momentum to our digital strategy just now and our continued investment and development of this area will be at the heart of our future success.

Thank you for all your support!