How does our technology provide cost efficiency?
We are aware of the perception that introducing new technology is expensive, and we have seen the concept initially bring a frown to a Financial Director’s face. Often, the cost efficiencies that technology provides, can be overlooked. First Sports software is designed by leisure operators, for operators with added value as its foundation. Here, we give you five ways our software solution helps to save money!
1) Measuring real-time performance
Access control and tracking allows you to monitor your centre’s footfall
and usage. You can easily investigate trends, identify peaks and troughs and have
the capability to shape your resources accordingly. Use measurement parameters
around activities such as participation in fitness classes, for example look at
the room and staff cost against the amount of income generated. This is usually
a one off or annual review consideration. However, with real-time reporting you
can set alerts if participation drops, and take remedial action such as
rescheduling them to time better suited to your audience, before profitability
is affected.
2) Automation, automation, automation
Time is money! Having systems that take hours and hours of staff time to extract
and manipulate data or even manually produce membership renewal letters,
process event bookings or send payment reminders is labour intensive and expensive.
When you consider that these tasks happen over and over again on a daily,
weekly and monthly basis, those costs add up. With First Sports software, these
tasks and communications are automated, recorded, retrievable and easily
reported on.
3) Online self-administration portal
Put the control of administration in the hands of your users. This provides a smoother
customer journey and gives users visibility and control of their personal and
transactional data, at a time and place that suits them. Importantly, this
saves you paying your staff to do the admin at the centre and takes away the
bottlenecks at the entrance, and the stress away from the reception teams. Making
contact data easy and timely for users to update, eradicates the cost of
issuing communications to the wrong address and reduces the time it takes staff
to update records manually.
4) Access control
We’ve all experienced a very busy multitasking receptionist checking member
cards, answering the phone, processing payments simultaneously, all whilst
causing a similar amount of unrest in the queue! This is no longer the case. First
Sports can provide individual PIN codes, QR contact-free scanning from a card
or direct from a smartphone – even biometric access via fingerprinting or face
recognition. Access control measures to provide inherent security, improve
customer experience, reduce staffing costs, and ensure that no payment means no
entrance.
5) Retention and engagement
Fact - it’s easier and cheaper to retain users than it is to go after new
conquests over, and over again. If you don’t continually connect with users,
they’ll be difficult to attract back. In the leisure industry, your audience
tends to live close by your venue, and your target population will be easily exhausted.
Gym goers join with gusto, then attendance lapses and secondary spend drops. With
First Sports data driven CRM, keeping users in touch, inspired, informed and
engaged is simple. Perfect for retaining members and their associated income with
automated renewal communications, but also capable of working with tracked
trend, personal and transactional data to transform one-off users to regular
bookers. You can segment your target audiences and send appealing incentives
such as price promotions, first to book new activities and events, and new
service offerings. Effectively targeting an audience for a new after-school
club activity, for example, to people who’ve previously booked school holiday
coaching sessions, will generate more interest, enquiries and bookings, with
less promotional cost.
Want to know more about saving costs through the
power of technology?
Get in touch and we’ll demonstrate these cost efficiencies to you, and your team,
in real time!
