Everyone is looking for ways to get back into their fitness classes, to get back into their routine of going into the club, to get back to being present with other members and interacting with their instructors. They’re also looking for a sense of confidence and security in doing so. The problem is, they’re not quite sure how to get that yet. We’ll be talking about that here.

Ensuring that your members feel connected to your club is crucial but can be difficult during the pandemic. That’s why you have to leverage virtual options, in addition to your in-club offerings, to continue to power your member experience. Here we discuss exactly that: how you can power your member experience and stay connected to your community with minimal direct contact. We’re joined by our Director of Product Management, Todd Irvin.

Short on time? Here are the takeaways:

  1. Members want to feel like they’re getting back to their routine, but they want to feel confident in doing so. This is why the more your members can do outside of the club, the better.
  2. Virtual fitness options are the bridge between you and your members, and they’re here to stay for the long term.
  3. There are two main types of content you can offer your members virtually: prerecorded content and live virtual fitness classes.
  4. Whether it’s recorded or live classes, your members are getting a visual of their club, of their instructors, and of the classes they’re used to. This is going to prove crucial for member engagement and retention going forward.
  5. Now is the perfect time to start using the member portal or the Club Automation member app to drive engagement at your club. Direct your members to your app to showcase all your offerings and communicate your club’s value.

For the full webinar, read below or play the recording above.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Marissa Meyers: All right, let’s get started. My name is Marissa Meyers. I’m the Marketing Manager for Club AutomationCSI Spectrum, TennisSource and GroupEx PRO. Thank you all for joining us for Connection Without Contact. This is our second in the webinar series. Today, we’ll be talking about powering your member experience.

Before we get going, I just want to cover some housekeeping items. We do have a question and answer in a chat box down below if you have any questions or have some feedback for us. Feel free to drop some questions, messages in there. We’d love to hear from you.

The other thing I did want to cover is that this webinar will be recorded. If at any point you need to drop off or it’s just not a good time to stay through the whole thing, or you want to share it with anyone else within your team, we will be recording this and sending it out to everyone on the call and everyone who is registered.

Like I said, my name’s Marissa. We will be starting today as the Connection Without Contact: Power Your Member Experience. As clubs are reopening, we want you guys to feel confident with your software solution, and we want you to feel covered from re-engaging your team, to managing your facility, to providing your members with the best possible experience, whether that’s virtually or in-person. We did hear from Shannon Fable on Monday regarding re-engaging your team, and today’s webinar we’ll be speaking about how you can power that member experience and stay connected to your community with minimal direct contact.

I do want to introduce Todd Irvin here. He’s our Director of Product Management. Todd, would you like to introduce yourself quickly?

Todd Irvin: Yeah, for sure. My name’s Todd Irvin, Director of Product Management for our club market, which encapsulates Club Automation, CSI Spectrum, Tennis Source and GroupEx PRO, like Marissa mentioned. Quick background on myself, before coming to Club Automation, I came from the club industry. Many of you might be familiar with Jeff VanDixhorn, one of the original founders of Club Automation. Before working for Club Automation, I helped Jeff manage a few of his facilities here in the Midwest, then about eight years ago, joined Club Automation. [I have] held various roles from training and implementation, to software testing, to product management. For the past handful of years, I’ve been leading our product team. As we’ve now combined forces with Daxko, that has grown to include CSI Spectrum and some of our other brands you mentioned as well. I’m really excited to join in the discussion with you all today.

Obviously, things have changed and are continuing to change, especially since I was actively working in the club space eight years ago, but we know over the last two to three months, especially, things have changed and are continuing to change rapidly. The first question I would have is for you, Marissa, is what are the biggest challenges that you see clubs facing as they reopen in terms of their member experience?

THE CHALLENGES OF REOPENING FOR HEALTH AND FITNESS CLUBS

MM: Yeah, in talking with clubs and even members like myself that are looking to go back into their clubs, I think everyone is looking for a sense of confidence and security as they’re going back into their clubs and reopening those clubs. Members want to feel like they’re getting back to their routine, but they want to feel confident in doing so. What that means is that they are looking for ways to get back into their classes, to get back into their routine of going back into the club. They want to be present with other members and their instructors again. They’re looking for ways to feel that confidence and feel that security, but they’re not quite sure how to get that yet. We’re hoping to be able to talk about that a little bit today. Something I mentioned is they’re really looking to get back into their community and rebuild that connection with their club. Let’s talk about that a little bit because I know that feeling connected to your club is crucial, but can be difficult because some people just aren’t able to, or don’t feel comfortable, in attending it. What is available to our clients that you could talk about to help with this a little bit more?

VIRTUAL FITNESS OPTIONS FOR CLUBS

TI: Yeah, for sure. I’m really excited to highlight a new development project that our team has been working hard on over the last couple of months called Daxko on Demand. Daxko on Demand is a platform that helps our clubs deliver that virtual class participation in order to help drive member engagement in this post-pandemic world. Like I mentioned, things have changed rapidly, I think we would all say, over the last two to three months. The health club industry has dramatically changed. I don’t think any of us have a crystal ball that can look ahead and say three months, six months, 12 months from now, this is exactly how the landscape has changed or maybe has continued to remain consistent.

I think one of those things that we all, or at least I believe, and a lot of the clubs I’ve talked to believe, is that there used to be a very strong distinction between brick-and-mortar fitness and virtual fitness. But during this time, as clubs have been closed, they have been forced into an area that they haven’t been previously familiar with: virtual fitness. Clubs have quickly had to figure out how they can deliver value to their members during this time virtually. Now, either while some of our clubs are still closed, some of our clubs are potentially opening and limited capacity or potentially trying to figure out how does this play into the long-term strategy? While you’re closed, no one can be in the club and trying to deliver that value and engagement to your members. Or if clubs are opening, maybe a GroupEX studio has space for 50 people, but due to capacity restrictions or local governance rules, maybe you only have 10 people in the studio at one time. Maybe there are other people who want to be there, but they can’t either because they didn’t get one of those lucky spots or because they have health concerns or they’re not wanting to leave their home.

Then the third piece, like I mentioned, is what is the long-term strategy of virtual and how is it going to play into a club’s strategy and value proposition? I really believe that’s where Daxko on Demand comes into play to help our clubs navigate these unchartered waters of virtual fitness.

MM: And what is this Daxko on Demand?

WHAT IS DAXKO ON DEMAND?

TI: Yeah. For sure. Daxko on Demand, it is a tool that allows you to aggregate content that a lot of our clubs already have out there, whether it’s YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram. Maybe their trainers are posting it on their own. Maybe the clubs are recording it and posting it. But a lot of clubs I’ve talked to are using multiple platforms, which can make for a pretty disparate experience. One of the big goals of Daxko on Demand is to bring all that content together into an easy to use, member engaging experience.

One of the other things it does, it allows you to use your own branding. I know some people are doing this on their website where they’re linking to these videos where we click this link and you get shot off to YouTube. You click this link, you go to Facebook. One of the benefits of Daxko on Demand is to bring that all together under one roof to maintain that experience, keep those eyeballs within the platform and keep the experience consistent, but also under the umbrella of your brand, which I think is really helpful and really important.

PRERECORDED CONTENT

TI: We kind of have two main types of content that we’re looking at. The first main type of content is prerecorded content. This could be classes that you’ve recorded. I’ve also talked to some clubs that are wanting to use it even beyond class participation, which I believe is the main thing clubs are thinking about. But whether it’s nutrition or motivational videos, or maybe they have a kid care center at their club and they’re wanting to demonstrate how to do a specific craft, as clubs are either closed or opening in limited capacity, how can we drive the engagement of our members by providing this prerecorded content?

Again, we’re pulling it in from YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, into this easy-to-use experience. We do have a quick demo here before we jump in. Just a quick highlight of this page. You can see we’re under the recorded videos tab. We have the videos organized by instructor or trainer. You can see across the screen there that each trainer has their own set of videos that are associated with them, reverse chronological order. The videos they posted most recently would be at the top. Real quick, at the top right-hand corner, you can see that there’s a drop down here to actually filter the video. Let’s say someone’s only interested in yoga videos. They’ll be able to use that for their filter down the list of available video. With that, we’ll jump into a real quick video to demonstrate the functionality.

Let’s say here I filter by body weight. I can see the videos that pertain to this tag. I can click on a specific video, see the details of it. I can click play, viewable screen and easily be able to jump into viewing this content. As you can see, it didn’t redirect me to YouTube. It didn’t make me navigate there. It keeps me within the defined experience of Daxko on Demand, which I think is really, really helpful.

LIVE VIRTUAL FITNESS CLASSES

TI: Jumping to the next slide here, we also have live classes. This is where I actually think even more value can be derived to make members feel like they’re part of the club, part of the experience, and have that personal connection because they know what’s happening real time.

For a lot of classes, we are using Zoom to help deliver this live class content. A lot of clubs I’ve talked to are already leveraging Zoom. This is an easy way, plug and play, to get this into the application. Rather than maybe having your recorded videos here that shoot off to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc, and then Zoom being a very separate experience, it pulls it together under one roof in an easy to use interface.

As we can see here, this functionality is also usable on mobile. I’m under the live sessions tab here, still have the filter on the top right-hand corner to filter down the available classes. As you can see, it’s organized by day of the week and time. Since these classes are happening in real time, we want people to know, “Hey, I’m available on Monday morning,” and they can easily see what classes are available and filter down by class type if they would like.

With that, we’ll jump into a real quick video for you guys. Let’s say I want to filter by Zumba. I could filter it down, see the list of videos that match that. There’s one on Monday, and that’s the Zumba class. I can see the details here and it’s as simple as clicking the launch button at the bottom and it redirects me to Zoom to allow me to easily join that meeting.

Overall, we have those two main buckets, the recorded content and the live content. Again, bringing it together under one roof to easily deliver that content to your members.

MM: I love this because whether it’s recorded or live classes, your members are getting that visual of their club, of their instructors, their classes that they’re used to. Whether or not they can attend in-person or they just don’t feel comfortable doing that, they’re still getting that virtual connection with their club that’s going to be so important going forward.

Another thing to note about Daxko on Demand is as clubs are reopening or have reopened, we do want to offer this as a resource that you guys can use. We will be offering Daxko on Demand as a free 90-day trial. Feel free to message in here if you’d like to learn more, or right after we will be sending a recording of the webinar and you guys can always message. We’d love to show you guys more about Daxko on Demand and how this can work for you.

Let’s go back to the other two challenges I mentioned. Members are looking for confidence that their club is doing everything they can to keep them safe, and then clubs are looking for ways that they can maintain the experience, but essentially put the power back in their members hands.

SOFTWARE THAT HELPS CLUBS ADAPT

TI: Yeah, exactly. I think this is really key to successfully reopening with minimal direct contact. Really, this is counterintuitive to how we usually want to operate. We are indoctrinated to think, and we train our staff to think of how can we personally physically engage people when they come into the club, when they walk through the door, whether it’s a warm hello, greeting them, having a conversation, walking to the front desk to perform different things that they need to do there. But with this, we’re actually counter-intuitively trying to reduce the personal contact and the actual time they are at the club, especially with capacity limitations. If you can only have 10, 20, 30, whatever, people in your club at the same time, we want to get people in and get them out in a way that they feel safe and confident and not having a lot of that personal contact interaction where they don’t need to.

OUR CLUB MEMBER APP

TI: With that, the more your members can do outside of the club, the better. Everything they can do on their own is one less thing they have to do presently at the club. With thatthis is really the perfect time to start using the member portal, or OLS, or the member app to further drive use and engagement. Maybe some of you don’t have the member portal or OLS configured, or you don’t have the member app. Now, this is a great time to think about, “Hey, should I start using those? Can I use them as part of this reopening experience to say, ‘Hey, you can form these things on your own, excuse me, to make members feel more confident coming into the club, not having to perform those things.'” Or maybe it’s also possible that you already are using the member portal or the member app, but maybe your member engagement is low. This is the perfect time to help promote that to your members to say, “Hey, look at everything you can do.” Really, with the existing member portal and OLS and the member app, there are already a lot of things the members can do on their own, whether it’s looking at their personal information, updating that, payment methods, registering for classes, programs, creating reservations, maybe tennis reservations or the like, viewing your statement, check-in history. Different things like that that are all self-service.

We also know that we might not have every single feature that is needed to help our clubs during this time. We’ve also been hard at work developing additional features that will allow members to do things on their own. That’s why I’ve been continuing to build out features in our mobile app. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll be focusing on some of these features specific to the Club Automation mobile app. You can see here the three ones we’ll focus on and talk about today are buying packages, paying your bill and also push notifications.

WITH THE BUYING PACKAGES FEATURE

TI: Jumping first into buying packages. You might say, “What is a package?” CSI is termed a series sale, but whether it is a 10 pack of personal training sessions, or maybe it’s a 10 pack of yoga classes or whatever the case may be, you can buy that 10 pack upfront to be able to use it over time.

A few of the main pieces of functionality we’ll look at, and then we’ll jump into the video, is the ability to view and filter available packages. Then you can select the package you want to purchase and ultimately easily check out via the mobile app. With that, we’ll jump into a real quick video to demonstrate the functionality.

You can see there’s a button in the bottom right-hand corner for packages. You can click on that. You’re brought to the new functionality here, see a list of available packages. You can click this filter. Various criteria you can filter by, and then show the results to see the packages that match that criteria. Then let’s say you see a package that you want. You can click on it to get into the package. We’ll get back to the video here, sorry, one sec. Again, filter. You have different filtering options. Show the results. Let say I want to click into a specific one. I can see the details of the package, excuse me. Click to buy. Then let’s say you do want to have a payment plan; you can offer that as well to your members. They could select that. Then they can go ahead and proceed through the checkout process here

MM: This is so simple. It’s great.

TI: They can choose… Yeah. You have your various payment methods. If you have one on file, you can use that. Then it shows up in your active package list. A run [through] of that functionality that’ll be getting released in the near future here to the Club Automation app.

One of the things I wanted to mention quickly about packages is that I think this is also something that can help during this time with club cashflow. Especially if you’re closed or maybe you’re opening in limited capacity, maybe you’re charging the members for their full dues, maybe you’re not, but your ancillary revenue is most likely lower. Being able to offer these packages is a good way to be able to bring in that revenue without having to pay out to the instructor to actually perform or teach that class. Maybe I buy a 10 pack, maybe the user uses it over the next two to three months. You get the cash flow right away when they buy the package, which can help float you for a few months as you’re still looking to get back up to speed and ramping up different club operations.

WITH THE “PAY MY BILL” FUNCTIONALITY

TI: Next, we’ll jump into the pay my bill functionality. Essentially, it’s as easy as it sounds, being able to pay your bill remotely or online via the mobile app. You can view and filter your available packages. You can check your current balances and past transactions. You can select how you want to pay for it, and then easily pay for it from your phone. So again, I have a real quick video here to jump into that functionality.

You can see the balance that you owe. If you did have activity, it would show here to say, “Hey, these are the recent transactions that comprise the activity.” Then you can click to pay your bill, choose how you want to pay it. It brings you to a page, essentially the checkout process. You can choose a credit card on file or enter a new credit card or also bank account to pay for it. Then easily proceed through the process to pay your balance.

You might still have some people at your club that like coming in and paying with checks, or like coming in and paying with credit card, this can be a good opportunity to direct them to perform that function online through the member app.

WITH PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

TI: Lastly here, push notifications. I think we all know what push notifications are, but essentially, they will help easily allow you to communicate with your members in mass via the mobile app. I think we all know things are constantly changing and it’s important to keep your members in the know. Maybe it’s changes in protocol. Maybe it’s changes in club hours. Maybe you have restricted hours and as you expand those or change that. This will really help drive the confidence that your members have that they know the information, that the information they know is up to date and that you are doing everything you can as a club to take care of your members.

It’s a really exciting tool that we will be rolling out in the near future as well. I really think all of this functionality, whether it’s Daxko on Demand or the features we already have in the member app and member portal or some of the new features we were just talking about, will help engage your members before they even step foot inside of your club. I think this really ties perfectly, we have a webinar on Friday that deals with helping manage members when they come to your facility. So, you can view this as the pre-steps or the pre-functionality while they’re not at your club, but then how can you effectively engage them and make them feel confident about their experience once they actually step foot inside your facility?

MM: Yeah. As Todd said, that will be on Friday at, I believe it is 11:00 central time. We will be sending out additional information following this webinar with recording of this webinar. We do want to give a couple minutes just at the very end of this to open the floor to any questions. Feel free to send some questions our way. We’re happy to answer them.

QUESTIONS

MM: To start, I am just getting a couple of questions here. A question that I am getting is, is Daxko on Demand for other platforms or is this just for Club Automation at the time?

TI: We’re building it as an application that can be used across platforms. Whether your application is Club Automation, or CSI, Tennis Source, whatever the case may be, it’s the functionality you can use and leverage. That was intentional to build it that way from the beginning knowing that the same needs that Daxko on Demand is addressing are applicable to all of our customers.

MM: Awesome. Another question I have is, is there a timeline on these new features that you mentioned within the mobile app that they will be rolled out?

TI: Yeah, [inaudible 00:23:03] to give exact timelines, but kind of over the next one to two months we’ll be looking to roll that functionality out. But I’d say stayed tuned for release notes and other newsletters and other methods of communication. We’ll definitely keep you in the know so you know when to expect this functionality so you can leverage it with your members.

MM: And I know you guys have been busy at work with those developments. Thank you. We’re rolling them out as fast as we can. Another question for you, how long does it take to implement Daxko on Demand?

TI: Yeah, I mean, it’s a pretty lightweight, easy to use application. Some of the goal is to not make it cumbersome. We know that time is of the essence here. Then as clubs are closed or looking to reopen, or some clubs maybe they get noticed by their state or their County that they can open tomorrow, I’ve heard some clubs say they haven’t really been given much heads up, so we can be pretty flexible and pretty quick to get that up and running. I’d say no more than a week. We’d want to have some training sessions, you would get your own instance set up that’s particular to your club. Make sure the branding everything’s right. Make sure we’re just trained to use that new functionality. Then you can be on your way pretty quickly.

MM: Awesome. Adding on to Daxko on Demand, will there be an option at some point to tie membership stacks on demand, like a virtual add on membership?

TI: Yeah. That’s definitely something we’re thinking about longer term. To be frank, this is something we really developed over the course of a number of weeks from the core functionality, but we do have a long, long list of things we’re wanting to add to it as far as new functionality. Really to derive the full value, we will need to drive it to integrate with the core club management systems. We know clubs are trying to figure out like, “Should we offer virtual memberships? Like what does that look like? And like I mentioned before, I think clubs aren’t really certain. You have clubs on one end of the spectrum that think, “Okay, this is something I need to use temporarily once my club can reopen and things will hopefully, for the most part, get back to normal.” You have clubs on the complete other end of the spectrum that are saying, “Hey, the landscape has materially changed, and this is something I need to integrate into my offering longer term.”

I think one of those other questions was like do you recommend offering a virtual membership? One I saw pop through is. I think that really depends. I think that if you do consider offering a virtual membership, I think you need to think about how do you build upon the value proposition of your facility. With Daxko on Demand, the goal of this is not to compete with Peloton. It’s not to compete with the Nike training app that have these highly produced thousands of videos with people that look much better than myself doing those workouts. But how can we, again, build on the value proposition of the club? Which I believe comes back to the fact that clubs have that connection with their members. There’s that personal connection. They come to the club for some reason, or a variety of reasons. Maybe it’s close by. Maybe their friends come. Maybe they’ve been going there for five or 10 years and they love the personal trainer they work out with, or they love Cindy who leads the Zumba classes. That type of connection in-person that you’re building on with this virtual experience is not something that Peloton can as easily deliver.

I’d encourage our clubs think through what is your value proposition of your club? How are you delivering that to your members? And how does this virtual aspect build on top of that rather than replace that? But at the same time, you might have a clientele, you might have the ability from a budget standpoint or personnel or knowledge standpoint to put together some really solid videos. I have talked to some clubs also that are thinking of offering 100 percent virtual membership. I would just say think about it intentionally, think about what you’re trying to offer, how it either complements what you’re already doing it at your facility or how this might be an offshoot of that that you can sell separately. Just knowing that competing head-to-head for eyeballs with Peloton and Nike training app could be difficult. What is your edge? What’s your foot in the door to differentiate yourselves from those other platforms? If that makes sense.

MM: No, that’s great. Thanks for answering that, I think you make some really valid points of keeping that connection amongst your community. We’re also trying to figure out this new norm. We’re hoping to help you guys out with that a little bit more. My last question for you for Daxko on Demand, is this publicly facing or how could others access these virtual classes? Is that a thing?

TI: Yeah, for sure. Right now, it is publicly available. You could embed it into your website. You could have a link on your website that links to it. It pulls public videos, like I said, from YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, which, to be frank, that was just the easiest way for us to get something out there. Clubs that already have their publicly available content out there. The goal was to pull that together under the one umbrella of Daxko on Demand, but we definitely have goals. Some of the biggest feedback we got is like, “Hey, we need to be able to gate this content.” So whether it’s the videos themselves, or being able to log in to Daxko on Demand to say, “Hey, you need to be a member to really recognize this value and to be able to partake in the value of this.” If it is just broadly available that might not be as valuable for you and your club.

First step, aggregated together using the content that’s already out there publicly. But one of the next things we’re looking at developing as part of this is that authentication step, which means you need to be able to log in to see the content. Thankfully, if you are using Zoom, Zoom already has some gating mechanism to say, “Hey, if you wanted to add a password to those videos that you send out to your member base, or you send out as reminder emails to people who register for certain classes, you can ensure, at least for your live classes using Zoom, that only members are attending those because they have the password that’s required to view that content.”

MM: Yeah. I think that is it for our questions today. Thank you so much for answering all those questions and thank you everyone for joining this webinar. We will be hosting one more on Friday, going over managing your facility during this new time, Connection Without Context. We will be sending some additional information out, like I said, after this, with the recording of this webinar. We will answer any questions that we didn’t get to. But again, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Todd. We will talk to you guys soon.

TI: You’re welcome. All right. Thanks everyone.

MM: Bye.

New call-to-action