Half past six in the evening, and it all lands on the front desk at once
Fifteen people come in together, one wants to renew, one has left the certificate at home again, one asks why she got a reminder for a payment she says she has already made, and meanwhile whoever is on the desk is answering the phone and opening the turnstile, so the list of renewals coming due stays open in a browser tab, and you'll look at it tomorrow, maybe
The work that eats the hours at the desk
- New sign-ups, with the details read off an ID document and retyped by hand into the gym software
- Renewals to check one at a time, because the list doesn't look at itself
- Medical certificate expiry dates to ask about, then to ask about again, then to ask about once more
- Payments to reconcile between the gym software and the payment systems you use, with the failed ones to chase
- Messages to members, always the same ones, written one at a time whenever a minute is left over
The membership that expires quietly
This is the point that's worth real money, a member who doesn't renew doesn't send you a goodbye letter, he simply stops coming, and by the time you notice two months have gone by, he has joined somewhere else or he has lost the habit, which is worse
Nobody loses renewals out of laziness, they get lost because going through the list is a job that never finds a moment of its own, it always comes after the person standing there in front of you, waiting
Examples of what the system can do
These are examples of jobs the system can do, not jobs already delivered for some gym, Muffin Suite started recently and we'd rather tell you
- Every morning it looks at the memberships expiring over the following days, prepares the list and sends the reminder to the members, with the text you wrote yourself
- It keeps an eye on the expiry dates of the medical certificates and sends the request to the member before it's too late, without going into what the document says
- It reads the transactions from the payment systems you use and matches them to the accounts in the gym software, and the ones that don't add up it sets aside instead of forcing them
- It takes the details of a new sign-up from the form or from the photographed document and fills in the record in the gym software, checking the fields you care about
The system opens the software you already have and works inside it the way the person at the desk would, so it's fine even if that program has no integration to the outside at all, and that's the part we do best
What stays with the person at the front desk
The people, who are the reason somebody picks your gym instead of the one past the traffic lights, the member asking for advice, the one who is about to give up and whom you keep with a couple of words said at the right moment
The decisions stay yours, a payment that doesn't add up or a case the system can't read it doesn't invent, it stops and leaves it on the table for you
Why it's worth it
The renewals that get lost today because nobody had the time to go through the list are takings you already had in the house, and the hours that go into typing come back to the desk, without putting one more person on copying data from a sheet of paper to a screen
You don't have to replace your software, we agree the monthly fee before we start and that's the figure, and you approve every addition yourself
If you want an idea of the numbers you can run the savings figures, or look at how we start, which is a handful of steps and none of them binding