Fitness and Lifestyle Group unveils its latest tech innovations

Fitness and Lifestyle Group has unveiled a series of digital product and information technology innovations designed to simultaneously enhance user experience and drive value to the business.

The first is a fully paperless digital joining experience for new members that incorporates user insights around how people select memberships and join online.

Eddie Swinnen, FLG Chief Digital and Product Officer explains “Our vision was to create a seamless process whereby someone could go online, find their closest club, join, set up their membership, verify their email, pay, go through our health and safety induction and access their new club via their mobile – all within a few minutes.”

Already launched across the Fitness First Australia, Goodlife Australia, Jetts New Zealand and Zap Fitness brands, the new experience is designed to make the joining process easier, with simplified product choices and minimal clicks versus industry standards.

There is also an innovative approach to the health and safety briefing, courtesy of a highly original video that’s been created in collaboration with FLG’s legal and marketing teams. A compulsory watch – club reception is alerted if a new member arrives without watching it – the video harnesses humour to drive new member engagement with the message.

Swinnen confirms “it’s turned member onboarding into a self-service model. Our final step will be to give the new member access to the club via their phone, once they’ve completed the PAR-Q and health and safety waivers, so they don’t have to wait to see someone to get a membership card. That is in R&D stage at the moment.”

Three other major IT initiatives currently being rolled out cover business analytics, office software and network infrastructure.

As one of the first in the fitness industry to introduce Business Intelligence (BI) across all departments, FLG has now furthered its market-leading position by standardising enhanced business analytics across the Group. Reporting of key metrics such as sales, leavers, visitation, personal training and group exercise attendance has been consolidated and streamlined, with standardised definitions driving consistency of data across all brands, sites, markets and systems.

All team members can now log in to a centralised portal and instantly view highly accurate performance data not only at a club level but also, subject to their role and permissions, by brand, region, or group; the system went live in Goodlife and Fitness First Australia earlier this year, with the Zap Fitness and Jetts Thailand/New Zealand roll-out also recently completed.

Rob Waldron, FLG Chief Technology and Security Officer advises “from sales and club managers to regional heads and the Group CEO, everyone now sees the same types of data in the same easy-to-digest dashboards. It has placed insights, trends and opportunities for competitive edge at everyone’s fingertips.

“Interestingly, what we’re also seeing is that the ability to benchmark club performance by brand or by region is encouraging teams not only to look internally to address issues, but also to collaborate across brands, asking other high-performing clubs for training and best practice.”

Waldron adds “moving forward, we’ll continue to expand on the types of data and insight we’re extracting from our customer touchpoints, to further enhance the way we engage, interact with and support our members.”

Meanwhile, the office software project saw the entire FLG business migrate from Google Workspaces to Microsoft 365 last month. In the process, the business moved from around 4,500 Google licences with hundreds of shared accounts – one for a whole reception team, for example – to approximately 10,800 individual accounts.

One of the key benefits has been the positive impact on teamwork, with Waldron noting “in the two weeks since migration, we have already seen the positive impact on collaboration of everyone being individually connected and able to communicate freely. Microsoft Teams usage is skyrocketing, for example.

“For the business, it also gives us unprecedented visibility not only around where data is and where it’s gone, but who sent it and when. This is critical to ensuring we adhere to data privacy requirements, which are particularly stringent in Thailand and Vietnam.”

Finally, following the recent signing of a multi-million dollar deal with telecoms giant Telstra, FLG is piloting a project to replace and upgrade the network infrastructure solution across its full estate of 530+ clubs.

“As part of the agreement, Telstra will provide FLG with an internet failover, whereby a 4G / 5G service kicks in within seconds of any internet outage. Particularly as a 24/7 operator, that’s hugely important,” says Waldron.

“This was an 18-month procurement process to find one provider capable of servicing our entire five- region estate, but we are now in a position to replace all legacy infrastructure systems and ensure our internet capacity meets the increasing demands of in-person digital experiences.”

Established in 2016, and headquartered in Australia with regional offices in South-East and East Asia, FLG has 530+ clubs, over 700,000 members and a portfolio of globally recognised brands that includes Fitness First Australia, Goodlife Health Clubs Australia, Barry’s Bootcamp, Jetts Fitness, California Fitness and Zap Fitness.

Images: FLG's new digital joining experience incorporates user insights around how people select memberships