AI-assisted onboarding helps a Dutch gym convert 88% of the leads into members

Most people who quit their training routine do this early. This has been proven multiple times, and one of the most representative studies is a study of 5,240 members published by Sperandei, Vieira and Reis (2016) in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport: about 63% stopped before their third month. The service a new member gets in the first three months decides much of whether they keep coming and renew, so the gym has to make that service as good as it can and not let the person get lost. Our own research at Regymo showed that the real reason members quit in those first three months is, in about half of the cases, a struggle with accountability, and in 31% a gap in knowledge: not knowing what to do or how to train. Interestingly, members rarely bring either problem to the staff themselves.

Onboarding is how someone walks the new member through the process, showing and explaining everything and making sure the person does not get lost. Good onboarding needs a rhythm of checking in at set moments, every time, but gyms struggle with this: different people work at different hours and nobody knows where a new member stands. That is an accountability gap, where everyone seems responsible and nobody actually is.

On top of the accountability gap, the quality of a member's onboarding depends on which team member was handling it, and not everyone is equally good at that. When the member's decision to stay comes down to whose shift it was that day, it becomes a problem for the gym. The owner of this gym described it like this:

Onboarding works when the rhythm holds: the right message and check at set moments, whoever is on shift. We are convinced that the onboarding has to be written into the process itself, set down once as the gym's business rules so timing and tasks run the same way for every new member. With that in mind, we wrote the onboarding steps that the owner wanted as rules, marked the steps that should be executed automatically (e.g. WhatsApp check-ins at certain moments) and created a coach task for the rest. The automated part is handled by Regymo AI, and the manual part is always guided by the rules the owner wants, so the routine no longer depends on who works the desk.

At the intake or first call, the gym decides between two tracks: training on their own after intro trainings, or a guided start with a coach. Members who train on their own are the more experienced ones, so they get less personal attention from the coach, but they always get check-ins at set moments: a WhatsApp message the day before and after the first training, and others during the first three months. When a member complains, or there are signs of disengaging or struggling, the coach is notified by Regymo AI and can help that person depending on what is going on.

Members with less experience get more personal attention from their coach: they agree on the small steps to take week by week, while Regymo AI follows up on those steps and helps the coach take the feedback into account in the one-to-one time at the gym.

We followed every new lead's onboarding in the first half year, linking each onboarding to the membership they bought and to their visit records. We wanted to know whether the Regymo AI's help with onboarding made any difference to the team's performance and to the final outcome, so we looked at conversion: how many became members, how many were lost during the onboarding, and why each loss happened.

Before we set up the AI-guided onboarding, we sat down with the owner of this gym to look at where things stood, going through the data the gym already had, and this is how he described his impression:

When we did the reevaluation after the AI-guided onboarding went live, we found out that 88% became paying members.

Most of the 12% who still do not convert drop off during the onboarding. Finishing the AI-guided onboarding turned out to be a good indicator of a lead becoming a long-term member. We keep working with the owner to improve it and to bring the onboarding drop-offs below 5%.

The rhythm no longer depends on who is working that day. The platform sends messages on the gym's own business rules, with the coach taking care only of the cases that genuinely need personal attention.

For the business, more people who come in for an intro training become members, and smart onboarding management creates more upsell opportunities:

Members feel they are being guided and taken care of, so they do not get lost in their first months.