AI helps a Dutch gym win back 23% more members who stopped training

Retention is a holy grail of fitness, where everyone wants to keep members as long as possible, yet how a gym should organise it is still an open question. A gym is a service business, and we are convinced that a service business serves its customers best with the approach in Will Guidara's 2022 book Unreasonable Hospitality: give a small sign of attention or an extra service they do not expect, and they will very likely be delighted. At Eleven Madison Park in New York, Guidara overheard four guests who had just listed the top restaurants they had eaten at say the only thing they had not tried was a New York City hot dog. He bought one from a street cart for about two dollars and had the kitchen serve it cut into four pieces with ketchup, mustard, sauerkraut and relish. In his own words, no one had ever reacted to anything he served them better, and he saw that the job was serving people memories. The lesson for a gym is that to give outstanding service, you have to know what people want and be able to act on it.

Knowing this about every member, and acting on it, is a huge effort, and the owner and the coaches rarely have the capacity for it: nobody remembers everything about five hundred or a thousand members. When we sat down together with the owner of this gym, we went through everyone who cancelled in the last two months and found that none of them had had a conversation with the gym; they were members who had gone quiet first. He put the reason this way:

Nobody at a gym can remember everything about hundreds of members, so the moment someone starts to drift goes unseen. Our answer is continuous member discovery: learning about each member so the gym can give them small, unexpected attention. For this gym, we configured our platform by connecting Virtuagym and WhatsApp to build one profile per member: when they come, what they book, what they buy, what they prefer, and what they talk about with the gym.

Take a member who used to train several times a week and now comes once. The platform notices and sends a WhatsApp check-in offering a free consultation with a personal coach, and a coach gets the task.

The platform automatically oversees gym members, and AI remembers what the team cannot. Each morning it picks out the members for whom the personal attention moment is the best right now, lets a coach know, and reaches out. That memory is what makes small, unexpected attention possible: a member who committed to running 10 km during the intake session, then lost motivation and slipped from training several times a week to coming once, is picked out by the platform automatically. Based on the business rules this gym wanted the platform to follow, the member gets offered a free consultation with a personal coach. When the person agrees, a coach immediately gets a task, so the member is met by a person at the gym and not only by a message. We are convinced that this human attention is what makes the service unique, so the AI is there to support the team's effort and not to replace it.

To understand the impact our approach has on retention, we measured it by splitting the members whose visits had become rare and irregular into two groups: those the platform kept an eye on, and those who were handled the way the gym had always handled them. We paid close attention to the differences in how these two groups behave.

Over several months we went back and checked how attendance went in both groups. When the staff followed the suggestions from our AI to engage members, they showed fewer signs of drifting away than the ones handled the way the gym always had. Members from the first group got back to their routine 23% more often, and the median member from this group returned to it within just 6 days.

Put plainly, for every hundred members who go quiet, fourteen more are training again a month later. That is fourteen extra months of membership per hundred members, before we count any of the time the staff save. For the staff, the change comes down to this:

A member who trains again is a member who still has a reason to stay, and for staff contacting people is easier because the work happens without anyone having to remember it.

The same attention that keeps members also makes them want more of what the gym offers. The replies to these check-ins hold what members needed, and that allows to make the right offer at the right time. We say more about how a Dutch gym managed to sell more with the help of AI in this case.