Effective member check-ins

If you’re operating a premium, small-group personal training gym, then it’s pretty much guaranteed that regular member check-ins are a cornerstone of your model. However, for many gyms, they are haphazard and often become an administrative nightmare, resulting in yet more spreadsheets.

I’m Chris Windram, CEO of Quoox.

In this webinar, I’m going to show you how you can use GymOS to easily and effectively manage your member check-ins. Not only will you be able to rest in the knowledge that no member has ever been forgotten, but also all the administrative aspects of check-ins are handled for you – potentially saving you hours every month.

The process we are going to set up is something you need to do only once. If you follow the process in this video, you’ll have it all up and running in just 10 to 15 minutes. Once it is in place, GymOS will handle the ongoing operation.

Unless you’re one of the lucky few still managing to get the remaining couple of bangs out of the “accountability drum”, then you’re operating in the “real world”. One where your members have families and jobs and need flexibility. This is almost certainly the case if you’re charging more than 200 pounds per month for your product.

For many, committing to the same date/time every month simply isn’t necessarily realistic, and it doesn’t generally work on a calendar basis either.

I’m going to show you how to set up a 28-day recurring member check-in. This will create and send members a DropSlot consultation appointment every 4 weeks, prompting and enabling them to book their check-ins. Because most gyms assign each client a mentor, we’re going to book the member’s check-ins with their mentor, based on their availability.

In my theoretical scenario, we also opt to do our check-ins in the first half of the day. I’ll therefore show you how to control the check-in slots offered to your members.

Members will see their check-in appointment in their app, and we’ll also send them a reminder text message 24 hours before.

We shall assign our recurring check-in schedule to members upon the commencement of their membership, using a Trigger. This will then happen automatically, and we know no one has been missed.

Finally, we’ll set up another trigger to notify us when an invitation expires unused, so we know who hasn’t booked a check-in.

So, let’s begin.

We will start by configuring the DropSlot consultation event, which members will be invited to book.

From the main menu, select Connect and Promote, and then DropSlot consultations.

If you’ve not used DropSlot before, the first thing you will need to do is head into “Team Availability”. If you use the GymOS shift functionality, your default settings will be ok. If you don’t, you will need to tell GymOS the hours each of your team members works. The times you enter are the broadest times that each employee is available for DropSlot appointments.

You only need to do this once, or if a team member’s work pattern changes.

To set up our bookable event, we head back to “Schedule and Events”.

I’m going to show you a Check-In event that I have already configured. You’d click the “Add Event” button to create your new event.

I’ve called my event “Check-In” and have given it a meaningful description. Don’t skip that step, as this information is shown to the members when they receive their booking invitation.

I’ve set the duration to 20 minutes, but set it as you need, and I’ve selected the built-in event category “check-in”.

By selecting this category, I have given GymOS the information it needs to now pull member check-in attendance data across into my “Source of Truth” and business metrics.

I also assign a highlight colour to the check-ins to make them stand out in the member’s booked session listing.

Here is where you’ll start to see why using GymOS is a smarter option than a general appointment app.

I can select my event host as the member’s assigned mentor. This saves me from creating lots of different appointment types and having to make sure the right members get the right links. Using DropSlot, GymOS handles it all for me.

I only want a single attendee, as this is an individual catch-up. Whilst members will only receive one invite, I’m also setting the maximum concurrent bookings to 1 to prevent multi-bookings.

Since this is a member check-in, I set permissions so only members with invitations can book. I have also checked the box to have GymOS notify the mentors when a booking is made.

In our scenario, our event location is “telephone”. We will be calling them. However, it could be a Zoom meeting that DropSlot would book, or an in-person meeting.

I’ve limited members to only booking 7 days in advance. You can set longer, but you will typically see more no-shows.

I don’t want my colleagues or me to suddenly have a last-minute check-in, so I’ve set the minimum booking notice period to 3 hours. I’ve also given myself a 15-minute buffer on either side of my bookings.

Now, here is another smart feature. I’m going to set GymOS to automatically avoid sessions where the host is a coach. It will also avoid issues like other bookings and holidays.

Finally, on this page, I set my invitations to expire 28 days after they are sent out. This is important because I will send them on a 28-day schedule. I don’t want invitations piling up, and I also want the expiry of an invitation to trigger a notification when a member hasn’t booked their check-in.

I hit Save, and my basic event is now created.

As I mentioned earlier, in this example, I am going to limit my check-ins to the quieter first half of the day. I added restrictions on the “time restrictions” tab.

GymOS considers these alongside staff availability hours and existing commitments to show only slots that meet all the availability criteria. So, here, appointments can only be offered Monday to Friday, 8 am to 1 pm.

Also optional, but shown for completeness, I have added a question to the booking invitation.

I ask the member to let us know if there is anything specific they would like to raise before their appointment.

I move to the schedules tab. This is again an area where DropSlot differentiates itself from generic appointment booking tools.

Here, I have created a schedule that issues an invitation every 28 days. It also sends a push notification to the member advising them that they have a check-in invitation. I have opted NOT to send an immediate invitation, for reasons I’ll cover shortly.

Finally, on the reminders tab, I have created a 1-day reminder.

I have set this to be sent via SMS 24 hours prior to the booking to remind the member to attend. Their booking is visible on their booking app home screen and in their calendar feed (if they use it).

To assign the schedule, I have set up a Membership Started trigger. This will run when a member starts a membership and allocates them the check-in schedule.

Because we only want to check in from 28 days onward, not on the day the membership starts, we left the “issue an invitation immediately upon the schedule being assigned” box unchecked when we set up the schedule in the DropSlot event.

Because I only want to assign the check-in schedule to memberships that have it, I have checked the memberships accordingly.

For the trigger action, I have selected to add the 28-day schedule for the check-in event we created a moment ago. I leave the two checkboxes unchecked, so members don’t end up with multiple check-in schedules assigned to them. This makes the trigger safe to be run across membership changes, as GymOS will determine that the schedule is already allocated and not duplicate it.

As my final step, I will assign a second trigger. This is an Invitation Expired trigger.

This trigger applies only to my “check-in” DropSlot event, so I have ticked that accordingly. I have decided that I want to be notified of every missed check-in, so I have set the “consecutive unused invitations” value to 1. If I wanted to give the member a month’s leeway, I could set it to notify every 2 consecutive unused notifications.

For the action, I have configured an email to go to the member’s mentor. It tells them who has failed to book a check-in and reminds them to reach out to the member sometime soon.

When a member commences a new membership, GymOS assigns them the check-in schedule – unless it has already been assigned. This shows on the “consultations tab” of the member record.

Then, when the first 28-day period arrives, the member receives their first check-in invitation. They get notified by both push notification and email.

They can follow the booking link in the email or find the invitation in the mobile app.

They click the invitation and are shown slots in the next 7 calendar days when their mentor is working and not already booked onto a session or other commitment.

Having made their selection, they are booked into the check-in slot. It appears in both their calendar and their app home screen.

24 hours before the booking, they receive an automated text message reminding them of the appointment.

28 days later, they get their next invitation, and the process continues.

All handled by GymOS, with just 10-15 minutes of setup time required. No members get forgotten, and the headache of scheduling goes away in an instant.

As a final point, you would also assign the schedule to your existing members. It doesn’t matter if you do this in bulk, because members can still only book the slots you have available and only once every 28 days.

Your check-ins will naturally find their own rhythm, and you can rest comfortably that your mentors are getting alerts about members who aren’t scheduling their calls.

You can, of course, revise this process however you wish – but hopefully this has shown you just how quickly and easily you can solve the whole check-in administration headache and deliver the service your members expect more ably.

If you are not currently a GymOS client and would like to learn more, please scan the QR code on screen and book a call.