DRIVING PROFITABILITY FOR FRANCHISEES THROUGH TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

By Stacy Anderson, Anytime Fitness

New technologies have positively impacted the franchising industry, enabling franchisors to give operators more effective business solutions and ways to enhance the overall customer experience.

T o thrive in today’s competitive market, it’s imperative for brands to maximize these innovations as franchisees are interested in applying new strategies aimed at increasing their sales and maximizing their growth potential.

In any franchise system, brand uniformity and operational consistency is the cornerstone of successful expansion. That uniformity and consistency can be difficult, especially in service industries like gyms which rely on humans to deliver the primary elements of the experience. That’s where technological innovations can help — not by replacing the all-important parts of the experience, but instead automating the parts of the experience that matter less to our consumers, reducing friction in things like the sign up process, providing guardrails for how the workforce operates and making our teams more efficient in their quest to improve their clients’ health. While Anytime Fitness is the largest fitness franchise on the globe, we know we can’t rest if we want to attract new customers, franchisees and grow with existing. Most recently, we launched our new AF SmartCoaching technology and AF App to provide members with personalized holistic fitness and wellness coaching anytime, anywhere. The new technology launched systemwide creates a consistent and modern customer experience and provides long-term financial benefits for franchisees.

In any franchise system, brand uniformity and operational consistency is the cornerstone of successful expansion.

 While launching new technology can help increase the customer experience and improve the bottom line for franchisees, it’s imperative to understand your goals before moving forward. Here are a few of the things we think about it before progressing that can help drive profitability for franchise operators.

How Can Tech Elevate Efficiency?

Across all service industries, the customer experience is primarily based on human-to-human interactions. More often than not, the initial touchpoint is the guest’s first impression of the brand and creates a lasting expectation. As a franchisor, we encourage our franchisees and their teams to prioritize these one-on-one relationships. By incorporating cuttingedge technology, we free up our team to establish stronger connections with members. For example, our proprietary coaching dashboard, app, and body composition scanners, along with integrations with Apple Health Kit and Google Fit, aggregate our client activity and data. This helps our coaches better understand a client’s adherence to their fitness, nutrition and recovery programs and create opportunities for educating our clients beyond the scale. This knowledge helps create natural up-selling opportunities for personal fitness training and nutrition plans, but more importantly, it helps our members reach their goals faster. And achieving your customers goals, no matter what business you are in, is good for your bottom line.

Convenience and Accessibility

It’s important for brands to make it as easy as possible for key stakeholders to access the brand in a variety of ways. Convenience and accessibility are everything today and technology is a vehicle that can help your brand become more easily accessible to the consumer. Anytime Fitness was built on convenience, providing access to state-of-the-art gym equipment 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Today we are redefining “convenience” by integrating technology in the right ways to make our brand and coaching services accessible anytime, anywhere.

Across all service industries, the customer experience is primarily based on humanto-human interactions.

 Launching our new app and AF SmartCoaching technology has given consumers access to fitness, nutrition and recovery guidance outside the four walls of an Anytime Fitness club and it’s something all brands need to consider no matter the vertical.

How are you using technology to make your brand more convenient and accessible? Utilized correctly, you’ll develop additional revenue streams and create higher consumer engagement resulting in higher average unit volume (AUVs) and profitability. And strong AUVs help make you more attractive to prospective franchisees, which will fuel expansion.

Personalizing Customer Experiences

Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, we all saw a digital usage surge across the globe. As a result, personalization has never been as important as it is today. Brands must customize to have a deeper connection with their consumers. More specifically, adding artificial intelligence and predictive analytics can increase the average customer lifetime value at franchised locations by recommending products and services at the right time to the right person. With the AF App and SmartCoaching, our system captures member activity and performance inside and outside Anytime Fitness clubs. This data supercharges our coaches at each location and helps produce a personalized health and fitness plan for each member. As their plans progress, a body composition scanner is used to measure progress, and when goals are reached, new programs are delivered to match the member’s increased fitness level.

Convenience and accessibility are everything today and technology is a vehicle that can help your brand become more easily accessible to the consumer.

To ensure sophisticated technology provides the personalized experience that customers are looking for, it’s important for brands to implement employee training with all team members who will be using it on a day-to-day basis. Building in new training processes will ensure all franchise locations use the technology to its fullest potential and sustain uniformity.

Simply put, as a franchisor, investments in technology may seem daunting up front; but when used to create efficiency and consistency in operations, you enhance your franchisees’ bottom line and job satisfaction. More importantly, investments in technology can give you a competitive advantage with your customers, making it easy (and even delightful!) to do business with you — ultimately helping them achieve their goals faster and better. And happy customers mean greater lifetime value and better profitability – the hallmark of a great franchise.

Stacy Anderson is the president of Anytime Fitness. For more information about IFA franchisor member Anytime Fitness, visit franchise.org/franchise-opportunities/anytime-fitness.