Many health clubs are failing to take advantage of an important asset in their business.

The concept of big data has become a significant focus for businesses and companies as they try to gain an advantage over their competition.

By collecting data on customer’s trends, behaviour and preferences, companies can get a better insight on how customers make decisions and what they are most likely to respond to.

This allows companies to create new products, services and offers that are more likely to resonate with customers and increase revenues.

In order to take advantage of data analysis, a company must first collect relevant data over a period of time before analysis can be completed. A savvy business owner or company management team will know the key data points they wish to track about their customers however it pays to collect as much data as possible as often some surprising distinctions can be found.

Over the time, your business’s historical data can become a very valuable asset which gives you greater clarity and ultimately the opportunity to significantly grow your revenues by more tightly meeting customers’ needs and wants.

This is a crucial mistake that we see many health clubs and leisure centres are making. Having no process to collect critical customer data is not acceptable for a business that wants to thrive into our fast changing future.

A health club should be gathering data on the preferences, interests, goals and limitations of their member base, not just on contact information typically captured through management systems.

The best point to capture this kind of member information is at the point of a health and fitness consultation where a gym instructor is asking a member about their goals, interests, limitations, injuries and training preferences in order to create a recommended training plan for the member.

Clubs that are recording this information on a paper card or paper file are letting go of a big opportunity to capture valuable information for future analysis.

Using electronic health club software for managing health and fitness consultation can be a much better approach as this makes your valuable data much more accessible and open to analysis at some point in your company’s future.

Some examples of the type of data you should be collecting and the applications of this are as follows….

Collecting information on member’s goals such as weight loss, improve strength, body building etc. This allows you to understand what is most important to your members so you can create targeted marketing and programs for popular goal types in the future.

Information on member’s health limitations. For example, you may have an exercise physiologist in your team and want to promote some rehab services to members with various health limitations or injuries.

Another example is to gather information on people preferences and interest. For example, it is useful to know which of your members are interested in functional training or bootcamps or learning about nutrition.

Can you see how by knowing this detailed information about your customer base, you can make better choices, develop programs and services that will increase your revenues and improve customer retention.

The value of this concept of data analysis may be missed by some however savvy managers and club owners are bound to see the massive opportunity in this concept.

The company that knows its customer best WINS.

The health clubs that are using pen and paper have all this valuable information potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to their business however it is all locked up written in words on paper.

The only way to solve this problem is to manually go through all your historical records and putting this information into a spread sheet or a health assessment software which is a mammoth task.

If you want to stay at the top of the industry and avoid falling behind the competition, this is a crucial TO DO for your health club.

If you are using a pen and paper system for collecting members’ information during fitness consultations and fitness testing, the best time to implement a health consultation software was five years ago. The next best time is now.