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Alter Ego: Workout Management System

A CRM Solution Fit for the Fitness Business

Nerd Masterpiece Theatre

Client profile

Alter Ego Fitness Group helps gyms and personal trainers in the fitness industry to streamline their business — which strikes a familiar chord with Sierra Bravo’s approach to helping companies use technology to work smarter. So why not work out smarter, too? Alter Ego’s clients include gyms, fitness centers, and other health-oriented establishments. Alter Ego provides the most advanced and sophisticated personal training system in the fitness industry.

Objectives

When the co-founders of Alter Ego met Sierra Bravo, they were rolling their years of experience in the fitness business into a new business of their own — but they wanted to leave behind some of the antiquated processes. They wanted no more of a familiar but inefficient paper/index card-based process. They needed something more automated.

Sierra Bravo built a web-based workout management system to enable gym managers and trainers to convert leads, sell contracts, and schedule workout sessions through a multi-faceted web interface that provides dynamic training session scheduling and customer relationship management (CRM).

Sierra Bravo worked closely with Alter Ego to meet key requirements for their unique business model, including multiple user levels, branding customizations and data unique to each gym location, and payroll management that automatically credits contracts and sessions to trainers.

“From the very beginning of our business, Alter Ego realized that investing in technology upfront to streamline our essential business processes would pay off in administrative cost-savings — as well as few key intangibles: making management more manageable, freeing trainers to focus on training, and putting clients in control of their fitness program,” said Mark Leeling, Director of Alter Ego Fitness Group.

Alter Ego maintains oversight via a central command center interface that allows them to create and manage each gym’s application. A specialized customer relationship management system allows Alter Ego to support their personal training program, interact online with customers, and support both personal trainers and their managers in giving customers a tailored fitness program.

Solution

The custom application created by Sierra Bravo supports five user types, each with a different interface designed to give users the tools they need. The five interfaces are:

  • Management Interface
  • Trainer Interface
  • Member Interface
  • Site Administrative Interface
  • Super User Administrative Interface

In the customer-facing portal, clients view and manage their workout schedules and session reports. Subscribing gyms share a central code base, but each gym has its own database and URL to access the application — which can be customized, allowing gyms to convey their own individual brand.

Management Interface

The management interface is the most feature-rich and comprehensive of the five user interfaces. The major component of the management interface is the sales queue, which allows managers to move and track new prospects through the entire sales process, including providing steps to contact a prospect, check on scheduling and assign trainers.

Managers get detailed reports on member workouts, including info on trainer, contact info, time, attendance, and additional training purchases. Managers are reminded to follow up with clients after a first workout — even if they don’t show up. A set of reports helps managers track training activity, including redeemed sessions, payroll, and the personal training daily report. Managers create new entries, edit existing entries, and view workout details. They can track members with sessions soon to expire, members with unscheduled sessions available, members due to renew, and members with scheduled sessions in the next six months — each of these screens is viewable by trainer/date range and by club/date range. Managers also have an interface to create new contracts, view existing contracts, renew contracts, and schedule sessions. Daily and monthly sales reports are searchable by date range. Managers control the workflow of personal trainers, with built-in reporting tools to gauge their business effectiveness.

Trainer Interface

Personal trainers have a subset of the tools available to gym managers, including workout cards, daily client reports, and a contract interface. By design, the trainer interface has more limited functionality. For example, personal trainers get workout reminders limited to their assigned members. Trainers maintain their working schedule in a calendar interface, which informs management and members about a trainer’s availability. The calendar interface also indicates times already scheduled for sessions, allowing trainers to view their schedule.

Member Interface

Each gym has its own custom-branded public-facing web interface for members. An interface to session scheduling allows members to request a session with a trainer. The trainer’s availability is presented in a calendar view of available session time-blocks. Members may send a cancel notification through this interface up to 24 hours before the start of the session.

Site Administrative Interface

Each gym has a site-level administrative interface where contract bundles, trainer compensation rates, site configuration values and users are managed.

Super User Administrative Interface

Alter Ego headquarters has a “super user” interface where staff can manage gyms with access to their Workout Relationship Management System. The super user administrative interface performs the primary function of setting up and maintaining the application on a gym-by-gym basis.

Tools of our Trade

Sierra Bravo developed the application with PHP and MySQL for deployment in a Linux Apache environment. Other technologies incorporated in this project include HTML, AJAX, and XHTML.

Results

With the Workout Management System Sierra Bravo created, Alter Ego can centrally manage their client gyms from just a web browser. Gym scheduling, reporting, payroll and new client set-up is all rolled into an application that now handles the old manual tasks for them.

“I think the final interface was completely unexpected and well-received,” said Sierra Bravo software development manager Kris Szafranski. “Alter Ego knows their business very well but did not fully anticipate the polish, functionality and ease of use that they got in the end.”

Alter Ego will pay for their application investment via new sales and resulting business opportunities.

“At Alter Ego, our approach to helping individuals and businesses in the fitness industry to streamline their business really resonated with Sierra Bravo, and they came through for us by creating a custom application connecting our entire working world — trainers, gyms, and their clients and members — via the web,” added Mark Leeling, Director of Alter Ego Fitness Group. “Sierra Bravo was very responsive to all the questions we had and exceeded our expectations on every phase of the application.”

“They got a solid, easy to use product that meets their needs specifically,” said Szafranski. “They didn’t have to try to bend some other customer relationship management system into their process. They described their needs and we built a CRM to support them.”

As this case study went to press, Sierra Bravo and Alter Ego were already working on the next phase of their evolving application.

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