Knowing your audience is important. As attentive leisure organisations, we tend to know our member demographics but we don’t pay much attention to the finer details of our customer payments. This is essential when you think about it, what with money being the end goal of every business.
So what are we looking out for?
Thriving fitness organisations as we are, we witness a continuous tide of new and returning members entering our facilities. Each of these will have invested something different into us. Some will be loyal, others less so. Some may be getting away with lost payments and you don’t even know about it.
The majority of customer payments are collected by Direct Debit. Whilst this is an easy solution for membership collection, it remains vital to keep track of where your money is coming in, for a number of reasons:
- Keeping a closer eye on customer payments will enable you to better understand your cashflow, allowing you future-proof your income in a clearer and much more accurate way.
- You can gain an improved understanding of your best and worst paying customers. This way, you can reward customer loyalty and start thinking about safeguards to deter customer’s that are a drain on resources.
- Following the peaks and troughs of member sign-ups on a more granular level will help you to plan offers and incentives that really work!
- Sometimes, defaulted payments slip the net. When you’re a busy organisation with a multitude of tasks on the go, that’s often the way it is. Unfortunately, however, little else burns a hole in the company pocket than lost payments so being on top of them really is crucial.
More analytics
Thank the stars for the internet and all the information contained within. Whilst manually analysing all your financial information can leech time away like little else, the internet has birthed the ability to have all the data at your fingertips in seconds!
Reports, such as leading Direct Debit bureau DFC’s Data Retrieval, can provide you with an in-depth overview of your transactions, customer insights and areas that need attention. It’s one of the reasons that so many leisure organisations use DFC to manage their Direct Debit collection.
Data Retrieval is available 24/7 and can be easily integrated with existing CRM systems. Find out more about DFC’s fantastic Direct Debit solutions and see what they can do to help you turn around member attrition, credit control and plenty more: https://www.debitfinance.co.uk/solutions