Those of us who’ve been in the fitness game for a long time might remember the faff of administrating membership payments. I certainly do. I remember the arduous setup. The gruelling form-filling. The cumbersome management processes. The storage snags. Hooray for digital, I say.

At DFC, Direct Debits are our forte. But we certainly wouldn’t have got onto the cutting-edge of our industry without insights from all the other areas of the digital payment revolution.

Direct Debit was once merely a resource for collecting ongoing payments. It was a pretty useful one, but its aptitudes were limited. Nowadays, Direct Debit is a front and back end sales aid and an administrator’s ally. It’s not just an efficient way to manage your bottom line. It’s a sustainable way to capitalise on it.

Take online joining, for instance. Gyms across the country lord this as the holy grail of gym membership acquisition. It functions beyond the 9-5 hours of operation and it’s accessible across most connected devices.

Online joining eliminates monotonous paperwork, solving the storage conundrum I previously mentioned and speeding up the process considerably. It truly is a remarkable solution that’s altered the membership collection landscape beyond recognition. It kicks down the barriers that stood in the way of gyms and their potential members.

Online joining portals can be integrated into your current website, app and CRM. Just think how effective it is to house billing information from your one central hub. That in itself arguably highlights one of the most valuable aspects of our high-tech age. All roads can lead back to your website and CRM if you want them too.

Even credit control doesn’t have to be a manual process anymore. We personally have a solution called My Payments that enables members to pay defaulted and payments online through an automated email or SMS prompt.

The technological age opens up myriad opportunities for simplified communication and development. It solves brainteasers that once plagued fitness professionals around how to ease the buying and membership journey for their customers. But the best is yet to come and I can’t wait to see what exciting innovations are in store.

– Ivan Stevenson, Director at DFC

DFC is a leading Revenue Solutions Management Solutions provider, handling Direct Debits for thousands of happy customers across the UK.