An Envibe upgrade coming in August will make managing swim schools and other courses easier, provide tools to monitor and boost group fitness class attendance and allow customers to use promo vouchers online from your customer portal.
Read on for a summary of key changes and advice on getting the upgrade set up at your leisure centre or gym.
Make course management easier
Two highly anticipated features are being introduced for our Courses module, commonly used by swim schools and other courses such as recurring gymnastics lessons.
Replacement sessions: How much time do your staff and customers spend co-ordinating replacement sessions when students attending swim school or gymnastics classes are away because of illness or a family holiday?
The Envibe upgrade being released in August will make this process easier by giving customers the power to re-schedule missed lessons directly from within your facility’s online customer portal.
This will allow customers to re-schedule sessions from home once they have had a chance to consider their schedule. It will also save time for staff, who won’t have to coordinate as many rescheduled sessions with customers at the front desk or over the phone.
Customers who have been granted a replacement session will be able to choose a time that works for them by logging into the customer portal and making their selection.
New trigger message templates: We have upgraded the templates for our trigger messages, used for automated email and SMS customer communications, to enable you to add a ‘Next Debit Amount’ and ‘Next Debit Date’ to messages being sent to those who have signed-up for recurring courses. This will automatically call on relevant information stored in Envibe for all members and populate each users’ message with the correct information.
Adding auto-populated ‘Next Debit Amount’ and ‘Next Debit Date’ information to trigger messages has long been possible in Envibe templates for member communications. However, this upgrade expands the functionality by allowing you to automatically add this helpful information to trigger messages you set up for people attending courses you run.
Group fitness upgrades
We’re introducing three enhancements to Envibe’s Group Fitness module to make it easier for facilities to ensure classes they advertise are operating at capacity.
Attendance marking: We’re introducing new tools to make it simple to mark attendance. You will be able to choose between marking attendance automatically when a registered group fitness participant swipes their access token at your access control gate, or doing so manually at your front desk when a group fitness class member arrives.
This feature will make it easier to keep tabs on who is turning up to your classes. If any customers are regularly registering but not attending, you can have a friendly word with them – no more empty spin bikes.
Watch list: You asked and we’re answering. We’re introducing a ‘watch list’ that allows customers to sign up to be notified if a space becomes available in a class they want to attend that is fully booked.
Everyone who has signed up to the watch list online for a fully-booked class receives a notification if a person who was registered cancels their booking. The notifications will be received via text message and wannabe attendees can then click a link in the message to confirm their registration.
The first person on the watch list to click the link and confirm their booking will secure the class spot – first-in, first-serve.
Class-specific registration windows: The third Group Fitness enhancement being introduced in August will give class coordinators the ability to choose how early people can register for classes before they take place.
Previously the timeframe you set in Envibe applied universally to all classes at your facility, but this feature will allow you to choose a different timeframe for each class you set up. You may want to select a 24-hour registration window for a class that is always fully prescribed but is seeing too many no-shows, or a longer 48-hour registration window for class that isn’t so busy or where attendees are less familiar with technology.
Discount code improvements
Last, but not least, our upcoming Envibe upgrade will allow customers to use any promotional discount codes you publicise by entering them directly into the membership sign-up section of your online customer portal.
This will make it much easier to effectively run marketing promotions aimed at boosting membership numbers at your facility.
Sounds great! How do I sign up?
The new version of Envibe will be available to all users in August. To get it set up at your facility, simply email our support team to let us know you would like the latest version configured as soon as it is available. We will be happy to help.
