UNIFIED AGENT DESKTOP EMPOWERS FITNESS FIRST AGENTS TO RESOLVE CUSTOMER QUERIES FIRST TIME Fitness First started as a single health and fitness club in Bournemouth in 1993. It has since grown to become one of the world’s largest gym, health and fitness club groups with over 1 million members, more than 380 Fitness First clubs across 16 different countries and 85 clubs in the UK. Fitness First’s UK contact centre operation offers an essential first point of contact for customers looking to join up, change their membership details, renew contracts, as well as for general enquiries. In addition to handling inbound calls, Fitness First agents also conduct outbound programmes to support member retention as well as using email, mailings and social media campaigns. Fitness First was keen to improve customer contact performance, however the combination of its legacy call delivery system and CRM-based member management system made it hard for agents to gain access to the information they needed. “While we held all the necessary information in-house, it was really hard for our agents to get hold of a customer’s details during a call, due to the lack of integration between our systems,” commented Fitness First’s Performance Manager, Emma Stark. “This had an inevitable impact on first contact resolution and overall levels of customer satisfaction.” Business Benefits

• Eliminated repeat calls
• Massive increase in First Contact Resolution
• Reduction in FTE through desktop efficiency
• Agents free to spend more time on complex issues

“When a member called up initially, Fitness First agents had to gather details and then submit a request for back-office departments to make a change. This could often prove a lengthy process and frequently meant that customers would call back to check on progress and it looked like we hadn’t acted on their request,” added Emma. “This lack of integration also impacted the consistency of information shared between the contact centre and the fitness clubs. For example, membership upgrades transacted by the contact centre weren’t being shared with the clubs.” “It was clear that lack of systems integration was increasingly impacting member satisfaction and we were determined to update our customer contact infrastructure so that we could deliver an improved customer experience,” she continued. “Our goal was to implement a more joined up solution that could directly address the issue of first contact resolution – cutting repeat calls and freeing our agents to focus on delivering a high quality customer service.” Improving first contact resolution through an intelligent desktop After a detailed market assessment, Fitness First engaged mplsystems to help support the delivery of an optimised customer experience for the club’s members. Fitness First recognised that its contact centre was an essential first point of contact for customers, so opted for an approach that would bring immediate customer service benefits. Working with mplsystems, Fitness First has now implemented a powerful multi-channel contact centre and intelligent agent desktop solution capable of delivering a more consistent customer service experience.