member payments
NO FRICTION, NO FICTION
I
STUART DYSON LOOKS AT THE FUTURE OF PAYMENTS And it isn’t going to end there: in a
magine this: you’re browsing the Amazon website for a book on the hottest new exercise routines. You find exactly what you’re looking for
and, just before you use the ‘one click to buy’ option, a message pops up explaining that a course is starting next week at the health club round the corner: would you like to add it to your purchase? You choose ‘yes’, instantly download
the book to your e-reader, receive a QR (Quick Response) code for access to the club, and see receipts for both items on your smart phone. Every time you go back to the club (swiping your phone to gain entry), a small, ‘micro’ charge is taken via your Amazon account, and you’re sent regular text and email messages from both the club and the author of the book to encourage you to stick to your programme. Fantasy? Science fi ction? This scenario will be here sooner than you think. The internet has transformed our lives
– personally, professionally and fi nancially. Shoppers in the UK spent a whopping £5.1bn online in January 2011, a year-on- year increase of 21 per cent, according to the Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.
study commissioned by Google, the Boston Consulting Group predicts that the UK internet economy will account for 10 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2015. That’s more than the country’s construction, transportation or utilities industries. One reason for this explosive growth
would appear to be that the internet simply takes the hassle out of buying things – it’s quicker, easier and more effi cient than other, traditional methods. Banks and credit card companies may still wield a tremendous amount of power, but the giant e-tailers such as Amazon and eBay are where we’ve been introduced to radically new and easy ways of spending money. They convinced us that entering credit card details online was safe and socially acceptable; then they showed us increasingly more creative ways of demanding and receiving goods and services through ‘friction-free’ payments. Think about how we receive the
items we buy on the internet. Click on an app on the Apple Appstore and it’s downloaded. Choose an e-book on
Amazon and it’s available on your Kindle reader in seconds. Want to keep your music current? Pay your monthly fee to Spotify and you need never download music again; all your favourite tunes reside on servers in ‘the cloud’ and can be played on all your devices anywhere, any time – simple, affordable and convenient. These changes have proved to be the
catalyst for many new businesses, but they have also become hugely disruptive for those clinging to the status quo. So how is the leisure industry responding to the changes in the way we pay for things?
tried and tested The traditional way to join a health club
was to walk in or to enquire by phone (no prices given out under pain of death!), book a tour, consider the membership options, get signed up by a salesperson, then set up a payment plan with the internal finance team. It involved lots of people and expense for the club, and plenty of friction for the customer. A cheaper alternative was to
outsource the membership collections process to a bureau. For a fee, these agents took over the electronic BACS submissions and debt collections, leaving the operator free to focus on other elements of the business. This streamlined the back offi ce transaction but didn’t address the time and cost of signing up new members, or the fact that data was rarely connected to leisure management software. The simple solution was to strip
Mobile wallet: Payments via mobile devices are growing as technology rapidly accelerates
60 Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital
back to very few membership options and then move everything online; if you could book and pay online for something as complex as a fl ight, why not a health club membership? The smartest operators recognised that outsourced BACS payments, combined with carefully designed websites, created a compelling end-to-end solution for managing the whole joining and payment experience.
july 2011 © cybertrek 2011
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