Many variables come with owning and managing a personal training business online and offline. The most critical variable is managing your clients effectively and helping them get value for their money, but how can you achieve this?
You may have a website where you run promotions, social media pages, and everything else experts recommend, and you’ve got several clients. The problem is, you’re not getting repeat customers, and what’s more? They could be opting to get another trainer, maybe. You may wonder where you went wrong.
It wasn’t with your marketing strategies since having an online presence got you several new clients and increased your brand’s credibility. Where the major problem began is failing to deliver a positive client experience to retain your customers after creating brand expectations for them.
One seemingly straightforward but long-term solution for dwindling client retention is to provide customers with a way to schedule appointments with ease. Here’s where using personal training software is essential. Although using software to schedule client appointments was seen as a tool for only online personal training appointments, it works great for private training consultants. This article will explain what personal training (PT) software is, its key features, and its benefits.
What is Personal Training Software?
Personal training software helps personal trainers and owners of personal training businesses to manage their clients’ appointments and create custom exercise schedules and workout plans for customers. It’s also an app that accepts payments via different platforms, sorts client schedules, and access payment histories.
The software reduces the workload of trainers with the app’s calendar option, which allows them to maintain a personal calendar and track daily appointments.
Using the app’s e-commerce feature, personal trainers may sell other client services, like books. For example, fitness personal trainers can sell fitness merchandise and gear online.
Features of a Personal Training Software
Personal training software has features that suit specific needs, so it’s important to choose software in line with your business. The following are some features that every personal training software should have and a few customizable options you should look for during software purchase:
- Self-service: The software’s self-service platform helps customers book appointments, change sessions, make payments, schedule training days, and make complaints. This service is transmitted in real-time; therefore, trainers can respond to clients, give answers to objections, acknowledge payments, and approve session cancellations as soon as possible.
- Attendance information: Personal trainers can use this feature to track their customers’ attendance and how often they cancel appointments. Typically, trainers can collate the attendance data daily, weekly, or monthly. The gym instructors can use the data to track each client’s progress, help them set new exercise goals, and collect general activity reports weekly or monthly.
- E Commerce is an online platform where personal trainers and instructors can offer various other products and services for sale. These products may include additional consultations, books, and even courses. They are inexpensive to create awareness for a business and build brand trust.
- Multi-user: This feature enables personal trainers to manage and assign tasks to employees and other administrative members. With this feature, the primary user can add additional members to the software to expand administrative control and enable syncing client data and information in real-time across all platforms.
- Habit-tracking: It allows you to create and track your clients’ progress through its habit-based behavioral feature. Your clients can monitor their progress by agreed milestones that you may include in the personal training software. You and your customers can upload video and photo proof which you can use to gather information about each client and modify their current workout and meal plan.
Benefits of a Personal Training Software
Streamlines Appointments
For every personal training business, optimizing client experiences and improving the quality of services keeps clients coming back. So, if the current way your customers make appointments is not straightforward, it could be causing “client friction” from the unsatisfactory booking experience.
Personal training software makes online booking and scheduling of appointments easy and fast. It eliminates client friction by enabling them to book sessions anytime, anywhere, and however they want.
With this tool, you can schedule several sessions at once using the software’s calendar and reminder services, whether the client’s classes occur regularly or once.
Client Service and Information Management
The app allows you to store client information which you can then analyze for creating and editing programs for each client. Its information management feature collects and collates client assessments, preferences, goals, progress, complaints, and recurring workout issues.
It assists in creating and modifying workout programs and meal plans. You can communicate with clients in real-time to schedule their appointments and manage payments, increasing client engagement, and retention.
It enables you to skip the hassles of traditional client management, where you would have to create a physical folder and store each member’s information in separate folders.
With your personal trainer software, you can easily control all the billing, scheduling, payments, and monitoring of client progress.
Client Feedback and Complaint Management
There are some forms you need to create and edit, such as liability waivers, complaints, feedback, personal assessment, and other forms aside from workout programs. Using personal training software to manage and organize these forms rather than a computer reduces helps you avoid computer-based mistakes, such as accidentally deleting a file, loading information into a wrong folder, or using system format. You can create and upload all the accompanying files you need your client to acknowledge with your business’s contract.
Saves you time
Personal training software enables you to confirm or cancel appointments on your calendar. It allows you to schedule and plan your sessions or meetings over a fixed period or randomly.
If you sync the software with your regular mobile or pc calendar, it lets you see and access your work and personal schedules.
This feature allows you to set your work availability and manage your waiting lists. Setting your availability or unavailability gives you more time for other activities. Clients can book your classes and sessions quickly and without hassles. When they can easily book your classes, it will automatically increase your class attendance rates.
Tech Support
You need to update your services to use modern technology as a personal training business. PT software allows you to integrate your services with technologies like Fitbits and Apple watches to track activity.
For example, since in physical fitness, many people use apps to monitor their heart rates, the steps they take throughout the day, and plan their meals, you can upgrade your fitness personal training software to integrate with such apps.
Offering these online services helps you create a more personal experience for your clients, especially if they follow modern tech trends. These integrations enable you to significantly get ahead of the tech trend as more trends modify and emerge.
Attendance Management
Personal training software gives customers access to your upcoming sessions, special events & projects you have per week or month. It saves them time by letting them know if there are available spots.
This feature allows them to make or cancel appointments if they make the cancellation order within the set timeframe. Doing this helps minimize abrupt cancellations or a client not showing up for classes.
The app also has timely reminders that allow you to send notifications to clients, reminding them of their upcoming sessions, payments, or cancellations. You can alert them about their status on a class waiting list and remind them about fees and packages that are about to expire.
It has a timely automation function that gives you complete control over the mediums through which the notifications are sent, i.e., via email or SMS text message.
This function also controls when you send the alerts, i.e., it only sends the notifications during the day or in suitable time frames.
Using this feature helps you minimize booking errors and saves time to focus on creating and maintaining a positive experience for customer retention.
Data Reports and Overview
It gives you access to an overview of how your business is doing. With the data personal training software provides, you’ll be able to make accurate cash flow projections to help your fitness center stay ahead of the competition.
Personal training software gives you the following data reports:
- Summary: It gives you a breakdown of the number of bookings, clients, payments, and services.
- Daily activities: It enables you to access a daily record of your business’s activities and events.
- Sessions and classes: This report provides graphs and tables representing each client’s cost and session duration information. It also has the option that lets you choose the data you want to access.
- Client information: It is a report of all your clients’ information, such as phone numbers, names, addresses, and occupations. It also gives other information concerning each customer, such as the trainers assigned to their activity types.
- Memberships: This report gives you information about the number of clients with active memberships and the services they purchase.
- Attendance: It helps you analyze your clients’ attendance by name, duration, time of day, trainer, location, day of the week, membership, and package.