The Problem
Blink offers its members personal training sessions in the gym, and with the pandemic, it became incredibly difficult to continue this service without a digital element. Even before the pandemic, there was a world of issues with the personal training offering -- it was a complete analog experience with no digital booking or session management. To compete with the landscape, we needed to increase our touchpoints for personal training.
Opportunity Analysis
I had initially started the idea with an opportunity analysis of just the Personal Trainer bios on the web and app. My assumptions were around the difficulty of choosing a trainer at a gym when you had to visit the front desk and hope they had a binder of photos and bios, most of the time they were submitted by the trainers and difficult to compare.
Pandemic Hit
Once the pandemic hit and the gyms were closed, we needed to act fast. Luckily for us, the vendor we use for member and session management had finally released the API for scheduling sessions (as well as reservations for gym time). I took the initial opportunity analysis for PT Bios and briefed my UX Designer who I was directly managing at the time to start working out the flow of scheduling sessions for personal training directly in the app. The availability would come from our current system at the front desk (MotionSoft), and the PT Bios data was confirmed, but where would it come from? While the UX Designer worked on the experience, I worked on understanding where the data would live and how it would be managed.
Looking to Real-World Examples
Unfortunately my UX Designer left, and I had just my visual designer left. While we took a look at the wireframes she had left, I wanted an approach that allowed members two different paths: one for knowing the date/time to book and the other for knowing the trainer they wanted to schedule with. Some members didn’t care about the trainer, some members did. I was directing my designer and had many working sessions on figuring out the flow, until one day I remembered, this is just like ZocDoc. Why reinvent the wheel? ZocDoc allows you to look at times available and bios at the same time, allowing multiple paths at once. We took their layout and reconstructed our PT Scheduling feature based off one of the most powerful medical startups.
A World of Problems
There seemed to be problems at every turn. We had managed to get the data for PT Bios to come from UltiPro, the HR platform, but unfortunately the images for the thumbnails could not be taken from there. We tried MoSo, but the images were too small and unable to be taken via the API. We then tried the app’s CMS, but they tried charging us more for an additional space. We had to take thumbnails from a new CMS, with a universal login, and create a world of pain for a lot of the field staff to upload and manage these photos. Questions were coming from UltiPro for the bios. Availability comes from MoSo. Franchisee trainers then didn’t have UltiPro, to which we had to reverse engineer the new CMS to include the questions as well. Then came the issue of session types and how the app would recognize them to schedule.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
We ended up successfully pulling together a product that will cause a huge paradigm shift in the business of Blink Fitness. Soon members will be able to view the personal trainers at their home gym and others nearby, view the schedules of personal trainers, book sessions on their own, and cancel in advance. The front desk associates will no longer have to help every member find personal trainers or times or cancel upcoming sessions.
What’s Next?
We’ll be conducting a small test by releasing the feature to a small subset of gyms in NYC. We’re doing this to understand any issues that may arise and getting feedback from the staff, trainers, and members.
The KPIs for this product are:
- Session submission conversion %
- Session redemptions
- Session purchases
- Unique client purchases
- Returning client purchases
I’ll keep updating this case study with metrics and performance as we further release the product.