We already know that club admin is the least favourite part of a gym owners’ day, but the worst part in particular? Looking at your CRM system and realising you have customers that are late on their payments.
This can be for innocent reasons, such as a change in card details or purely life getting in the way. Regardless of the reasons, it’s crucial to keep your missed payments to a minimum so that your business can continue to meet its financial targets and operate smoothly.
So, here are our tried and tested methods to collecting missed payments, and preventing them before they happen.
Make your pricing clear from the get-go.
The first step is to make your pricing as clear as possible for your customers. Try to include everything in one price instead of having a number of costs for several different things. Hidden extra costs are certain to put a bad taste in your customers’ mouths.
If your price list is long and confusing then (not only do you run the risk of losing the customer before they’ve even signed up), the customer might be charged more than they were expecting, making them less likely to complete the payment.
Our advice? Keep it simple and straightforward to avoid confusion.
Collect payments online.
There are many, many benefits to using online payments at your club, from better security to no longer having to go to the bank to deposit your cash.
Online payments are particularly good at preventing missed payments from your customers because you can set up a direct debit or recurring card payment, meaning you’re guaranteed to collect the money (as long as there are sufficient funds in the payee’s account of course). If you run monthly rolling memberships that are paid via Direct Debit or card, that’s money guaranteed to be in your pocket every month.
No more, “Oh sorry, I left my wallet at home today. I’ll pay next time I’m in” from your cash customers!
Use automation to prompt payment.
If you tried both of the above and you’ve still got members with overdue payments, it’s time to start chasing them – a task that’s incredibly frustrating and time consuming for gym owners that are spinning enough plates already.
If you didn’t already know, automation is a gym owners’ best friend. Set up your CRM system so that as soon as a customer has failed to pay their membership fee, they receive a communication from your club notifying them that their payment has failed.
In ProRight, you can set up a Payment Due automation to do exactly that: send an email/text/push notification (or all of the above) to members with overdue payments at timed intervals of your choice. For example, five payment due reminders within 28 days after the first failed payment. ProRight even has multiple automation templates that you can use, so the bulk of the work is already done for you.
Prevent entry for customers with overdue payments.
If your club operates from physical premises, you’ll likely already use some form of access control; it might be turnstiles or something as simple as a barcode scanner to register attendance.
Whatever your setup, your software should not be letting in customers with overdue payments. This allows you to address the issue at your premises and come up with a solution for your customer to get their payments up to date there and then.
In a nutshell, there are plenty of ways to avoid missed payments and even a couple of solutions for when a small number of individuals slip through the net. The most important thing is to implement a process that’s not only effective but works for you too. You don’t want to spend hours writing emails and making phone calls to members that might’ve missed a payment when you can bypass all of that by using automation, for example.
We hope this blog post helped give you a few ways to keep your number of overdue customers to a minimum! If you’d like to learn more about ProRight and how it can save you hours on club admin, you can give us a call on 0203 884 9777 or schedule a free, no-obligation demo by clicking below.
