Clive Humby, a British mathematician and the inventor of Tesco’s Clubcard, famously said “Data is the new oil. Like oil, data is valuable, but if unrefined, it cannot really be used.” This is relevant to leisure centres now more than ever, as new technology is enabling businesses to gather and utilise data in powerful ways.
What Clive Humby’s statement meant was, unrefined data is like crude oil in that it contains a lot of value, but must be separated into useable parts. Data also needs processing so that you can extract useable information from it. This involves analysing it to uncover trends, correlations and other meaningful insights.
In this article, we explore how leisure centres can enhance their data collection and use their data to the benefit of their organisation.
Types of data to collect
Here are some of the basic kinds of data that leisure centres can collect and use:
Activity history: You can collect this kind of data to see how your clients are responding to classes and events. If you’re seeing high activity rates, you know that clients are enjoying classes, if they are low, you can conclude that something needs to change.
Attendance data: Basic attendance data can help you manage your centre’s capacity and ensure you don’t overbook. It can also reveal how many members of staff you need at a given time, so that you can deliver a consistently good service.
Equipment usage: By monitoring how frequently people use certain bits of equipment, you can not only gauge what’s popular, but you can also predict what will need repairing the soonest. Equipment usage data can also guide upgrade decisions.
These are just the basic forms of data to collect, but using leisure management software, you can begin to collect even more kinds of data and paint sophisticated pictures of customer behaviours and preferences.
Leisure management software for data harvesting
When you add leisure management software to the mix, you can begin to extract even more value from data. You can layer and stack data to reveal different information and produce complex metrics, like a customer cancellation prediction score, which conveys the likelihood of a customer cancelling their membership.
This software gives you the tools you need to gather complex datasets, consolidate them in a dashboard and analyse them with ease. The automation of data collection through software also eliminates the risk of human error and allows you to collect data across multiple sites simultaneously.
You can begin to paint more revealing pictures with your data when you have powerful tools such as this at your disposal. You can determine which times of the month or year are your busiest periods, who is at risk of leaving and why, you can improve the efficiency of various processes, and much more.
If you’re interested in getting started with leisure management software, reach out to us today and we can help you get started.