How Fitness Factory drives sales with KioskBuddy
We talked to Tyler, the CFO at Fitness Factory, to hear how things have been going for them since they started using KioskBuddy.
Why did you decide you needed a self-service kiosk?
"As a 24/7 gym I needed to allow our members the ability to purchase products outside of our staffed hours.
The way that buying outside of staffed hours was done prior to KioskBuddy was members would come up to the front desk with their pre-workout drinks, protein drinks, or supplements and they would just write down the products that they got next to their name on a sign-in sheet. Then every morning the staff would go through the sign-in sheets and they would enter the purchases into the system and charge the members via card on file.
Sometimes 20 sheets of paper from a given day with some interesting handwriting or accidentally writing on the wrong line, no thank you! As we grew it became a nightmare fast, so I knew that we had to do something quick.
Fortunately I am a tech nerd and I travel a lot. I saw these self-checkout kiosks growing in other businesses and airports and I was like "okay, this seems like the way for us."
I did some research and found KioskBuddy and the rest is history."
"KioskBuddy has been life changing for our business…specifically in the way KioskBuddy has so much configurability with Square. It works tremendously. It works really, really well."
What kinds of specific improvements did you see?
"We've seen real observable statistics in having a self-checkout kiosk. Members that have been with us for 5 to 10+ years, their average customer value (how much money the customer spends at the gym) has gone up over time.
And no, their membership has not changed. We have a lot of reason to believe that it's because they can go to a kiosk and make purchases whenever they want."
"The system itself encourages buying more stuff or buying more frequently. You don’t have to depend on a cashier or wait in line at a front desk…that (being a cashier) became a task that our staff no longer had to do."
Did you have any challenges with the kiosk and how did you overcome those?
"There is a little bit of margin of error for people ringing themselves up incorrectly.
The way we tackle that is by having a ton of cameras. We have one camera behind the kiosk and one camera above. As we research any inventory variances, we go back and watch the cameras in order to see what happened.
The vast majority of the time it is an accident so we send a nice little note, like, "hey, you accidentally rang up the wrong thing."
What has worked best in terms of kiosk placement?
"The front desk of a gym is a very sacred place. People love to just hang out, talk about training, chit chat. It is not conducive for doing business to be honest. So our front desk can now be what members want it to be, a hangout spot.
Our kiosks have their own separate space by the cooler with protein ready to drink products, pre-workout, water, gatorade, etc.
Due to our member size, I also started with two kiosks. Now, that may not be necessary for everybody, but I recommend it. You can mount your kiosk to a wall but I elected to do the free-standing VESA mounts that Square sells. I can move it wherever I want. If we ever do change up how our supplements and refrigerators are laid out, I can adjust the kiosks with it.
The smartest thing I ever did was have one iPad that has cellular. That means if there's an internet outage or a power outage, I am covered and my kiosk is plugged into a battery backup that will power it for longer than what the iPad would."