Technology is playing an increasing role in the world of leisure and fitness management. New systems can seem daunting at first, but the benefits of their use – from greater time efficiency to cost savings – are often clear if the effort is put in up front.

For this month’s Fast Five, we spoke with Hannah Donohoe, services manager at Jonas Leisure, to find out about current trends, how the pandemic has accelerated digital uptake, and more.

What do you enjoy most about your role as Services Manager? 

I love leading a team that embraces continuous improvement. My team is always looking at lessons to be learned, or that could be learned. And they’re constantly challenging the way we do things to improve the customer experience – from install and set up, to training and data imports, all the way through to going live.

What is one technology trend you are seeing with customers this year? 

With all the new web functionality, our customers are loving the transformation of their business from a digital perspective. We have seen our customers increase membership sign ups, improve course enrolment efficiency, increase facility bookings, significantly reduce staff administration hours – the list goes on. So I’d say the current trend would be our customers using their new digital presence to empower their customers to manage their own journey, and ultimately feel more connected.

Training is an important part of the on-boarding and customer success process. What are you doing at Jonas Leisure to stay ahead of the curve? 

Due to the massive shift in the way we live and work post-COVID, with increased staff turnover and more of us working and learning remotely, we’ve seen a need for ‘on demand’ training resources. To meet this need, we’ve been working hard to develop an eLearning Platform that includes end-to-end product training videos. This is due for launch in the coming months.

Getting data into any IT system can be time consuming. What does Jonas Leisure do to make it simple? 

Data migrations from one software to another can be a time-consuming, tedious task, that’s true. To ease this pain point, our technical consultants have been working to enhance our data import toolkit, allowing us at Jonas Leisure to do the majority of the heavy lifting – depending on the product you are moving from. Our technical team can extract the data from your old system and import it directly into Envibe, removing the need for you to extract and populate spreadsheets.

What advice you would give to a customer wanting to get the most of Jonas Leisure software?

Keep up to date with the latest releases. That’s how you get all the fun new stuff!