Signing up members, giving great customer service and driving retention are key to a successful health club business. Ivan Stevenson explains how DFC can drive this process to underpin success

What service does DFC offer?
We’re a leading payment solutions and revenue management company, which has been running for almost 25 years. Our main purpose is to make our clients’ businesses easier by helping them to on-board members, manage and maximise customer revenue. We seek to create a true business partnership with our clients.

To this end, our value proposition has changed over the past few years to become more focused on the customer journey. Whereas we were primarily about revenue management, now we’re more about a holistic and consultative approach to the entire customer journey.

What is the difference between DFC’s offering and a payment gateway?
Payment gateways offer a slick online joining process, but they don’t offer any further customer service, credit control or reporting. Our value proposition is much more holistic. We’re there for the full customer journey: from the birth of the member via the online joining process to credit control and re-engagement if they fall behind with payments.

Our service speeds up the signing-on process and increases the average length of membership by three months. Our call centres can handle thousands of member communications daily, which frees up stakeholders to spend more time on revenue-generating and customer-facing activities.

What are the main ways in which you support clients?
There are five main ways. Firstly, we take the pressure off regarding billing and have worked hard within our partnerships to create a slick online joining process. An example being that we shaved eight minutes off the joining process for one of our clients in the Trust sector, which allows them to sell more.

Secondly, we can take over customer service, dealing with the bulk of enquiries through our state-of-the-art-telephone platforms. Calls are dealt with quickly and efficiently, with answer rates in the high 90 per cents and more than 80 per cent answered within 45 seconds. Added to this, we can deal with the electronic communications, freeing operators up to spend more time on revenue-generating activities.

Thirdly, credit control. This can be a time consuming and not particularly pleasant job for operators, and is another service we can control. If a member hasn’t paid, they receive an SMS within 24 hours and our MyPayments technology allows them to self serve and bring their account up to date. It’s about re-engaging with them and getting them back – around 50 per cent of people who fall into arrears and use MyPayments come back.

Fourthly, reporting is another valuable service we offer, we hold a lot of data about our clients’ commercial activity, so can provide them with valuable management information about their members, including good and bad payers.

Finally, we can integrate with operators’ chosen CRM system, ensuring everything is automated, freeing up their time and creating a smooth customer journey.

We pride ourselves on our full service, from joining customers at the front end, to stopping them from falling off the back end. We’re constantly listening to our clients when it comes to what they want and how we can continue to improve our service to work in partnership with them.