GLL (Greenwich Leisure Limited), the UK’s largest charitable social enterprise leisure provider, has extended its contract with Legend Club Management Systems for an additional three year period.

Operating under the brand “Better”, GLL runs 258 sport and leisure facilities and 101 libraries on behalf of local authorities in London and across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as its own training college and the “Healthwise” programme. With its goal to benefit the community, GLL (established in 1993) has exhibited astounding growth and has expanded from a Local Services Charitable Trust in Greenwich, London, to the market leading Social Enterprise organisation we see today. GLL strives to make community services and spaces better for everyone and is the first leisure operator in the UK to be awarded the prestigious Social Enterprise Mark and the Big Society Award.

Legend was initially installed across the GLL estate at the end of 2010 on a four-year contract, which was subsequently extended for three years in 2014. This latest contract renewal comes in recognition of the success and value gained from the GLL/Legend partnership.

Legend provides GLL with its core business system. This includes database; sales and member retention; direct debit administration; business intelligence and reporting; front of house systems including e-POS, access control management, bookings, and kiosk including extended-hours kiosk hardware maintenance and support. The synergy of development and close GLL/Legend relationship mean that GLL has also become the first Legend client to enjoy the benefits of the new Legend Fast-Payment Kiosk, a game changing step in customer service. Legend also provides member-empowering, self-service e-commerce solutions including smartphone apps, customer portal, join-online and web bookings.

The comprehensive, seamless Legend solution is provided on Legend’s cloud based, high availability infrastructure running across two data centres. Legend offers GLL industry leading customer support 24x7x365 while its ISO 9001 Quality Management Accreditation and ISO 27001 Information Security Accreditation provide reassurance to GLL Senior Management as to the quality, security and accuracy of its data.

Since 2010, Legend has helped GLL deliver several significant R&D projects for its customers, which include:
• A fast track kiosk project which has seen over 7.4 million uses since delivery
• A Smartphone App which has enabled over 10.5 million Smartphone bookings since its delivery
• A new, fully integrated Online Ticketing Solution for the opening of the London Aquatics Centre to the general public following the London 2012 Olympic Games
• A unique Business Intelligence dashboard solution with customer-tailored KPI dashboards and auto-alerting and analysis data cubes
• A fast payment kiosk project launched Oct 2017 to be seen in GLL centres from Dec 2017

Sean Maguire, Managing Director, Legend outlined: “I am pleased to announce Legend’s continued engagement with GLL. As a market leading technology partner, we aim to respond positively to the software R&D challenges set by the diverse and rapidly growing organisation that is GLL. GLL expanded by 26 sites in 2017 alone, and there are even more sites in the pipeline. Our core aim is to support GLL’s continued growth by adding value to each customer interaction every time they book a session or visit a centre, through our jointly developed pioneering software technology. This is an important partnership for us both and we look forward to maximising the benefits for our businesses going forward.”