Carlisle Leisure Limited has selected Legend Club Management Systems' comprehensive leisure management system, to help provide better insight into its current users, enable the provision of a greater range of online self-service capabilities and improved reporting and tracking of club and membership data.

Carlisle Leisure has selected Legend's hosted leisure management system to sit at the core of the organisation's customer service offering. Moving forward, Carlisle Leisure has ambitious plans to use the data and the analysis the Legend system can provide to support social care organisations in the region.

Carlisle Leisure is a not-for-profit company responsible for managing a variety of leisure facilities - from sports clubs, swimming pools and golf clubs, to entertainment and conference centres - for Carlisle City Council and Allerdale Borough Council, as well as on behalf of a number of schools and academies in the region.

With over 5,000 members and many more users, Carlisle Leisure recognised 15 months ago that it needed an IT system that would enable it to provide better self-service facilities for its customers, more in line with their expectations, in addition to providing the organisation with an opportunity to gain better insight into its varied customer base and hone its service provision to those individuals.

Andy King, Managing Director at Carlisle Leisure Limited, explains, "Our overall strategy in respect to ICT is to improve our efficiency and be more effective at what we do. In particular, we recognised that our customers had expectations of what they should be able to do using IT, that far outweighed our capabilities."

He continues, "In order to meet customer expectations, we needed to invest in a system that could facilitate things such as online bookings and payments - improved levels of self-service, which in turn would free up the time of the administrators and receptionists in the leisure facilities to provide value-added services."

Carlisle Leisure took an extensive look at the systems available on the market and spoke to the different providers' reference sites before selecting Legend for its flexibility, its intuitive, easy-to-use design and the fact that the system is designed uniquely and specifically for the leisure industry. "Legend can do so much more than the other providers and came out on top by a significant margin when we did our due diligence," King adds.

As a hosted solution, Legend is also highly cost-effective - a key consideration for Carlisle Leisure, as the not-for-profit organisation reinvests any financial surplus back into the services it provides for the community.

Looking forward, Carlisle Leisure plans to build on the data capture and analysis capabilities within the Legend system to gain better insight into its customers' needs and to develop a range of tailored products and services.

King concludes, "As an organisation, we work very closely with our council partners and other local institutions. The logical extension of the data analysis and insight that we will get from the Legend system is to start offering both customers and these partners more relevant services and building additional links in the fields of social care and health services."

The Legend system will start being piloted in Carlisle Leisure Limited in December 2011 and is due to go live in April 2012.