Ever seen this ominous sign...?

Ever seen this ominous sign and thought, "what the flippin' heck?! I paid yesterday?"

Dear Swimmers

I hope you have had a good week and are looking forward to the forecast good weather next week to kick you back into your exercise routine (assuming you ever lost it that is?). Next week looks great - bring it on I say!

So last week marked the 2nd anniversary of us switching over to the new app-based booking and payment system - quite a landmark, I'm sure you'll agree. I ran some stats yesterday and it turns out that between YR1 and YR2 there was just 0.38% variance in attendance over the whole year. Incredible. This shows just how consistent you guys all are and how well the system manages the waitlist spots but equally prevents overcrowding too (which the old manual paper system was susceptible too) - so a massive thanks from me for this continued patronage and support. As someone pointed out this morning:

"Erm, from a business perspective you'd want to be seeing 10% growth, not stasis…?"

…but this is not about growth, it's about consistency. It's about quality coaching. We have a finite number of lanes we can hire in any one session and thus a finite amount of space available to use. As such, without extending the program to another pool (or building our own!), we are already operating at capacity - the app simply helps us manage things much easier…most of the time, anyway!

Most of you say you love using the system, but it does have some quirks, namely the dreaded yellow screen of "death" above which sometimes pops up when you check-in on the iPad on the pool deck. If you only read one thing from this email it is this:

DON'T PANIC! YOU (PROBABLY) HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING WRONG! IT ALL GETS WORKED OUT ON A SATURDAY!

…if this, ever shows for you, it simply means that some of your payments haven't been reconciled properly. We do a manual sweep of the "automated" system every Saturday, such that these so-called "unpaid" visits do get eventually picked up and settled. What causes this situation is due to the fact that in order to hold your permanent spot in the squad I have to book you ALL in unpaid for the vast majority of your sessions. You are currently booked in for 5 years, so if you swim twice per week for 50 weeks of the year for 5 years that's 500 bookings you have with us - wow! If you're using a 10 session card and have used 2 credits, really you have 500-2+10 = 492 unpaid visits scheduled. If you happen to early cancel a session (as most do) or access a session via the waitlist (some do) or let your true credits lapse by 1 or 2 sessions (occasionally) this just proves to be a step too far for the automated reconcile function (I'm yet to understand why), thus requiring us to manually check things out.

What the system does do (usually) very well, is send out email reminders when you are truly low on credits or available time, prompting you to top-up. If you happen to miss these (or forget), I will usually send you and ever-so-polite email kindly reminding you to top up.

So if you do happen to see the yellow screen of death, please don't go into situational meltdown or panic, all is (usually) OK, and if it's not, I will follow up with you on a Saturday, using my not-so-automated word processing skills.

Thanks for reading! Have a great weekend!

Cheers

Paul