Speakers announced for retention convention
Speakers have been announced for this year’s Retention Convention, organised by globally-recognised retention expert Dr. Paul Bedford – a two-day event that will focus on improving customer experiences.
The world-renowned experts include Molly Kemmer, who is the Chair of IHRSA and only the third female to hold the position in 34 years. A thought leader with more than 20 years experience in the health and fitness industry, Kemmer is passionate about innovative programme solutions that contribute to sustainable health outcomes and enduring business models, and she presents internationally, teaching awareness of ‘connecting, knowing, and doing better’.
Molly’s current role is regional director for EXOS|MediFit, which works with elite athletes, the military, fitness centres and innovative companies, designing and delivering health and performance game plans to help people achieve higher levels of success.
At the Retention Convention Molly will talk about structure protocols, on-boarding clients, prescribing programmes, tracking performance and delivering and measuring outcomes. All of which enable consistent, replicable exercise prescription that build trust and deliver better results. She will also review the development of new technology that automatically writes and updates exercise progression programmes.
Other international speakers include Germany’s Dr. Niels Nagel, who is head of the German Industry Federation for Health and Fitness. Neil has been a consultant in the industry since 1998 and also works as a lecturer and research assistant at the German Sports University in Cologne. Niels will talk about his research on health-oriented fitness training with the focus on attendance, compliance and adherence from a behavioural psychological perspective. He will also discus how developments in technology may assist with improved results in the near future.
Selda Gamzeli, from Turkey, was Jatomi Fitness’s Group Customer Experience Director for six countries – Poland, Turkey, Malaysia, Romania, Indonesia, Czech Republic, with the remit of creating and implementing member experience programmes to reduce attrition, increase retention and support revenue growth. Selda will talk about how she was responsible for providing strategic and technical direction for customer analytics, including defining KPIs and methodology, designing test-and-learn experiments, growing data sources and producing regular customer insights to answer key business questions.
From the UK will be Arron Williams, former Special Projects lead at Life Fitness, who believes designing and driving stronger human connections into the fabric of health and fitness facilities helps turn members into profitable customers and employees into apostles. His diverse background as a personal trainer, coach, university lecturer, and facility and fitness product designer will ensure a fun and thought provoking session that decodes the current exercise experience and then recodes it with added value to meet the needs of the customer and the business.
In his session ‘the Ordinary vs the Extra Ordinary’, Arron will explain what drives people to pay £25 for a single class – more than some gym chains charge for a month of membership. He will also describe how boutique operators deliver their service and how they measure performance using non traditional metrics.
With extensive experience across the sector, including 10 years at SLM/Everyone Active where she was Digital Fitness Development and National Exercise Referral Manager, Tiffeny Gould supports organisations across areas such as health interventions, customer experience and programme delivery and digitally-led developments, including product integration and development.
At the convention, Tiffeny will discuss the technical challenges of going digital – integrating new software, staff issues, training and end user engagement. She will explain how to achieve significant improvements in membership figures, adherence to programmes and demonstrations of long term behaviour change, and how to make projects financially sustainable with a flexible resource model.
Dr. Melvyn Hillsdon will also be speaking with a session entitled ‘What’s the price of Silence’. Melvyn’s research involves understanding the contribution of personal, social and environmental factors on physical activity prevalence. As well as working at University College London, Bristol University and the University of Exeter he has consulted to the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Europe and the Department of Health (DH) and is a member of National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Programme Development Groups.
Alongside Dr. Paul Bedford, Melvyn will challenge the rationale behind reducing the number of fitness staff in order to cut costs and discuss how good fitness staff can have a greater impact on retention and revenue than you think. He will show operators how getting staff to engage in brief, simple interventions with members can double income.
The event will take place at Austin Court, the home of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in Central Birmingham, on 19 and 20 May 2016.
Dr. Paul Bedford said: “The two-day format will enable us to focus on the customer experience; hearing from retention experts across the globe, as well as operators that have put fantastic measures in place to increase retention and boost revenue, and technology experts; who will demonstrate the wide applications technology can play within the leisure industry.”
You can book your ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/retention-convention-tickets-20702890904 Or, for further information email paul@retentionguru.co.uk, tweet @guru_paul or call 07956 311899.
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For further information or photographs contact:
Abigail Harris at Big Fish Public Relations
Tel: 07738 331019
Email: abigail@bigfishpublicrelations.co.uk
