As one of the largest and fastest-growing fitness center franchises in the U.S., Planet Fitness has a strong commitment to give customers an excellent experience with their service team. Not only do they have to think about appealing to their American customers, but also those around the world in Canada, Mexico, Panama and Australia. The social media care representatives that interact with customers have 24/7 duties across the world to delight customers with engaging, personalized and effective service.
However, accomplishing this across countries and multiple social media touchpoints is not easy. Here’s how Planet Fitness accomplished their goal.
Inside Planet Fitness’s Challenges
Strong brands have a reputation to support and maintain as they grow, and Planet Fitness is no exception. Last year, each of their agents covered as many as 3,000 cases a month, and they communicated with customers and prospects on a variety of platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Yelp, Google Reviews, email and more. There’s also a wide array of questions agents must answer, including concerns that arise in fitness franchises around the world, and brand-related questions that arise on social media platforms.
What worked in their favor is that starting in 2020, social media care representatives began using Sprinklr to manage its social presence, customer service and brand reputation from one unified platform. The challenge was that it took a lot of time to respond to customers thoughtfully and effectively. Beyond this, agents needed to be able to shift their tone depending on the platform they were responding on. Certain feedback required a more lighthearted approach, like on social media platforms such as TikTok, while other service requests required a more formal tone, like on Google Reviews.
Finding the Solution
In June 2023, Planet Fitness joined a beta group for Sprinklr AI+ — Sprinklr’s new solution that gave brands unified generative AI capabilities. The goal of adopting this new capability was to ease the burden for social media representatives and give them the tools to have more high-quality interactions with customers, all while spending less time crafting responses.
The social media and reputation management team also wanted to see how Sprinklr AI+ could deepen the insights they were getting from social listening. The team used social listening to understand trends in brand sentiment in real time and make certain business decisions based on these trends. AI technology had the potential to make that process more efficient. Query-building for social listening insights is a Sprinklr AI+ feature that promised to help with this. It helps teams construct queries and create reports for stakeholders based on key findings. It also helps social media teams learn about important trends in conversation topics or themes quickly, allowing them to respond proactively rather than be caught off guard.
Sprinklr AI+ gave the social media and reputation management team many other useful functions. For one, social media care representatives began using it to tailor their responses to customers, whether they needed a shorter response, a longer one or something in totally different words. They could also easily customize responses so that they sounded unique and personalized rather than repetitive. For representatives responding to a large number of one-sentence reviews, this helped them keep up with a large number of interactions.
Finally, representatives also began using Sprinkr’s AI-powered Modify Tone feature to change the wording in their responses, depending on the customer and the channel where they’re interacting. The feature suggests ways in which people can adjust their tone while remaining professional. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) have different audiences and communication styles; keeping up with users’ preferred communication style across various platforms helps ensure that brand messages are consistent across channels, even if the wording and tone is different.
Experiencing an Impressive Impact on CX
Planet Fitness has seen noteworthy results from adopting Sprinklr AI+, according to Kara Seymour, the fitness center’s reputation manager. She said that the ability to tailor responses based on length and context is something that has especially helped them on channels like X or Threads, where sharing a message that’s short but perfectly worded is very important. “The flexibility that AI+ provides our social media care reps ensures that our responses are true to the brand and aligned with the tone, while meeting the requirements for the specific social channel,” she said.
Query-building for social listening has also been a huge success, she added. AI technology does a good job building out topics and themes from social media content. The capability will soon expand to include more powerful listening insights as well, allowing teams involved in social listening to include synonyms or variations of important terms that customers use to discuss certain topics. Seymour is excited to see how this feature will impact the team. “This would expand the scope of queries and enable a more comprehensive analysis of customer feedback and discussions,” she said.
Representatives also have a better employee experience in that they don’t feel rushed and they have access to a toolset that is truly impactful in the quality of their job. Being able to balance both speed and quality is a game changer.
Learn More About Sprinklr AI+
Overall, Sprinklr AI+ has greatly improved Planet Fitness’s ability to provide an excellent, personalized customer experience more quickly and effectively. It is essentially a personal assistant that each social media care representative has access to 24/7. The scope and efficiency of this solution can help any organization transform how customer interactions are handled, as well as improve productivity, employee satisfaction and customer engagement. Learn more about Sprinklr AI+ in the link below!
How Sprinklr AI+ transforms the customer service experience.
