Creating friction-free fitness and health booking journeys

Nuffield Health is the UK’s largest healthcare charity, with all profits invested in its mission to improve the health of the nation. Every year Nuffield Health supports millions of people in their health journeys - from prevention via gym services, through diagnosis and treatment in its hospitals, to recovery with physiotherapy.
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A scalable booking solution

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The sheer scale and complexity of Nuffield Health’s operation means that creating a seamless customer experience across all of its services represents a significant challenge. But that is the ultimate aim for its digital team. Fundamental to this goal is the ability for customers to book and manage their appointments.

“We’re working towards making it as easy as possible for customers to know what we do, book services and pay without fuss,” says Ian Edmunds, Head of Digital, Customer Management and Fitness Solutions.

“When COVID-19 hit, all projects were suspended to allow us to focus on COVID support. Our booking project was one of the first to restart, as it’s so fundamental to the customer experience. Now that we are moving towards providing more virtual services it will become even more essential.”

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Improved booking functionality and capacity management

Currently Nuffield Health’s booking system is for gym classes only. It’s a legacy system that sometimes struggles to cope with the demand at peak times, when thousands log on to book classes. Limited functionality to manage bookings means that classes are sometimes left empty and customers disappointed.

With a technology refresh needed, Nuffield Health launched its tender process to find a company that could deliver software capable of scaling during peak times and providing a reliable service to manage capacity in its gyms.

They also included a first-of-its-kind requirement: Nuffield Health will be the only organisation to provide both health and wellbeing bookings in one platform, offering consultant outpatient booking alongside gym class and beauty booking. This is a major milestone in its mission to provide a friction-free customer experience, aimed at removing sometimes lengthy steps in the booking process and providing a single view of appointments for members.

Ultimately, Nuffield Health hope to incorporate the full breadth of their services, including free and paid for, virtual and in-person, gym, hospital and recovery services, all in one customer interface.

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Enhanced customer experience

Gen25’s involvement in the project stretches beyond providing the Booker25 booking engine, to the development of a new app, and the configuration of Booker25 to work with Nuffield Health’s existing back-end technology. Combined with its completely customised and white-labelled interface, the configuration will ensure that while several technologies are at play in the background, to the customer it will appear as one seamless Nuffield Health-branded journey.

The integration will provide significant improvement to the customer experience and help address current limitations.

As it stands all consultant outpatient appointments are taken over the phone within office hours. Availability isn’t clear until you speak to an advisor. With the new digital consultant outpatient booking system customers will have a clear view on when appointments are available and will be able to book at any time, day or night.

For gym users Booker25 will introduce at-a-glance visibility over which classes have availability, and where they are on the waiting list. Notifications will be issued as reminders and when there are changes to classes. Members will be able to see all of their current and past bookings and the steps in the booking process will be optimised based on user feedback.

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Flexible booking solutions for changing demands

“It’s important that we address the needs of the user and are able to adapt and improve our services as we go,” says Ian.

“What impressed us about Gen25 was their technical knowledge of Salesforce, which is our existing strategic platform, their proven track record in providing a scalable solution, and their flexibility. They were the only provider that said ‘Whatever you need, we’ll build it’.”

“They have been very accommodating to our changing demands, with highly-skilled technicians who are able to adapt the offering as requested. They’ve allowed us to take Booker25 off the shelf, configure it and also extend it to our requirements, providing a completely unique booking engine that works with our existing software.

“It’s also important to us to be able to work with the system ourselves. Gen25 has introduced us to new software, creating new source code for our organisation, and has taken us on the journey to ensure we can maintain the platform with or without their support.”