Planet Fitness pumps up the customer experience with Sprinklr AI+
The Challenge
Planet Fitness is one of the largest and fastest-growing fitness center franchises in the U.S.. Today, there are more than 2,400 locations across all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Panama and Australia. One of Planet Fitness’s goals is to provide a best-in-class customer experience across all brand touchpoints.
AI+ acts like a personal assistant, allowing our social media care reps to have meaningful conversations, while ensuring we're being consistent in messaging, tone, character count for certain channels, etc. AI provides suggestions, but we maintain full control of community engagement and social listening reports."
Reputation Manager, Planet Fitness
The fitness club first partnered with Sprinklr in 2020 to manage its social presence, customer service and brand reputation from one unified platform. Today, 38 social media care representatives use Sprinklr to communicate with online customers and prospects on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Yelp, Google Reviews, Trustpilot Reviews and email. They handle questions and concerns related to all 2,400+ locations as well as any issues that arise on social channels. Planet Fitness’s social media and reputation management team use Social Listening to understand how people are talking about the brand in real time to identify trends in sentiment and topics in order to make appropriate business decisions for members and the business alike.
In June 2023, Planet Fitness joined the beta group for Sprinklr AI+, which gives brands unified generative AI capabilities to drive higher productivity and provide more seamless customer experiences. The social media and reputation management team wanted to test the potential benefits AI could have on member experience, agent workflow and consumer insights. The team was interested in exploring how AI+ could enhance both the quality of customer service and response times. They were also eager to see if AI+ could deepen the insights they were getting from Social Listening.
The Solution
With each agent covering as many as 3,000 cases a month, the Planet Fitness team was eager to lighten the burden on the social media care representatives — enabling high quality interactions while improving the customer experience. They enabled AI+ for all social media care representatives as well as for Reputation Manager Kara Seymour, who uses it to assist in building social listening queries.
Tailoring response length and wording based on context
Social media care representatives at Planet Fitness use AI+ to tailor their responses for customers, ensuring they’re appropriate in both length and detail. This can be particularly helpful when representatives are responding to lots of short, one-line reviews and want each response to be unique and personalized. The “Make it Longer,” “Make it Shorter,” and “Reword” features are a welcome solution. These enable representatives to effortlessly customize their responses, which not only saves time but also elevates the customer service experience.
“Expanding our messages is great when we are responding to something like customer reviews on Google, and shortening them is particularly helpful on channels like X or Threads, where brevity and concise communication are key to effective interactions,” explains Seymour. “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.”
Modifying tone for personalized customer experiences
Sprinklr AI+ also enables Planet Fitness social media care representatives to easily modify their tone depending on the customer and the channel on which they’re communicating. Whether responding on X with a casual, playful demeanor or maintaining a professional tone on platforms like Google reviews, representatives are using this feature to ensure their responses align with the vibe of the specific channel and audience. When they click the “Modify Tone” feature, they can use the suggested response to quickly adjust their tone without compromising professionalism. This helps especially when switching between platforms like TikTok and X, which have distinctly different audiences and communication styles. This ensures Planet Fitness has consistent messaging across diverse social channels while always staying in tune with the unique preferences and expectations of each platform’s users.
Building queries for Social Listening insights
Seymour is also leveraging AI+ to enhance query-building and streamline the process of gathering insights from online conversations. AI+ aids in constructing queries for topics and themes aligned with her research objectives and in creating reports for stakeholders. Proactive alerts notify Seymour of spikes in volume of conversation topics or themes, ensuring timely awareness of potential issues and the ability to proactively address any concerns. “AI+ does a really good job building out the topics and the themes,” says Seymour. She looks forward to being able to pull even more powerful listening insights when the capability extends to incorporate synonyms and variations of words that customers might use when discussing specific topics. “This would expand the scope of queries and enable a more comprehensive analysis of customer feedback and discussions,” she says.
The Outcome
Seymour says Sprinklr AI+ has made a significant positive impact on Planet Fitness's social media care representatives and, consequently, the overall customer experience. The focus on response quality has allowed representatives to provide more thoughtful and effective responses.
“This not only enhances the quality of responses, but also ensures that customers receive personalized interactions rather than robotic ones” says Seymour.
While there are metrics in place to track daily response numbers, AI+ has played a pivotal role in ensuring that social media care representatives don't feel rushed. It accomplishes this by offering suggestions to representatives in terms of tone, length, wording and more — and essentially streamlines the response process without compromising quality. Planet Fitness representatives are able to strike the balance between speed and quality, enhancing the overall customer experience by empowering representatives to respond effectively and with greater precision.
These insights were pulled together in partnership with Planet Fitness and their trusted social media care partner, NexGen Agency.