Friskis&Svettis is a leading gym provider in Sweden. With 500,000 members, over five percent of Sweden’s population trains at one of its facilities. Its gym in Lomma, Sweden, has started using facial recognition with Precise YOUNiQ to enable secure and convenient access for its 3,000 members. We spoke to Mariana Fleischer, operation manager at Friskis&Svettis, to find out how the new technology is ensuring great customer experience and meeting the business operational challenges of enabling access outside normal hours while reducing costs by removing the need for physical access keys and tags which are so easily lost, shared or stolen.
Tell us about Friskis&Svettis and the challenges you face in enabling access to your facilities?
As a non-profit sports association we have a special goal; we aim to spread as much joy of movement through exercise as possible. This resonates with many people here in Sweden as you can see from our membership numbers – over 500,000 people choose to train with us. Our goal is for our facilities to be available whenever members need us. However the challenge is that we simply cannot afford to be staffed to the extent we would need to enable this, for example with reception staff 24×7. Our members want flexibility so they can train at the times that are most convenient for them.
How is using YOUNiQ helping to solve these challenges?
To meet the demand from our customers to have flexible access, it was an easy decision to use this solution from Precise as it means our members can use the facilities even if we are not here. In addition it enables us to save on personnel costs as we do not need to hire extra staff to become an openly accessible facility.
What is the key advantage of using this type of access using biometrics instead of a traditional pass, access card or passcode?
For us, the best thing about using biometric access is that it cannot be abused. For example, it is not possible to “lend” a copy or otherwise sneak past the system.
What other benefits are you and your members seeing from using Precise YOUNiQ?
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the big question for members right now is ‘when are the least people in the gym?’ as they want to come in and train safely. By using Precise YOUNiQ we can quickly answer this question because we have accurate data at our fingertips. This in turn has meant that new members have joined us and existing members have continued to come into the gym – who otherwise would not have due so to pandemic related concerns. So it has meant that our gym has continued successfully in these challenging times.
Watch video on how YOUNiQ works at Friskis&Svettis in Lomma: