Pendle Leisure Trust is a not-for-profit organisation providing sport, fitness, health and wellbeing services across Pendle, with four sport and fitness facilities alongside a Spa.
Like many leisure operators, the team wanted to find new ways to deliver a great customer experience while reducing the pressure on busy colleagues.
They could also see how quickly AI was developing across the leisure sector, so feeling like there was a risk that they could be left behind, Pendle Leisure Trust saw an opportunity to embrace AI, not to replace its people, but to support them.
The goal was simple, use AI to help manage customer enquiries, provide a more personalised experience, give customers faster access to information and free up the human team to spend more time delivering valuable face-to-face interactions.
Working with HireBOB, Pendle Leisure Trust created Penny, their new AI employee.
For the team, getting started was much easier than they had anticipated, as Lucy Rowe, Pendle Leisure Trust’s Digital Content Coordinator explained, “The set-up process was really easy, it was like onboarding a new colleague. We could see Penny’s knowledge and personality coming together very quickly and already we feel like she is part of the team.”
Penny was initially brought on board to support general enquiries across the Trust’s website and MyFitApp-powered app, alongside an AI voice agent supporting incoming telephone calls, but within just the first week, Pendle Leisure Trust began seeing her support a much wider range of customer conversations.
By monitoring interactions through the BOB 2.0 analytics platform, the team could see Penny responding to early-stage membership enquiries, nurturing and qualifying potential customers and even preventing cancellations.
For Pendle, it was an early demonstration that Penny could become far more than simply a ‘tool’ for answering frequently asked questions.
“She’s already shown some really great improvements to our systems and helped our customers. She’s even changed the mind of one customer who was going to cancel their membership and instead decided to freeze it, which is great news for us so early on.”
The benefits aren't limited to the conversations Penny is handling.
Through HireBOB’s BOB 2.0 business analytics platform, Pendle Leisure Trust is gaining greater visibility into what customers are asking, how conversations are developing and where opportunities exist to improve the customer journey.
Although still at a very early stage, the dashboard and analytics are already helping the team identify trends and learning opportunities that can be used to shape service processes across the wider organisation.
Instead of customer conversations simply being dealt with and disappearing, they can become a valuable source of insight into what customers need and where the business can improve.
It’s still very early days, but Pendle Leisure Trust’s first week with Penny has already changed expectations of what an AI employee could contribute.
The team is already considering what their AI employee could learn next, exploring how Penny could provide additional information, guidance and support to people taking part in exercise referral pathways and programmes, extending her role beyond answering enquiries and into supporting customers on their health and wellbeing journey.
As Lucy puts it, “We’re excited to see where Penny can take us, how we can continue to elevate our service levels and what other skills we can add. This feels like just the start of the journey.”
For Pendle Leisure Trust, introducing Penny was initially about keeping pace with a changing leisure sector and finding new ways to support stretched teams while improving customer service.
Within days of going live, however, the team has already discovered opportunities extending into sales, retention, business intelligence and fitness coaching.
It is still early days, but Penny is quickly becoming a valuable new member of the Pendle Leisure Trust team.
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Pendle Leisure Trust’s Digital Content Coordinator
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