5 ways AI will take your wellness venue from good to great

The global wellness market is growing at a shockingly fast pace, and with no signs of slowing down anytime soon, it is experiencing major developments thanks to the latest scientific healthcare innovations and technological breakthroughs. However, even though these technologies are being applied to improve end products, the market still remains pretty much fossilised in terms of business development. 

Rigidity and inadaptability can be fatal in times of accelerated change. And yet, it is common for managers to delay the implementation of disruptive technology, learning new skills, and preparing for change. 

So if you want to avoid being devoured in today’s growing and rapidly-changing wellness industry, here are 5 uses of AI that can help your wellness business thrive! 

1. Improved customer services:

Are you selling your wellness tickets and admissions online, or not yet? If you’re not, I’m afraid you’ve got some catching up to do. But if you are, then you’ve probably noticed some patterns in your online customer’s behaviour. For example, a big part of online transactions is being done from mobile. Or that, on average, 90% of visitors that come to your site will leave without taking any action. In this scenario, every visitor counts. To reduce the chances of losing visitors along the way, it is essential to properly guide them through their customer journey and give them the support and information they’re looking for.

In order to do so, many companies are already using chatbots or virtual assistants, which are nothing more than a form of using AI to communicate with users in a more human way. This branch of AI, known as NLP (or Natural Language Processing) is able to decipher the natural language and begin a conversation, assist customers in finding out what they need to know, or redirect them to the appropriate web page, among other things.

In essence, AI-driven bots can deal with routinary customer complaints, and take this burden out on your staff members. This would allow them to cover more customer requests at once, in less time, and in a smarter way. Which ultimately leads us to our next great use of AI:

2. Workload automation: 

Smart software and programs powered by Artificial Intelligence will help you solve problems you didn’t even know you had.  By adapting your wellness business to these technologies, no matter if it’s a spa or a chain of fitness centers you are running, you’ll be able to reduce operating costs and increase productivity.

But how? Well, because these programs based on Machine Learning systems can boil down huge sets of data into meaningful information and, after identifying patterns, make the smartest business decisions for you. They can even automate those decisions and take specific action depending on the scenario. Making accurate predictions of the future in order to organise work-flows or supplies, or giving you accurate insights by understanding historical activity and performance are just some of the things AI can do for your business.

As a manager, wouldn’t you love for your employees and yourself to take the most time-consuming tasks off your shoulders?

For example, with AI your booking process can become intelligent and highly personalised. Let’s say you run a wellness center where you offer different types of therapeutic massages. Traditionally, an interested customer would call you in or try to make an online appointment, and the person in charge of managing bookings would choose a therapist based on availability, speciality, seniority… and a couple more variables. With AI-driven software, on the contrary, you could save your front desk all of this work because the Machine Learning system would process all available information (both internal and external) to automatically match the most suitable therapist for your new client. But it can go further. If you could also collect their feedback in your system, such as what pressure levels they like for their massages, or which of the different therapists they’ve preferred, the algorithm would also learn from this data and give better and more precise recommendations over time. 

This is just another example of how AI could improve operations of your center by freeing your staff’s time so they can focus on higher impact customer service.

3. Identifying valuable customers

One of the areas in which spas and wellness centers traditionally fall short in is retail. There are still a lot of ways it could be improved, but we get it…selling can be tough. Not to mention online selling. Especially in today’s highly competitive e-commerce world. The good news is, here’s where AI can really come to your rescue. By gathering data from your consumers, AI-powered systems can deeply analyse this information to better match products with specific consumer needs and behaviour.

Recommendations can be based on many different variables, such as price sensitivity, social and environmental concerns, personal taste (such as colour or fragrance preferences), historical online behaviour, and so much more. Of course, the more data you can collect from your consumers, the more precise these recommendations will be.

When the system recommends your consumers the product that suits them best, which is also the product that responds best to their pains or needs, the chance of them purchasing it naturally increases. And therefore, so does your chance to generate more revenue.

And now that we mention revenue… let’s talk about money:

It goes without saying that more efficient booking processes improve customer experience. 

Happier customers → Higher customer loyalty and more referrals.

All of which ultimately increase profit margins as well.

That’s still pretty neat, but I am talking about a much more direct impact on your profit growth. I am talking about optimising your pricing with the use of AI to directly increase your profit-making.

By using AI-driven dynamic pricing you’ll be able to set flexible prices for your products and services based on current market demands and many other variables (such as weather, seasonality, inventory etc.). Once again, by analysing vast sets of data from a variety of different sources, AI-powered systems can determine patterns in order to predict what the customer is willing to pay and how responsive they might be to special prices or offers.

However, price adjustments are not only useful for profit maximisation, but also for  your visitor’s spread:

Some more than others, but we’re all sensitive to pricing. I don’t know about you, but it is quite likely that if I want to get weekend tickets for a spa circuit and I see prices are significantly cheaper during weekdays, I’ll be quite willing to change my date and make a spot in my agenda just to save up some money.

By using AI to influence on pricing you can react over your customers’ demand in real time and solve your visitor spread and seasonality issues.

For example, let’s say your weekend tickets are always in high demand and you’ve got limited availability. The algorithm will adjust and increase prices to control demand and maximise your profit. Or on the contrary, you struggle to try to fill up bookings during lunch time? You experience a strong drop in visitors during the week? Don’t worry, the algorithm will adjust and decrease prices to boost sales for those specific days and time slots.  

This is a great way to unlock the full potential and capacity of your wellness center, all while taking into account your business goals, reducing costs and workload, and maximising its efficiency. 

In the end, it all comes down to staying relevant in this highly competitive industry. 

So what changes will you make? How will you adapt?

Transform your  wellness property with Convious:

If you want to stay ahead of your competitors and gain a competitive advantage within the wellness market, there’s no better time than now to start investing in new technologies. 

Empowered by Artificial Intelligence, at Convious we offer an easy-to-use SaaS platform that helps businesses like yours sell more tickets online with better results, better prices, and happier visitors. 

From a high-conversion web shop to intelligent marketing tools, we cover it all so you can focus on what’s really important: your customers. 

Get in touch if you would like to know more about how to leverage the power of our smart, conversion-oriented platform and start seeing for yourself the amazing impact that the use of AI can have in your business!