Q&A: Orangetheory Fitness franchisee analyzes customer communications
A Georgia Orangetheory Fitness franchise location is leveraging agentic voice technology to streamline the analysis of customer communications across channels.
Cam Lothridge, Orangetheory Fitness franchise owner in Warner Robbins, Ga., recently spoke with Chain Store Age to explain how utilizing the ChatGPT plugin for the RingCentral agentic voice AI communications platform to turn everyday customer conversations into actionable insights, helping staff identify qualified leads, prioritize follow-ups and improve customer engagement.
Results have included a 50% increase in lead response rate, helping the fitness studio retailer better engage prospective members, as well as a reduction in staff catch-up time from 45 minutes to under five minutes, with AI automatically summarizing hundreds of customer messages and surfacing next steps between shifts.
What issues was Orangetheory having with customer communications?
Our biggest challenge was keeping track of actions resulting from texts and calls. A message could come in, or a shift change would happen, and the next person would not know there was still a follow-up or task to complete. We also lacked a unified way to build a member profile from what we learned through our conversations.
Personalized outreach and event reminders required tedious, manual work to gather relevant member information, write the message, and copy and paste it. As an owner, I had to routinely go back through text conversations to make sure everything was being handled, taking time away from coaching, team support, and strategy.
What made Orangetheory select the RingCentral ChatGPT plug-in?
What first caught my attention was seeing that RingCentral was available as a ChatGPT plugin without any additional fees. Setup was incredibly easy. In under five minutes, I had everything connected and could start using it. Once I tried it, I quickly realized how many of our communication challenges it could help solve and how much time it could save our team.
How does it work?
We use the RingCentral connection in ChatGPT, through its Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, to review available communication records and ask questions in plain English. Depending on what's available, that includes text conversations, call activity, voicemail, and call notes.
We ask ChatGPT to identify unresolved requests, summarize the context, and suggest a next action or a personalized reply. We've used that process to produce morning and afternoon action digests for the team.
A useful digest tells us which prospect requested a callback, which first-class guest needs attention, and which member issue still needs verification. It also distinguishes someone waiting on us from someone we've already contacted.
What benefits has Orangetheory received from the solution?
The biggest benefit has been time savings. Staff can get up to speed quickly at the start of a shift, see what needs follow-up, and reply to members and prospects promptly and personally. For example, we recently sent personalized outreach to 80 members about an upcoming special event, drawing on their participation in previous years. That took 15 minutes.
[READ MORE: Small businesses cite cost and time savings as top AI benefits]
Historically, achieving that level of personalization would have taken multiple days of work. We can also see which messages get the most responses from leads and use that to improve future outreach and train our team. As an owner, I can check the pulse of the studio through daily updates without having to read every conversation or ask my team what happened.
Are there any future plans you can discuss?
I’m currently building my own internal CRM and integrating RingCentral through MCP to build richer member profiles from our conversations. The goal is what I think of as a ‘super employee,’ an assistant that can recommend personalized follow-ups based on what we know about each member and what has worked for others in similar situations.
We also want to track response rates and engagement so we can continually refine how we communicate. What’s exciting to me is that, as a small business, we can now access the kind of insights and personalization that used to require a large company’s resources and support team.
