How to handle membership credit cards that fail – DSP 98

Many float center memberships provide a discount on floats that’s contingent on an agreement of a membership fee that has a contract that extends for a certain period of time, usually at least 3 months. What do you do if after the first month, the members credit card is declined? Graham and Ashkahn meander through this concept, while discussing some of the differences of memberships that many float centers offer.

FTS Blog – Float Memberships and Packages

HelmBot – Scheduling and Management Software for Your Center

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question is, “What is your process for handling members whose credit card renewals don’t go through?”

Ashkahn: Members whose credit cards don’t go through?

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: That’s, well, so, the nice thing is they come in to float at your place. It’s not like they get the service sent to them digitally or something. They have to come into your shop to be able to get any floats, to actually float in a float tank, right?

Graham: So, if the renewal’s not going through, then they’re not paying money, which means they’re not getting floats, which means at some point if they want to come in and actually utilize your services and float again, they’re gonna have to get ahold of you.

Ashkahn: So, there’s two outcomes here. It’s basically they’re gonna come in to float and you’re gonna be like, “Hey, you don’t have a working credit card on your account. We need to fix that before you can go in,” and then they’re gonna fix their credit card. Or, they’re not gonna come in to float for a long time, and that probably means they weren’t really an active member at your place. If a member’s not coming in to float on any regular basis, that’s not really someone who probably should have a membership at your business.

Graham: So, we do things a little bit differently at Float On than a lot of businesses do, as well, which is that we actively go through and make sure that our members are using their memberships and their floats. So, if anyone goes for more than a couple months without using any of the floats on their account, they’ll get a phone call from Float On asking if they want to keep their membership and saying, “Hey, just so you know, you have these unused floats on your account,” and so on.

Not everyone does that, right? So, there’s the scenario where people are actually almost monetarily relying on these inactive members who still are getting charged every month. Again, much more like a standard gym model or something like that. So, that’s sort of a different scenario.

In that case, you do want their credit card to be updated because you want their money and you’re not as worried about them back piling floats on their account, right?

Ashkahn: But what can you really do? You can email them, sent an auto-email if their credit card fails.

Graham: Yup.

Ashkahn: You can call them. What, you gonna mail them a letter? How else are you gonna try to finally get, what other means can you even use to go about trying to get someone to update their credit card?

Graham: Yup. So, again, we don’t even really reach out to people to contact them or try to harass them or anything like that. Again, because we know that they’ll be coming back in to use their floats, or they were an inactive membership and we didn’t want them to be a member anyway, if they’re not using floats, so that kind of makes our situation maybe a little easier than some float centers, as well.

But again, definitely not harassing them, I would say.

Ashkahn: I mean, send an email, or maybe your software sends an email automatically.

Graham: Yup, the Helm has an option to just auto send an email when a membership fails, for example.

Ashkahn: If you notice it, give them a call.

Graham: Yup. I guess there’s also, what if they’re in a contract, right? Now they’re one month in to a three month contract, and now their credit card fails.

Ashkahn: I see. Well, there’s still really not much else you can do, right?

Graham: Reach out-

Ashkahn: It’s not like you have that many other options.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Just wait until they get back to you, and then deal with it then and charge them for another two months.

Graham: Hire a private detective to trail them and find out their routines, corner them someday in the coffee shop.

Ashkahn: At some point, I think you just need to be like, okay. Fine. And give up. If someone has a three month contract and they do one month and then their card gets canceled and they don’t respond to your emails and they don’t respond to your phone calls, that’s the point where I’d just be like, “okay, I’m done dealing with this person. I’m not gonna bother myself over it or hunt them down. They obviously didn’t want to be a part of this anymore.”

At what point, if that is really the case, someone gamed your system and used a card that expired or whatever, they really don’t want to come back to your business. So, forcing them to, or … it’s just not great. None of it sounds fun or really worth your time or energy, unless this is 80% of your memberships, I just don’t see this being a super frequent thing that happens.

Graham: Yeah, definitely. Again, I think the worst thing you can do is really act as though they’re trying to dodge their float bill and get on their case and start harassing them or something. That’s probably the best way to ensure that they don’t stay members with you after their contract, or if it’s already up, that they don’t actually give you a new credit card.

So, assuming that it’s an innocent mistake, not harassing people who don’t get back to you, and at least for us, kind of recognizing the best time to take care of this is actually when people come in for their next appointment and they’re in the shop right there is a really easy time to have this conversation. Just have them pull out their wallet with another card in it.

Ashkahn: Yeah, just take it easy.

Graham: Just mellow, man.

Ashkahn: You’re a relaxation business. You can’t be too uptight. It’s gonna look bad.

Graham: All right. If you have any other questions, go to-

Ashkahn: Floattanksolutions.com/podcast

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