Les Mills
This innovation project aimed to recreate the Les Mills instructor experience, building high levels of engagement, advocacy, and creating a higher quality fitness outcome for end customers.
Project Information
Client Les Mills International
Industry Consumer Products
Services Design Research & Customer Insight, User Experience Service Design
Key Outcomes
Virtuo developed a new Instructor Experience Strategy.
Design coached the IX Team through project front-end.
Conducted empathy research with instructors across the world.
Identified and conceptualised new product and growth opportunities.
Deliverables drove the generation of Les Mills Connect.
Overview
The Les Mills Instructor is key to their group fitness model, serving as the interface between the brand and the customer. The pressure is on to recruit and retain quality instructor talent who can deliver a great class, support sales, and uphold the brand values in today’s fast-paced, technology-rich era.
Les Mills approached Virtuo in the midst of a once-in-a-century shift in business models. Research has indicated that people are choosing outcomes over ownership. Les Mills saw this potentially impacting how people approach working out and, from a business model perspective, wanted to rethink how they engaged with their instructors across the globe.
Frame
Les Mills is a group fitness brand that provides high-energy fitness classes across the world through clubs, gyms, and an online app. The winning experience for Les Mills classes is the inspiring instructors who continuously deliver effortless experiences.
This project aimed to increase levels of engagement and advocacy with instructors in order to support recruitment and retention targets for the future. For instructors, it was clear that this project needed to:
Create an effortless instructor experience: from joining to initial certification, teaching and continuing development. An experience which continually fosters growth while surprising and delighting.
Improve the value equation for instructors by enhancing the reasons why being an instructor is rewarding. This can be achieved through a seamless engagement model that includes additional benefits, loyalty recognition, and more creative engagement opportunities.
Increase motivation: Instructors feel more motivated and supported through better information and deeper connections, resulting in high-quality outcomes for Les Mills customers.
For Les Mills this project was driven to:
Improved club retention by reducing cancellation rates through a better value equation and overall experience.
Improve instructor quality by incorporating the entire educational journey into the membership model, thereby achieving higher rates of AIM certified instructors.
Increase brand strength by delivering a more consistent experience aligned with the brand values and proposition. A stronger brand fosters a deeper level of engagement and loyalty towards Les Mills.
Gather more and better data to enable positive, informed business decisions.
Generate reoccurring revenue by exploring new models to deliver more streamlined relationships.
Our Approach
Working together, Les Mills and Virtuo mapped out the project, designed an integration model, and scoped out what was required. The core approach was a series of in-depth objectives involving rapid learning cycles with many members of the Les Mills team. We then launched the project, setting out the vision and key goals, as well as establishing team principles and agile work modes. A series of rapid-fire pre-mortems brought to life the broken windows, identified what was burning for instructors, and highlighted what needed to be overcome within the instructor platform.
More in-depth design research was conducted on the current Instructor Journey and the various touchpoints that comprised the daily experience. A number of instructors were identified for a design series to reconstruct the program and identify areas of opportunity. Evaluation of the existing product provided to instructors enabled the team to develop a value pyramid. The pyramid classified various elements of the product, service, or customer experience into functional, emotional, life-changing, and social impact layers. This Voice of the Instructor was a vital ingredient in building trust, cohesion, and decision-making. The goal was to improve the experience across all touchpoints while aligning with the company's brand values and a new overarching instructor strategy. Using Virtuo's framework, we were able to essentially coach the Les Mills team to create the solutions themselves.
We then took the range of observations and created concept designs - turning these insights into new ideas and actions. We led the team through the process of insight formation, making sense and defining core opportunities from the raw information and data collected through the instructor research.
Following this, a range of new models and approaches were built by taking the loosely framed insights and accelerating them through the design process. These were constructed into a series of low-fidelity prototypes. This was all about ‘learning-by-doing’, generating breakthrough concepts to transform the Instructor experience. These prototypes were tested with instructors and the most promising concepts were taken into development.
Throughout this project, significant design direction support and inline coaching were provided to the Les Mills Instructor Experience team and other members of Les Mills staff. The purpose of this approach was to actively grow the team and their capability, equipping them for success.
Outcome
This project helped guide and support Les Mills through a design innovation programme that resulted in a contemporary programme model for their global instructors. The new Instructor Experience increased engagement, retention, and streamlined the life cycle of the joining experience, while also rewarding the instructors more. This has resulted in a noticeable shift in loyalty both from instructors and end customers, through the increase in energy, motivation, connectedness, and higher quality fitness outcomes - which has helped Les Mills grow its brand position in the market.
