Keepcool

Getting paid, without breaking a sweat

Keepcool is a sports club network with around 250 gyms, but it places as much emphasis on social contact and wellbeing as it does training. “Our objective is to bring well-being into the daily lives of all French people,” said Hélène Brillant-Hartmann, Responsable Administrative et Financière, Keepcool. “You don’t need to be a bodybuilding enthusiast to find your place in our gyms.”

Keepcool’s members pay monthly so Direct Debit is core to its business. When the team became frustrated at its former service provider’s poor support whenever they ran into payments problems, they acted quickly to make a change.

“We’re essentially a subscription business processing a huge volume of payments,” said Thierry Dagron, Secrétaire général, Keepcool. “At our scale, minor issues can quickly become big problems if they’re not sorted promptly. So we need a reliable partner and GoCardless soon established itself as our preferred choice.”  

95+% payment success rate

Thousands of members across hundreds of gyms: there’s plenty of scope for complexity if Keepcool’s payment

operations aren’t managed carefully. Keeping costs low in the here and now, and smoothing the way for future growth, all depends on automation, efficiency and scalability.

“What surprised me most about GoCardless was the ability to manage very high volumes, around 100,000 Direct Debits every month, without a hitch,” said Fréderic Dellerie, Responsable Comptabilité Clients, Keepcool.

Hélène says it’s very simple to measure GoCardless’ success at seamlessly managing this volume of payments: cash in the bank.

Three days saved on reporting

The limitations of Keepcool’s previous payment system meant the team used to spend days every month manually running reports into payment statuses. By contrast, GoCardless has delivered a unified process that increases visibility into payments and delivers huge time savings on reporting.

“With our former service provider we had to log in to 80 different accounts and do our reports manually,” said Hélène.

“Now, our GoCardless Customer Success Manager has created custom, consolidated dashboards for us. These allow me to monitor and analyse much more closely our failure rates and any non-payments, right down to the level of individual gyms."

GoCardless support

Keepcool had to migrate almost 80 client accounts over to GoCardless. Any lost or incomplete accounts would mean missed revenue, but the GoCardless team ensured this process was as anxiety-free as possible.

“This was one of our major concerns because we had 80 client accounts to create and onboard on GoCardless,” said Hélène. “This process was made much easier by the expert GoCardless team and we had a dedicated manager, who helped us a lot.” 

The initial set-up is way behind Keepcool now, but that strong support has endured. This is particularly welcome given the support issues Keepcool had with their previous provider.

“What sets GoCardless apart from other providers is their great responsiveness and their ability to facilitate all stages of our work,” said Fréderic. “From day-to-day management to the implementation of new tools — even the opening of new clubs — they always provide great support.”

A business ally

Keepcool always looks for partners that can match its relaxed and welcoming ethos, and Thierry believes he’s found an ally in GoCardless.

“We look for parallels between the relaxing aspects of our gyms and the collaboration and relationships we have with partners, and GoCardless truly supports us in this way,” he said. “Our Customer Success Manager is like our payments personal trainer, always helping us to improve. The team has a listening ear and has become a real ally in our daily business.”