RSG Group Creates Exceptional Experiences for 4.5 Million Members

An active lifestyle is key to a happier and healthier life. For millions of people worldwide, exercise plays a major role in physical and mental wellbeing, managing weight, reducing stress and keeping health concerns at bay. And in an increasingly health-conscious society, it’s no surprise that the fitness industry continues to grow. 

RSG Group has been a fitness leader for over 25 years. Starting with a few pieces of equipment in a single gym, it now offers a global network of fitness and lifestyle brands, supporting over 4.5 million members across 30 countries with physical and digital exercise options. 

Data plays a vital role in supporting those brands, providing insight into customer journeys and powering key business decisions to enable the high-quality, personalized experiences that keep members coming back. With a desire to gain more granular insights and deliver bespoke experiences to millions of members, RSG group turned to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, running on Azure, as the foundation of its updated data infrastructure. In doing so, it has doubled the number of users who can access vital operational metrics and accelerated time to insight tenfold. This democratization of data and speed of insight enables the group to make better business decisions around where to place gyms, how to price products and when to deliver what offers to its customers.

Historically, RSG Group’s data organization only reported on top-level KPIs to the business leaders that needed them. But a combination of increased competition, rapid growth and a shift in member expectations meant its data strategy had to adapt and deliver more granular insights to more areas of the business. 

“We needed to change how we marketed our products, and interact with members in a more personalized way to keep them engaged,” says Christopher Rüge, Head of Data and BI at RSG Group.

By centralizing data on Snowflake, the group now has a single source of truth, enabling it to quickly and easily share the insights that fuel more successful business decisions across the organization. 

“Our goal is to bring as much data to our departments as possible,” says Olaf Weik, Senior Data Engineer at RSG Group. “With Snowflake, there’s no back-end maintenance or managing complex pipelines. We can ingest data in a couple of clicks, so we’ve gone from using around 2 terabytes to around 12.”

Increasing the amount of data at its disposal has allowed RSG to more than double the number of business users who can access reports, helping improve operations across marketing, product development and member experience. Next, the group plans to extend that data access with self-service business intelligence delivered through Power BI.

“We previously only gave office employees access to data,” Rüge says. “But now we’re starting to share that data with gym managers, who have a much more hands-on experience with their members. This will make a big difference to how we can improve our service offering and stay competitive.”

Snowflake has enabled more than just better data access for RSG. The AI Data Cloud, on Azure, has also improved speed to insight by 10x, which is vital for making timely decisions and allows the group to create new products, workout challenges and partnerships with data at their heart.

“It was clear to us that physical spaces weren’t enough and we had to provide digital products, apps and on-demand classes,” says Rüge. “We can now deliver workout challenges with global leaderboards, guide members on their fitness journeys with bespoke workout plans and monitor their progress so we can intervene and provide offers when needed. It’s a real market advantage.”

The granularity of insights has also changed dramatically. While RSG’s legacy data stack provided only rudimentary numbers for top-level business insights, the group now has detailed member insights and behavioral data that simply wouldn’t have been possible before.

Those insights support decision-making across RSG’s teams. Marketing, for instance, has benefited in particular, using demographic and regional performance insights to help pinpoint where campaigns and offers should be launched, how different demographics should be priced and where different brands would be most successful. Putting data at the heart of these decisions maximizes the probability of success.

In an increasingly competitive fitness industry, staying at the top of your game means keeping members satisfied and engaged. Previously, RSG would use a member survey with a single 1-10 rating to judge satisfaction. But with Cortex AI, the group can conduct detailed data analysis to provide more granular insights, identify shortcomings and implement  improvements. 

“Snowflake’s native capabilities in AI and machine learning mean even small teams like ours can work with predictive modeling and sentiment analysis without a whole set of data scientists,” says Iana Palacheva, Data Engineer at RSG. 

These capabilities enable RSG Group to understand the sentiment of its members across 30 countries, seeing trends from a birds-eye level while also taking deep dives to explore the nuances of the data. 

“We get reviews in German, English, sometimes even Arabic or Russian,” says Palacheva. “What impressed me is that everything works out of the box. In the past, I used to spend months trying to create different models for different languages, but with Snowflake and Cortex everything just works. If we were to build this from scratch it would take weeks.” 

With the data provided by Cortex, RSG can meet requests from business leaders to classify reviews based on different issues, making it easy to identify friction points and trace them to specific locations, experiences or processes. Armed with that information, issues can be tackled quickly, improving member satisfaction and reducing the chances of churn.

Replacing its legacy data stack with a centralized, scalable data cloud has provided numerous advantages to RSG group. The total cost of infrastructure ownership has been reduced by an estimated 20% through a model where RSG only pays for the resources it uses. Data staging is 80x faster and, thanks to the intuitive nature of the AI Data Cloud, onboarding new engineers is now 3x more efficient. 

“It’s a great product,” says Weik. “It provides flexibility and scalability, and it integrates seamlessly with other tools like Power BI, Fivetran and Coalesce.”

This gives RSG Group’s data engineers a better environment to work in, which enables them to serve the business more effectively. And, by transforming data into the insights that power member experiences, helps them contribute to the health and wellbeing of millions of members worldwide.

“I think the focus of a data engineer should be to act as a partner to the business, and Snowflake allows us to focus on what’s important,” says Rüge. “We can help make decisions that lead to happier members, and that makes for happier management and, ultimately, a fitter, healthier business.”