ConnectCX 2026 - Fitronics

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The ConnectCX Summit theme this year is 'Just One More Visit' because every visit is a promise of the next. It's another chance to build a habit, create a connection and give a customer a reason to come back.

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Meet the Speakers

Melvyn Hillsdon

Featured Speaker

Session Title

The Hidden Value of a Potential Member

Why Sales Numbers Mislead and What Actually Drives Revenue Growth

Most operators measure joins. Few measure the value of the people they are trying to recruit.

Back by popular demand following last year’s actionable insights session, Dr. Melvyn Hillsdon returns to share the latest findings from the TRP Insight Series.

In this thought-provoking session, Melvyn challenges traditional growth metrics and reveals why recruitment numbers alone rarely tell the full story.

Introducing Expected Revenue per Potential Member, he combines the likelihood of joining, expected membership duration and membership value to provide a clearer understanding of what drives sustainable growth.

The findings reveal an important commercial trade-off. Younger people are often easier to recruit but tend to leave sooner. Older adults can be harder to attract but frequently stay longer and provide greater revenue stability. Understanding this relationship changes how operators should think about acquisition, retention and marketing investment.

Attendees will discover why campaigns generating identical join numbers can produce very different financial outcomes, why retention directly influences marketing return on investment and how different customer groups contribute to long-term profitability.

This session will provide practical insights for leaders responsible for customer experience, retention, membership growth and commercial performance.

Key Takeaways

Why join numbers can be a misleading measure of growth
The relationship between recruitment, retention and revenue
How different customer groups contribute to long-term profitability
Why retention is one of the most powerful growth levers available
A new framework for evaluating marketing and acquisition performance

The most successful operator is not the one that sells the most memberships. It’s the one that creates the most value from every potential member it reaches.

Intro to Melvyn

Melvyn started his fitness industry career as a fitness instructor at the Hogarth Health Club in 1986, followed by management roles at LivingWell and Virgin Fitness. After this he moved to academia but retained links with the fitness industry.

In 2001, he was commissioned by the Fitness Industry Association (now UK Active) to establish a standard measure of membership retention and a benchmark figure for the industry. The results of the research were published in a series of six reports entitled Winning the Retention Battle.

Melvyn’s research into retention and attrition has led to the development of appropriate measures of retention, attrition and longevity that provide data for operators that can directly inform business decisions. The research has been presented at numerous conferences in the UK and abroad including the IHRSA annual conference in the US and Europe. Multiple club operators and industry bodies have benefitted from Melvyn’s expertise in identifying the determinants of retention. In 2006, Melvyn partnered with Fitronics to provide retention insights to customers and to continue industry research.

In 2013, in partnership with The Retention People (TRP), Melvyn undertook the TRP 10,000™ study, the biggest and most comprehensive survey of member behaviour and retention ever carried out in the health and fitness industry. Results of the research have been released in a series of features in Health Club Management and via numerous industry conferences. Melvyn has produced retention reports for multiple clubs all over the world.

In parallel, Melvyn has over 30 years’ experience training leisure industry staff in Motivational Interviewing with the intention of improving staff-member interactions and therefore membership retention.

David Connell

Featured Speaker

Session Title

Achieving an outstanding customer experience: The perfect blend of humans and technology

Join David Connell CEO of Hertfordshire Sports Village for this interactive session exploring how you can achieve outstanding customer experience by perfectly blending humans and technology. A staunch advocate for in-person customer service but equally a passionate early adopter of technological solutions, David has been able to deliver exceptional results. You will learn how, in the last 10 years David has increased Net Promoter Score from 29 to over 70, driven huge improvements in member interactions, visit frequency, retention and member length of stay, whilst never losing sight of the need to employ and develop highly engaged and committed staff. You will leave the session with some key takeaways about how David has balanced human and technology potential at Hertfordshire Sports Village and how you can apply these same principles in your own businesses.

Intro to David

David Connell is CEO of Hertfordshire Sports Village, a leading single-site leisure facility with an average Net Promoter Score of 79. Inspired by his relentless pursuit of excellence and continuous improvement, David has led the team at the Sports Village on a good to great journey over the past 10 years, achieving incredible results in this time.

David has an unfaltering belief that by focussing on two key priorities – staff engagement and customer satisfaction (which he knows are inextricably linked) you will always create highly successful businesses that can grow, develop and respond to any challenges they face.

Highlights include taking a laser-focussed approach to increasing employee engagement, with the Sports Village being rated outstanding in this area and being recognised as one of the best companies to work for in the UK and growing NPS from an average of 26 in 2016 to an impressive 79 in 2025 (up from 69 in 2024). These improvements have been driven by David ensuring staff focus relentlessly on small but powerful interactions, that leave a lasting impression on users and lead to huge improvements in income, retention and length of stay.

None of this success would be achieved without his passion for questioning the norm, being an early adopter of new technology, listening to the data and using this to really understand what is going on in his business to improve staff engagement, customer satisfaction and retention.

Jill Spencer

Featured Speaker

Session Title

Just One More Visit: What Retail Can Teach Fitness About Bringing Customers Back

Retail lives or dies on whether a customer chooses to come back. So how do the world’s leading retail brands measure the experience they deliver, and what can health and fitness operators take from them?

Jill Spencer brings an outside view from years of working with major international retailers. She’ll show how the best brands measure and manage customer experience, and where mystery shopping fits in as a tool for seeing the experience through the customer’s eyes. Drawing on Proinsight’s EII data, she’ll compare leisure with retail and other sectors to show where fitness leads, where it lags, and where the quickest wins are.

Jill will also cover the key CX trends shaping 2026. One theme runs through all of them: even in a digital-first world, the human touch is still what earns the next visit.

Intro to Jill

Jill Spencer is an Associate Director at Proinsight, where she previously led the business intelligence function. She specialises in turning customer experience data into decisions operators can act on. Her work covers mystery shopping programme design, Voice of the Customer surveys, customer journey mapping and cross-sector benchmarking, for clients in retail, hospitality and leisure, including some of the UK’s best-known high-street and global brands.

Jill has been a guest on the CX Channel podcast and has written for Synergistic CX magazine. She is known for making data practical: finding the insight that changes what happens on the shop floor, or the gym floor, tomorrow morning.

Wayne Burton

Featured Speaker

Session Title

Turning guest insight into operational improvement at scale

How do you turn millions of guest interactions into clear priorities and practical improvements across a complex, global organisation? Wayne shares how Merlin Entertainments combines guest insight, operational data and continuous improvement to focus teams on the measures that matter and translate insight into action.

Drawing on practical examples from Merlin’s attractions, Wayne will explore:

Creating a clear, consistent view of guest and operational performance
Identifying the measures that matter and setting meaningful targets
Combining feedback and operational data to prioritise the biggest opportunities
Turning insight into action through clear ownership, accountability and continuous improvement

Delegates will leave with practical ideas for building a stronger link between customer insight, operational performance and sustained improvement in their own organisations.

Intro to Wayne

Wayne Burton
Director of Operational Excellence, Merlin Entertainments

Wayne leads Operational Excellence across Merlin Entertainments, the business behind attractions including LEGOLAND, Madame Tussauds, SEA LIFE, Alton Towers and the London Eye. His role is to help Merlin understand what matters most to guests and turn that insight into measurable, sustained improvements. He brings together guest feedback, operational performance and continuous improvement to set clear priorities, strengthen accountability and help teams deliver better experiences consistently across brands, sites and countries.

Marianne Boyle

Featured Speaker

Session Title

The state of the sector: UK Health & Fitness Market Report 2026

Opening the day, Marianne Boyle presents the headline findings from the UK Health & Fitness Market Report 2026, the most authoritative picture of how the UK’s gyms and leisure centres are performing.

The numbers tell a story of record growth: 12.2 million members, 18% of the population now belonging to a health and fitness club, more than 679 million visits in a year and sector income of £6.5bn. For the first time, the report also puts a figure on the sector’s wider social value: £7.5bn a year through improved wellbeing and reduced health conditions.

Marianne will explore:

Where growth is coming from, and who the new members are
How visit patterns and consumer behaviour are changing across public, private and independent operators
The sector’s growing role in the nation’s health, and what that means for investment and policy
What these trends mean for the customer experience you deliver

Delegates will leave with a clear view of the market they’re operating in, and the context for the rest of the day’s sessions.

Intro to Marianne

Marianne Boyle
Director of Membership and Sector Development, ukactive

Marianne leads membership and sector development at ukactive, the not-for-profit body representing the UK’s physical activity sector. She joined ukactive’s Executive team in 2023 after three years as Head of Partnerships and Strategic Lead for Infrastructure.

Marianne has more than 15 years’ experience in fitness and leisure, including senior management roles delivering multi-million-pound projects in public health, leisure services and higher education. At ukactive she focuses on keeping members at the heart of the organisation’s work and supporting the sector’s growth through member services, events and expertise across health, inclusion, digital and policy