Toustone Builds Predictive Intelligence Tool to Forecast Membership Churn Rates with 82% Accuracy

BSC was established in 1958 as a meeting place for various sports in the local community. Over the years, it has expanded to over 160,000 members, and now includes an extensive range of F&B and entertainment establishments, including recreational gambling facilities.

In 2022, the NSW government introduced new initiatives to promote responsible gambling. With recreational gambling accounting for up to 72 percent of the club’s income, BSC recognized that it may be financially impacted. To reduce its reliance on recreational gambling for income, BSC needed to diversify its income sources, minimize membership churn, increase long-term membership renewals, and better engage new prospective members.

While BSC planned to achieve the above-mentioned goals by tapping its wealth of membership data, it had previously stored its membership data across disparate and siloed systems. As a result, BSC had to designate a staff member to manually identify and analyze data from different sources, which often took weeks to complete. This complex, highly labor-intensive process was prone to human bias and errors, which undermined the quality of data and business insights.

In 2022, Toustone proposed RetainMember, an advanced and predictive intelligence solution that would forecast membership churn rates, identify at risk members, highlight marketing opportunities to grow their membership base, and improve the overall member experience.

Toustone used Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy a machine-learning model that formed the basis of RetainMember, its predictive intelligence tool. By analyzing BSC’s visitation, point of sale (POS), gaming, paging, promotion and membership data, RetainMember can accurately identify members at risk of discontinuing their memberships, which in turn allows BSC to implement targeted marketing initiatives, member retention programs and plan their future capital expenditure. Since using RetainMember, BSC has achieved their highest membership growth rate of 25 percent during the period of April to October, 2023.

“With Amazon SageMaker, we created a highly accurate machine-learning model that predicts member churn rate and unlocks new marketing and business opportunities with data to help clubs grow. By building our predictive intelligence tool on AWS, our customers can make evidence-based decisions with unprecedented confidence and ease of mind,” said Craig Lefoe, chief executive officer and co-founder of Toustone.

Toustone used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service, and Amazon Redshift, a cloud data warehousing service, to build and deploy a robust data pipeline. RetainMember can now tap on a unified database to generate deeper business insights and make accurate churn predictions. For instance, RetainMember helped BSC achieve its highest-ever membership growth in 2023 by identifying with an 82 percent accuracy rate which members were likely to discontinue their engagement with the club within the next 12 months. With Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift being fully managed services, there was no need for additional manpower from Toustone to manage the database, resulting in a more cost-effective solution to its customers.

“With Toustone’s RetainMember, we now have a unified dashboard that includes key metrics, such as member lifetime value and churn rates. This allows us to efficiently allocate marketing resources, target at-risk members, and focus on their long-term retention. Today, we have achieved our highest membership growth rate. This in turn drives staff across the business to engage in acquisition and retention campaigns,” said Chris Villani, Group Strategy & Commercial Manager of BSC.