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Stay updated with the latest news, insights, and trends from our team. Our blog is a space where we share valuable tips, industry updates, and expert advice to help you stay informed and inspired. Whether you're looking to learn something new or keep up with what's happening, you'll find fresh and engaging content right here.

When Planning Country Club Renovation, Don’t Forget to Renovate the Club Management Software

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When Planning Country Club Renovation, Don’t Forget to Renovate the Club Management Software

Renovating facilities can breathe new life into the club. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of updating the surroundings to make the club feel more modern and vibrant.

Other times, certain updates can reflect the shift in member preferences. For example, the pandemic drove a desire for more open-air or patio dining.

Of course, undertaking a renovation is no small chore. Because of the investment, it’s wise to take a step back and look at the scope of renovating the country club through the lens of improving the member experience. After all, it would be easy to look no further than the updates to the physical facilities. But this is also a great time to look at the systems that support those facilities. Renovating or upgrading your technology can ensure that you’re creating a modern experience within those modern spaces. Better yet, you can make that happen with just a minor part of the renovation budget.

Teeing Up an Exceptional Golf Experience

With a renovation of the club golf course, much attention will be paid to the physical improvements (as it should be). But also consider all those things surrounding the golf outing that can make the whole experience exceptional. With top-flight systems, you can enable capabilities like booking tee times online and easily gathering, confirming, and communicating with your foursome. Plus, imagine a new POS system in the pro shop that improves your retail capabilities – from purchasing to inventory management.

Serving Up an Updated Dining Experience

Your members will be enamored by the plans for the updated surroundings. This is the perfect time to implement the tools that will help give your service a new look as well. Consider adding F&B POS systems that help streamline how you operate while helping you personalize the member experience. This can include innovations like Northstar’s Tableside POS which equips your wait staff with mini-tablets that connect with all the other systems in your F&B operation. Also, consider adding in highly-desirable new services like Grab ‘n Go which allow members to order from an easy-to-use club app.

Upgrading the Way you Connect with Members

As you plan and execute your renovation, you’ll want to keep members apprised of the exciting changes. That makes this a great time to consider an upgrade in the tools you use to communicate.

New systems can help you advance the club website, unlocking capabilities that members can use to interact with the club. That may include the ability to make reservations for events or dining. Or, the ability to pay the bill online.

You can also add a club app. Your members all have smartphones. It only makes sense to create an avenue to connect with them on the one device that they always have with them. You can give them all the capabilities available on the website, plus the power to communicate with other members through the app.

Also, don’t forget your outreach tools. New technology makes it easy to create graphics-rich emails. And then segment members by interests, preferences, spending habits, and more. Additionally, you can implement the capability to send text messages, as well as notifications through your club app.

There are many more examples of opportunities to refresh your technology as you renovate the facilities. For example:

  • Convenient self check-in capabilities
  • Security-enhancing gatehouse technology
  • Streamlined accounts receivables and accounts payable
  • Powerful reporting and analytics
  • Game-changing business intelligence capabilities

And this is just a start. Take a look at what you hope to accomplish with your country club renovation from a member experience perspective. Then evaluate whether or not your current systems and technology do justice to your renovated physical facilities. You may discover that it’s time to upgrade.

Learn more about how an update to your technology can further enhance the physical renovations at your club. Request a demo of the Northstar solution – a complete club management system built on one database to help your club take advantage of every opportunity to upgrade the member experience. 

Future-Proofing: How your Club Management Software can Help you take Advantage of the Club Trends for 2022

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Future-Proofing How your Club Management Software can Help you take Advantage of the Club Trends for 2022

The club industry has seen a lot of change over the past 18 months. Some of those changes arose directly from the emergence of Covid-19. Others have been developing over time, but their significance was amplified by the pandemic.

As we look to 2022, it’s valuable to examine how you can deploy your club management software to help address those trends that will continue to shape the club experience for your members and prospects. Let’s take a look.

Trend: Golf Continues to Experience a Renaissance

Around 2003, golf started to experience a slow decline in participation that would last until the pandemic. That’s when things changed. People needed an activity they could participate in while social distancing. Golf was a natural.

According to the National Golf Foundation, 502 million rounds of golf were played in 2020. A 14% increase in the rounds played of 2019, despite course shutdowns at the beginning of the pandemic. This trend is expected to sustain.

This is a boon for clubs. The challenge will be managing the increased demand to make the most of the opportunity. Robust reservation functionality allows clubs to easily run reservations lotteries to ensure fair and equitable access for all members. The technology also gives members added convenience, allowing them to request tee times on the club website or through the club app on their phones. The members can even access a buddy list as part of the process. This gives them the ability to build their foursomes and automatically send out invitations to those friends to play.

Best-in-class club management software will also allow the club to handle the other in-demand amenities surrounding golf. This includes reserving resources like a practice bay. And allowing members to see their favorite teaching pro’s schedule and book a lesson – all through the app.

Trend: The Rise of the “Third Place”

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to describe the space outside of the home (the person’s first place) and work (the person’s second place). It is defined as a destination where people meet to enjoy themselves and build relationships. When the pandemic restricted access to so many places, the value of having a safe and welcoming third place became even more important. The private club was well equipped to fulfill the role of that third place. And people began to look at it in a new light.

Even as things open, there will continue to be a halo effect of this renewed positive perception of the club that will extend into 2022 and beyond.

To take full advantage of it, clubs will need to move beyond the old-school view of the club as a place for special occasions and golf. Today the opportunity lies in repositioning the club as a more family-oriented destination and a more frequent gathering place. This fulfills that need for a third place, especially among the prime prospects who are 35 – 45 years old and have families.

Marketing will be key in the effort to shift perceptions. Your club management software can help. Start with your website builder module, revamping messaging. And adding promotional banners to feature those parts of the club that support this new position. For example, you can highlight amenities such as your spa or family-oriented programs you have developed. Maybe you added new casual dining options. Some clubs even retooled a room, offering coffee, wi-fi, and all the amenities you’d expect in a coworking space.

Use your software to deploy campaigns through email, text, and app notifications. Of course, you’ll want to include your social media in the effort, encouraging your members to repost to their friends (your prospects).

Promoting these aspects can help your club become that much-sought-after third place.

Trend: Great Technology Becomes Table Stakes

Best-in-class club management software helped clubs manage through the new reality that the pandemic ushered in. Members turned to the club website and app for contactless access to do everything from checking in at the club to ordering food to paying their bill.

As we look to 2022, there are a couple of drivers that will continue to elevate the demand for advanced technology.

  1. The pandemic increased members’ use of the technology. This has now created an expectation that it will continue to be available and even evolve (just like all the other technologies in their lives).
  2. Millennials have reached the prime recruitment age for clubs. This is a generation raised with technology. These prospects have an expectation that they will be able to reserve and access club amenities on their schedule, not yours and that of your staff.

Your club management software solution will continue to grow in importance. Members will rely more heavily on the club app and website, viewing both as extensions of their club experience. The opportunity for clubs will be to integrate the disparate departments, creating one seamless experience for members. And allowing club staff to better manage the operations.

Trend: Shifting Lifestyles

The pandemic and the influx of younger generations are shifting the expectations of the experience the club delivers. This will continue into 2022.

The dining offering is a great example. The need for social distancing drove a desire for contactless ordering. Additionally, members gravitated more and more to outdoor dining for both safety concerns as well as the appeal of the more casual environment.

Club management software helped clubs meet the demand, introducing food ordering to the app. Members could now request delivery outside, dining on the patio. Or they could order Grab ‘n Go.

With the addition of the younger generations, clubs will continue to see a desire for more wellness offerings at the club. That includes healthy menu items as well as amenities like yoga classes and resources like a workout facility. As mentioned before, there will be an expectation that they can book their session, receive reminders, and pay for any services all through the app and website.

Trend: The Great Resignation Lingers

2021 saw the rise of a phenomenon labeled as The Great Resignation. With the pandemic as the catalyst, workers left their jobs in record numbers. That included almost 7% of workers in the hospitality and food industry in August – more than twice the average rate of the rest of the economy according to a US Department of Labor report in October of 2021.

Businesses of all types have experienced worker shortages. And it looks likely the trend will continue into 2022.

As part of the hospitality industry, clubs need to be particularly aware of this lingering trend. Club management software can play a vital role in helping you mitigate the effects of The Great Resignation by building better communication, empowering workers, and more. For a deeper dive on this, check out the post How your technology and club management software can help you navigate The Great Resignation.

Future-Proofing

The 2022 trends will be accompanied by challenges. But with those challenges come opportunities. Opportunities for clubs to find new ways to engage and serve members that meet an evolving expectation of the club experience.

The right club management software can help a club put itself in a position to take advantage of all these opportunities in 2022. To learn how, request a demo, of the Northstar Technologies complete club management platform. A premier platform built on one database to give your entire operation a single source of truth for better decisions for the club. And a better experience for members. Request a demo, today.

Zombie Technology: Is your Club Management Software Creating a Horror Show?

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Zombie Technology Is your Club Management Software creating a horror show

They are there. Hiding in the shadows. Bedeviling everything from the way you communicate across your club to your ability to get things done. They are the demons lurking in your disparate systems

Left to their own devices, they can slowly suck the life out of a club. It’s time to expose them. Bring them into the light of day. So we can drive them out. Never to return.

Here is a field guide to identifying the evil fiends.

The Time Vampire

This creature skulks among all your disparate systems. It thrives by sucking up all your staff’s time by cursing them with manually entering information from one system to another. Or causing them to cross-check information in multiple databases to make sure the billing is right or a member isn’t left off of an event they registered for.

This fiend especially delights in watching you and your staff scramble when it’s report time and you have to pull data from those multiple systems and databases. And then try to turn it into coherent insights.

The Frankenstein Monster

With those cobbled-together systems, you have created a monster. There are telltale signs. Lurching and staggering operations. Faltering abilities to communicate.

Every time you try to update a system or bolt-on functionality, the creature becomes more grotesque and unwieldy. You end up spending more time and more money trying to wrangle the beast. Training and retraining your staff. Patching security vulnerabilities again and again. And just trying to keep this brute stitched together.

The Befuddlement Goblins

These mischievous imps infest your siloed systems. They delight in the chaos that they create by keeping systems from speaking to each other. They can drive staff insane by forcing them to run from one department to another, trying to get the most recent data.

Worse yet, they can wreak havoc on the member experience. They are responsible for orders getting lost in the restaurant, tee times being jumbled, court reservations disappearing, and more.

The Befuddlement Goblins can seem like an irritating but tolerable nuisance. That is until you see how they make it hard to retain staff and leave members feeling spooked about renewing.

The Financial Fog

This evil spirit is insidious. It’s hardly noticeable as you go about the daily financial business of the club. Sure, it’s a pain to try and get a consolidated view with all those disparate systems. But you do your best to root around for all the information you need for accounts receivable and payables. You slog through. Invoices get sent out. Bills get paid. And mistakes are made.

Being in the middle of it, it’s hard for you and your people to see the fog that creeps in and engulfs the backend operations. The impenetrable haze chokes any ability you and your people have to do anything other than to just keep up. Time for process improvement is lost. Lost in the fog.

The Brain Eater

This creature may be the most sinister. It lives to devour any ability you have to be able to strategize about the future of your club with Club Management Software.

The Brain Eater is naturally drawn to clubs with Time Vampires, the Frankenstein Monster, Befuddlement Goblins, and the Financial Fog. It knows these other fiends create an environment where it’s difficult to do anything more than just keep up with the day-to-day. In this bog of disparate, siloed systems and faltering communication and coordination, the Brain Eaters add to the chaos. They ravage the last shred of possibility of gathering any intelligence from your systems that could help you optimize, reinvent, and innovate in your club.

Exorcising your demons

If you have been seeing the signs of zombie technology at your club, all is not lost. There is still time to drive out the evil lurking in your operation. It begins by creating an environment that repulses the demons. An environment where disparate systems disappear. Where your country club management software operates on one database that connects everything and everyone, shining a light on even the darkest corners of the operation. Hence, in this environment, the ghouls cannot survive. The spirits flee. And the once horror show becomes the idyllic club you always knew it could be.

With the Northstar complete club management software solution, you have access to a premier platform. A platform that can protect your club from those demons of inefficiency, confusion, and chaos that can creep in. The Northstar platform is built on one database, giving your entire operation a single source of truth for better decisions for the club. And a better experience for members. Thinking about implementing anything less is just spooky. Get the full profile ? Request a demo of the Northstar Technologies solution, today. 

Club Management Software Experiences a Surge in Innovation in 2021: Northstar Leading the Way

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Club management software experiences a surge in innovation in 2021 Northstar leading the way

If you think you have an idea of everything club management software can do, it’s time to take another look. Over the past year, advancements have brought new functionality as well as innovations to existing abilities.

Some of the developments were quick responses to clubs’ needs that were precipitated by the COVID-19 virus. “Grab ‘N Go has been a hit among our members. Within 48 hours of coming up with the need for takeout during COVID, Northstar had the system in place and ready to go,” said Scott Kolb, General Manager of Victoria Golf Club.

But that’s just part of the story. Other advancements arose as well. “In addition to the new offerings, our team deployed a number of high-value upgrades to existing functionality to help improve the member experience while helping clubs streamline operations,” said Prasad Suryadevara, Northstar’s Founder and CEO.

Here’s a look at the progress our club management software has made over the last year.

Cooking up tantalizing offerings in dining

Adoption of Grab ‘N Go grew for clubs as the realities of the pandemic set in. For Northstar, a continuous improvement approach ensured functionality was tuned to the demands of the time. It started with optimizing navigation to streamline the user experience. It also included adding new abilities such as allowing credit card payments through the app as well as the capability to allow ordering by the public.

Additionally, the offering saw improvements with how it worked with the Kitchen Display System (KDS). Load management was introduced into Grab ‘N Go, allowing the kitchen to restrict ordering based on load factors. And helping to reduce the incidence of swamping the kitchen and dealing with members irate about delayed orders. An option was also added to allow members to pre-order for future dates.

The KDS incorporated these innovations, allowing the kitchen staff to see the full queue of orders – from the dining room and Grab ‘N Go. This helped to further improve the workflow, but also to enhance the member experience. For example, when Grab ‘N Go orders are ready for pickup, a message can automatically go out to the members’ app to notify them.

“Shadow Wood recently upgraded to Northstar 6.0 and brought in both the tableside tablets for the dining room. And the KDS screens for the kitchen Both systems have proven to be wonderful additions and have greatly sped up service, as well as accuracy during the order taking process,” said John St. John, Director of Food & Beverage at Shadow Wood Country Club

The value of these optimizations is magnified when you consider how the system can reduce the demands put on your team. In other words, the advancements can help clubs more efficiently manage through a time when hiring and retaining staff is particularly challenging.

Scoring new enhancements for golf

Golf everywhere saw a surge over the past year. For Northstar, upgrades to club management software helped mitigate the challenges of the extraordinary demand, all while improving the experience for both the members and the golf staff.

An upgraded booking engine helped drive the improvements which included new tools to help the golf staff control daily play. Of course, this connected with the members’ app which allowed them to see and book available times, and build their foursomes from a buddy list in the app. “The tee time app has been very well received by our members. It is easy to use and has made some significant enhancements to get the members on the course at the times they want and the people they want to play with,” remarked Ben Hay, General Manager at Crane Creek Country Club.

On top of it all, Golf Events functionality was built to help the golf staff manage tournaments.

Giving check-in the VIP treatment

Check-in was another area that rose to prime importance in the pandemic environment. Northstar responded by developing a front desk self-check-in solution. It allowed guests to scan the QR code on their app or use physical cards and fobs to check in themselves, dependents, and guests. The new technology tied to Northstar’s Access Control Box which triggered the opening of the door upon successful member validation.

But it didn’t stop there. The new development also gave clubs the ability to immediately post guest fees to the member’s bill upon automatic check-in.

Northstar also added upgraded functionality for those clubs needing room check-in. Upon booking, members receive a link for the room booking. The solution allows them to add guests, view bills, enter credit card information, and checkout. All from the app.

Sending a strong message with texting

Texting continues to be one of the most ubiquitous methods of communicating. Unfortunately, most members have to go outside a club app to use this preferred method of communication.

Northstar recognized that requiring the member to leave the club app to text was not optimal – for both the member and the club. As a result, texting was added as a new feature.

The addition reduces steps, making the experience less burdensome for members. For the clubs, it provides numerous benefits. For starters, it allows the club to send a message to a custom list of members based on demographics, interests, and literally hundreds of parameters stored in the member database. This enables precise targeting to deliver a highly relevant message. And since the texting functionality is connected to the database, creating highly personalized messages is simple.

The advancement also allows the club to send automated reminders for a dining or event reservation the member made. This reduces the need for a staff member to manually send notifications. And it helps reduce lost business due to no-shows.

Issuing the first-class functionality of vaccine passports

This year, the pandemic had many places considering the requirement of having visitors show proof of vaccination status.

Northstar saw this as an opportunity to bring value-added functionality to the club management software solution. Now members can take a picture of their vaccination cards from their phones and upload them to the app. Club staff receives notification that the card has been uploaded and they can review and approve. Once approved, the members receive a green (safe) shield on their profile. This green shield shows up in the system whenever the members check in, letting the staff know that they are vaccinated. The functionality even allows the staff to override the system if the member does not have the green shield but presents a vaccination card in person.

For members, the advancement delivers invaluable peace of mind, knowing that there are measures in place to enhance their safety. As Chief Technology Officer of Jonathan Club Chas Boyer added, “Northstar has really risen to the occasion for Jonathan Club by providing a streamlined way for our members to confirm their COVID-19 vaccination status. Members can simply leverage the Club Now app to snap a picture or upload a scanned file directly to their membership account.”

Continuing the never-ending pursuit of an exceptional member experience

Northstar continues to innovate to improve both the member experience and the club operations. The pandemic has created a unique challenge. But with it has come an equally unique opportunity to make the club experience more engaging, convenient and rewarding than ever before.

To get a more in-depth look at all the innovations of a complete club management software solution built on a single database, request a demo, of the Northstar system.