An Orangetheory Owner Built His Own AI Follow-Up Desk

Cam Lothridge's problem was not a shortage of leads. It was the handoff between shifts.

"A message could come in, or a shift change would happen, and the next person would not know there was still a follow-up or task to complete," the Orangetheory Fitness franchise owner in Warner Robins, Ga., told Chain Store Age in an interview published Nov. 4.

His fix uses parts he already had. The studio runs its calls and texts on RingCentral, which in September announced a plugin for ChatGPT and connectors for Claude built on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets AI assistants read from and act in other software. Lothridge asks ChatGPT to review call activity, texts, voicemail and call notes, find unresolved requests and suggest a reply. The team gets a digest in the morning and another in the afternoon.

"A useful digest tells us which prospect requested a callback, which first-class guest needs attention, and which member issue still needs verification," he said.

Lothridge said in RingCentral's announcement that the setup raised his studio's lead response rate by 50% and cut staff catch-up time between shifts from 45 minutes to under five. He told Chain Store Age that personalized outreach to 80 members about a special event took 15 minutes, work that used to take days. Those are one owner's figures, not a controlled study.

The notable part is who built it. Not the franchisor, and not a vendor selling to the franchisor, but an owner who said the connection took under five minutes. We argued last month that franchisees aren't waiting for corporate's AI; this is what that looks like at the front desk. It also comes from a system where the economics are under strain, with some Orangetheory owners walking away at renewal.

The approach has limits. A digest summarizes what already happened, and someone still has to make the callback. The member data also flows into whatever accounts an owner connects, a question franchisors will eventually ask about as these setups spread.

Revscale, which publishes this site, comes at the same gap from the other end. Its Inbound Agent answers inquiries, asks qualifying questions and routes qualified leads within minutes at any hour, and its Voice Agent answers calls, captures caller details and transfers to a person when needed, with every transcript and message kept on the lead record. Because the agents are configured in plain language, a studio could set them to handle the first reply itself instead of flagging it for the next shift, and the records can flow into the CRM a business already uses.

Lothridge says his next step is an internal CRM fed by those conversations, what he calls a "super employee" that recommends a follow-up for each member. The question for franchisors is whether they want that layer built one studio at a time, or once.

Revscale Media is published by Revscale.