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Setting Expectations; Response Times & SLAs
Setting Expectations; Response Times & SLAs

A guide to the reality of how busy our office is, and how many queries we're hit with on a daily basis.

Giovanni avatar
Written by Giovanni
Updated over 3 weeks ago

We're making huge strides.

With the support of our community, we've reduced the average waiting time for a reply from 5 days to just 26 minutes over the last three years (2022 to 2025).

Whilst we recognise there are still some issues that take us longer than we'd like to resolve fully, we're making huge progress and will continue to focus on improving customer services as a core and unshakable commitment before an other innovation.

In the ideal world, we'd be able to get back to everyone same-day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The reality is, of course, very different.

BMABA straddles a strategically perilous line - we're a Community Interest Company (CIC) and therefore have a public responsibility to spend membership fees from our community extremely carefully, to make sure we deliver on promises and continue to innovate.

Looking in from the outside, it's easy to think we're a massively well funded, well resourced corporation with investors, Sport England backing, and so on. The reality couldn't be more different.

What's the current estimate for order completion and replies to queries?

Currently, all orders, including renewals are being dealt with in 1 working day on average. Some orders take a little longer, but almost all are being completed in full within 2 working days. It can sometimes take a little longer, so we ask that you allow up to 5 working days unless its urgent.

We're still working hard on emails and webchat etc, which has an average of 24 hours for a reply, with a huge proportion being answered in real-time same day, and a few which take longer. This is especially true if it's a complex or in-depth query, or relies on a smaller number of our team (for example, compliance or safeguarding queries).

How We're Using AI To Innovate & Resolve The Bottleneck

As you'll see below, with over 4,000 monthly touchpoints with our members, if we didn't use state of the art AI (our FIN!) to help resolve matters, we'd be unable to reply to 3 in 4 points of contact.

Currently, FIN AI (our AI bot) answers around 2,000 of the 4,000 touchpoints we receive every month. That may be chat, email, FB messenger, or another form of contact.

Around 1,000 of the 2,000 remaining doesn't require a reply (notifications, non-reply updates, and so on) and the team then focus on the c. 1,000 contact points. Assuming we need to allow 5 minutes per correspondence to check accounts, discuss the issue internally, or check our staff training guides, that's still around 166 hours of support needed per day. That's enough for 20 full time members of staff!

We're investing more time and money into FIN picking up the brunt of contact. FIN uses state of the art and one of a kind AI, powered by Intercom, to answer in as real conversational terms as possible. FIN uses the same knowledge base, handbook and internal training notes that our team use, and FIN also has full visibility on our websites. This allows FIN to provide accurate, in-depth replies with the ability to manage back and forth live chat or email.

We review FIN's review scores and sample dozens of communications FIN's had with members, and we often reflect that we couldn't provide a better reply. Often when clubs ask for a human purely because they don't want to engage FIN (we do understand!) we have to copy and paste FIN's reply because there's no better explanation available!

Our members trying FIN in the first instance is a game changer, and we're incredibly grateful.

There will always be a real member of our team available for complex issues, on-going queries, or just regular contact that you'd like a human reply for but by using FIN as much as possible it not only helps you get an immediate resolution to a question or issue, but crucially, it helps us be both available for real support when you do need it, as well as innovating to keep your membership cutting edge and best of its kind.

What's The Challenge For BMABA & Response Rates?

BMABA has a very small team by comparison to the size of our operations. Whilst representing more than 100,000 martial artists every year, we have a team of only c. 20 members of staff, some of which will be part time or remote based. If you consider even your local Tesco Express, there's probably double that number working to staff the tills and stock the shelves.

It's an absolutely colossal task for our team to not only be available to respond to questions, queries, emails, phone calls, SMS messages and so on - but also to undertake everything else required. From safeguarding, compliance and legal matters through to marketing, social media and operations. Customer services to finances, new product and service development to charitable operations. Those titles in themselves is 10 of 20!

Without any external funding and relying purely upon the revenue we raise from membership transactions (which in themselves are kept to the absolute minimum, to support clubs) the reality is our team are working hard to clear an ever-refilling queue of orders and queries. That's a good thing, of course, but it can be challenging at times, especially if a query is complex, technical or requires very special knowledge.


The Statistics

On average, our team deal with around 4,000 messages, chats or emails per month. That's around 48,000 queries per year. This doesn't include a back and forth web chat or Facebook Messenger conversation either. The average number of replies sent by the team can easily break through 11,000 per month (560 per day) when we take into account back and forth replies on chat.

We're able to get back to almost all enquiries within 20 minutes, with a Median first response time of 21 minutes and 6 seconds. The Median time to close (as in, the typical amount of time before a web chat, email or other communication channel is 'closed' by our team because the issue is resolved) is 2 hours and 35 minutes.

The type of nature of queries received daily varies hugely. Some are quick, easily resolved issues - such as password resets or account issues. Others can be hugely complex, highly technical or legally difficult. From safeguarding responses to website technical issues right through to membership enquiries. Some messages take over 60 minutes to write a reply to, let alone the time needed to investigate and discuss the issue internally, which really demonstrates the challenge.


What's likely and realistic?

Across our 100,000 members we have around 6,500 instructor.

If we spent 10 minutes per year dealing with every instructor - be that 10 minutes of phone calls, emails, data processing - it equates to us needing 35 full time members of staff.

If you assume 1,000 of the 6,500 will need 20 minutes, that figures balloons to 46 full time members of staff.

If we assume just 200 of the 1,000 need 60 minutes per year, that adds another 10 members of staff.

At minimum wage (we're a living wage employer, and as we require really good quality staff, the reality is we pay substantially more than this) the bill for wages alone would equate to more than £1,045,000. That figure just isn't sustainable. The cost implication to clubs would see a huge increase in costs, and a massive decrease in the tools and resources we offer.

If we assume our current team of 20 all spend their entire time dealing with instructors, they could as a team contact all 6,500 members - but only if they allot no more than 0.27 seconds per instructor!

Clearly at this sheer volume, we have to try and create a balancing act between making ourselves available to members, and trying to keep things moving.

What's the balancing act?

We always need to keep some of our team behind the scenes, away from the phones, chat and email, to keep things moving. From basic things like filing VAT returns and dealing with safeguarding queries to those who working on amazing new products and services - like ClubManager, WordpressbyBMABA, SeoByBMABA, our Club Grants Programme - it requires dedicated staff.

We then try and counter this by putting as many staff as we can into day to day customer services. That includes processing renewals, registrations and orders, as well as responding to phone calls, queries, emails, web chats and so on.

The balancing act is trying to make sure we tackle as much as is humanly possible on a day to day basis, to offer the best club experience we can, against the trade off of keeping new courses, content and resources being created throughout the year. The latter is what membership pays for, so we do have an obligation to make sure we're always strategically pushing forward the Foundation's visions, and that we continue to innovate and build new services, content, apps and resources.


What's our goal, and what are we doing to meet this? And how can you play your part?

We aim to respond within 1 working day to all web chat queries.

We aim to respond to all emails within 2 working days.

We aim to return phone calls within 2 working days.

We're currently achieving this target in 97.3% of all cases.

This target isn't always possible, but we're doing absolutely everything we can to make it happen. Super technical queries, or really complex issues - including those that might need a specific member of the team - are always unfortunately going to fall outside of this timeframe.

To help try and tackle waiting times, we're hiring more and more team members on a constantly recruiting basis. We hired 4 more members of staff in 2024 alone and expect to hire atleast 6 new colleagues during 2025.

We're always having to balance this, and the six months of training needed to be able to provide 1st rate support, with our ultimate aim of keeping membership affordable and accessible.

How can you help?

Let's just be clear; you shouldn't expect a delay, and we're always sincerely sorry if you experience this when you reach out to us with questions or queries. We'll do all we can to try and prevent undue delays, and you're always welcome to chase up outstanding queries with us as required.

There are a couple of basic things you can do to help us get back to you as quickly as possible, without doubling our team (and membership prices);

  1. Try FIN!
    FIN uses the latest AI technology. It reads our handbook, websites, internal training notes and everything in between. You can conversate back and forth on chat, FB messenger and even email with FIN for realtime support that is often as good as the support our genuine colleagues can provide. We know FIN can't always help with everything, but if you can give it a try in the first instance, it's hugely appreciated as this massively helps us cut down on the amount of human time needed for support, and therefore the amount of time you need to wait if you do need to speak with us.

  2. Please read instructions, including any website information.
    So many of the queries we receive are answered by information boxes on the website, or basic instructions before submitting forms. Please double check website instructions or information first, to save you time waiting.

  3. Please do check the handbook (here) first.
    We add to this everytime we come across a question asked more than once. There's so much good stuff in there (Including this article). To save yourself time, please search here before contacting us. It's probably been answered, and we'll often have to refer you back to the knowledge base article for the answer anyhow!

  4. If it's a really technical, niche or long question, please be patient.
    If you're asking for help resetting your password, presuming we get to the request in among the hundreds of other queries, we'll aim to reply and resolve the issue on the spot.

    If, however, you're querying the underlying insurance contract with our reinsurers, alongside a technical question about specific syllabus progression in a very rare style of Chinese Martial Arts, whilst also asking a highly technical question about Wordpress, please understand this can't possibly fall under our usual expected response rate.

    We appreciate that sounds silly, but we often receive emails which, if printed, account for more than three pages of A4 on a Friday night, with an angry chaser Monday morning when no response has been received!

    Our team need to have time to switch off, and we don't like colleagues feeling pressured to jump onto web chat at weekends or outside of office hours - it just leads to burnout, and doesn't help them help you properly.

Please don't confuse this article with us saying you can't contact us if you need to! You can reach out whenever you need to, and we'll do our best to respond as quickly as possible. You're also welcome to chase up any outstanding requests, but please remember we're doing our best, and not ignoring you if you don't have an immediate reply!

We are here to help, and we do manage to get back to most requests within 24 hours so if you're in any doubt, please reach out on web chat and we will be happy to assist.

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