Setting Expectations; Response Times & SLAs

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.

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).

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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);