How Active Wellness Increased Tour Bookings by 57% with Nova

At a glance

• Four locations supported

• Engagement across SMS, email, and web

• Always-on response for paid, organic, web, and after-hours leads

• Persistent follow-up when leads hesitate, push back, or go quiet

• Tour bookings increased by 57% in just one month

• 35.3% of out-of-hours leads converted into tours with no staff involvement

• Pricing and objection insights used to inform knowledge base and team training updates

About Active Wellness

Active Wellness is not a traditional gym operator. It sits at the intersection of fitness, wellness, healthcare partnerships, recovery, longevity, and community health. Its Active Wellness Centers are designed to support people across different ages, goals, health needs, and stages of life, from people looking for a better fitness experience to those seeking a more holistic route into long-term wellbeing. That makes the prospect journey more complex.

When someone inquires about an Active Wellness Center, they may not only be asking about joining a gym. They may be comparing membership options, asking about pricing, exploring programs, looking for recovery services, checking facility access, or trying to understand whether the experience is right for their lifestyle, health goals, or family.

For Active Wellness, the challenge was not simply how to respond to more leads. It was how to keep more conversations moving across multiple channels, without losing the quality, persistence, or insight those conversations can create. That’s where Nova, the sales agent inside Keepme Antares, came in.

Active Wellness deployed Nova across four locations to support lead engagement across SMS, email, and web. The agent now handles hundreds of conversations every month, simultaneously, without a single one going unanswered.

The context: A wellness operator with a more considered sales journey

Active Wellness Center describes itself as “the new front door to better health.” Through partnerships with developers and healthcare systems, Active Wellness Center delivers fitness clubs with medical wellness programs to communities across North America.

That positioning matters. Active Wellness is not selling a simple access-only gym product. Its model is broader, more consultative, and more closely connected to wellbeing, prevention, recovery, longevity, and lifestyle change. The offer includes a 360-degree approach to wellbeing, with fitness, recovery, stress management, longevity, expert support, social connection, and best-in-class amenities all part of the experience.

That creates a different kind of lead journey. Prospects need more than a quick answer. They often need reassurance, education, follow-up, and help understanding how the offer fits their needs.

Recent company news reinforces that strategic direction. In 2026, Active Wellness highlighted several initiatives that point to a business focused on long-term health, lifecycle engagement, and differentiated wellness experiences. Chief Marketing Officer Kari Bedgood was featured in Club Solutions discussing the shift from tactical digital marketing to intentional, lifecycle-driven strategy, with a focus on education and member connection over digital noise.

Active Wellness also announced COO Michele Wong’s appointment to the ACE 2026 Certification Advisory Board, reinforcing the company’s commitment to safe, science-based, and inclusive wellness experiences.

The company’s partnership with Manor Park and RDG Planning & Design on a new senior wellness center in Midland, Texas adds to that picture. The project is focused on active aging, strength, lifelong vitality, cognitive health, dual-task training, and data-driven programming.

This is the operating environment Nova is supporting: a sophisticated wellness business where the quality of the conversation matters because the product is not one-dimensional.

The challenge: Lead engagement needed to continue beyond the first reply

For Active Wellness, speed to lead was only part of the challenge. Prospects were not always ready to book after one answer. They asked about pricing, compared options, went quiet, came back later, and needed reassurance before taking the next step.

Across four locations and multiple channels, that kind of follow-up is difficult to manage manually. Leads arrive from paid campaigns, organic web forms, mobile pop-ups, and after-hours searches, often at the same time and with different levels of intent.

Active Wellness needed a way to respond immediately, keep conversations moving, and support prospects through a more considered decision process without adding more manual follow-up for the team.

The solution: Nova keeps the conversation going

Nova responds instantly, but the real value is what happens next. When a lead hesitates, asks about pricing, compares options, or goes quiet, Nova continues the conversation instead of letting momentum drop. As Jerry Cardinali, Director of Sales at Active Wellness put it:

“The ability of continuing the conversation is really effective.”

That’s the use case. Nova helps Active Wellness keep prospects engaged without relying on a team member being available at the exact moment a lead needs a response.

Because Nova runs inside Antares, that persistence is controlled. The agent works from approved knowledge, defined actions, brand parameters, and handover rules, so conversations stay helpful, accurate, and within the boundaries of the business. You can read more about those safeguards here: Why Antares Is A Safe Decision

The Customer Success layer: Performance improves through tuning

The Active Wellness story also shows how Keepme’s Customer Success program supports Antares customers beyond launch.

Nova is not treated as a static deployment. Keepme works with operators to review real conversation data, identify where prospects hesitate, and tune the agent so performance improves over time. That can mean refining agent actions, adjusting training, improving automations, updating knowledge base content, and sharpening how the agent handles common objections.

For Active Wellness, that optimization work made a measurable difference. After reviewing conversation patterns and making targeted improvements in May, tour bookings increased by 57% from April to May, making May the strongest month on record for tour bookings.

As Tom Bohlin, Customer Success Manager at Keepme, explains:

“Active Wellness is a strong example of what happens when an operator uses Nova as a performance system, not just an automated responder. After reviewing the conversation data and making targeted improvements, tour bookings increased by 57% in just one month. Just as importantly, the conversations showed us where prospects were hesitating, especially around pricing, so we could work with the Active Wellness team to improve responses, refine training, and strengthen the knowledge base.”

The results: Stronger tour momentum and out-of-hours conversion

After the May optimization work, tour bookings increased by 57% in just 4 weeks, making May the strongest month on record.

The out-of-hours performance is especially important. In May, 35.3% of out-of-hours leads converted into tours with no staff involvement required.

For Active Wellness, that means Nova is not just helping the team respond faster. It is protecting conversion opportunities when staff are unavailable, keeping prospects engaged across channels, and giving the business a more reliable acquisition layer.

From conversation volume to operating intelligence

At the volume Nova is handling for Active Wellness, the conversations themselves become a source of intelligence.Every pricing question, facility query, program request, objection, and stalled conversation tells the business something useful. These are real prospect signals, captured at the moment people are deciding whether to join.

Active Wellness’ CMO captured the value simply:

“A lot of the insights that were shared, a lot of conversations about pricing, are helpful for us to take back to our teams to consider updates.”

That insight became practical. Pricing conversations and deflection patterns helped Active Wellness see where prospects were hesitating and where responses needed to improve. After reviewing those patterns, the team built a response preference training document covering nine specific scenarios, including pricing, objection handling, and personal training inquiries.

That is where Antares goes beyond automation. Nova captures the conversations, while Pulse, Antares’ conversational intelligence layer, helps surface patterns in intent, objections, knowledge gaps, and behavioral signals. Those signals inform the Keepme Score, helping operators understand what conversations reveal about readiness, friction, risk, and opportunity across the customer lifecycle.

Nova turns conversations into engagement. Antares turns them into intelligence.

The takeaway

For multisite wellness and fitness operators, the lesson is clear: lead engagement is no longer just a staffing challenge. It is an operating system challenge.

Prospects move across channels, compare options quickly, and often need several touchpoints before they are ready to act. When that journey depends entirely on manual follow-up, opportunities are lost, patterns stay hidden, and teams are left reacting instead of improving.

Active Wellness shows what changes when those conversations are handled through a platform built for consistency, control, and learning. Nova gives the business the capacity to stay close to every prospect, while Antares turns those interactions into signals the wider organization can use.

That is the bigger opportunity for similar operators. The value is not only in booking more tours. It is in building a sales and engagement layer that gets sharper over time: one that captures demand, protects momentum, reveals friction, and helps teams make better decisions across acquisition, service, retention, and member experience.

For operators with complex propositions, multiple locations, and limited team capacity, this is where AI becomes more than automation. It becomes infrastructure for growth.