CrossFit

Our multi-year engagement with CrossFit began with leaning into internationalization. The objective was to build global brand equity through localized digital outreach, enhanced accessibility, content, and training courses. We used extensive market research to define and validate digital expansion plans, and built an actionable prioritization framework. The result was a digital brand redesign and a multi-step roadmap for omnichannel growth.

In addition to the web strategy, design, and implementation projects, we’ve spent the better part of the last year evaluating and streamlining business systems. 

An early goal was to redesign key websites and key acquisition flows to reduce friction in the enrollment process for CrossFit’s training courses. Phase2 analyzed the trainer conversion path, pinpointed registration abandonment triggers, and prototyped and tested a new UX. To visualize trends and validate assumptions about user interactions, Phase2 developed custom reporting dashboards using Google Analytics and Looker, their BI tool. We completely overhauled the acquisition funnel including backend payment systems, reducing conversion time from 11 to 3 minutes.

CrossFit’s meteoric growth resulted in a complex and diverse technical ecosystem managing a wide variety of business activities—ESPN televised events, global in-person training events, and accredited online learning. As the business reoriented and refocused its mission, the question arose: can any of these systems be consolidated, and what is the ideal enterprise architecture to support our new goals? Phase2 created a Digital Operations Roadmap to inform and direct this initiative. We built a current state inventory of all existing systems, services, partner solutions, and technical solutions recently in use at CrossFit. This served as a foundation to design a future state vision for how this ecosystem could evolve, as well as practical, stair-stepped recommendations for iterative progress. Our roadmap spans a 24-month period and includes customer service architecture, audience engagement methods, payment systems, identity management, customer data management, and ERP.

Working our way from the enterprise down to the business units, we proposed a service model for how they could best support the business units and a product management approach for governing the entire ecosystem. This new model optimizes the value generated by internal resources by focusing their efforts on business problems unique to CrossFit while allowing for the frequent and risk-managed use of external resources to support C/OTS solutions.

After deeply examining the CrossFit.com ecosystem, we were able to sunset custom systems to free up developer focus and attention to service high-priority requests. We found that the website and mobile technologies themselves were not as big a blocker for outreach as the processes and systems surrounding it.

CrossFit also faced a challenge of data fragmentation within their customer service architecture. This created a situation where no one system had a 360-degree view of customer interactions.

Phase2 proposed a new customer-centric data architecture for the use of CRM and ERP that would create a centralized “summary” record of each customer, while still allowing business-specific systems to manage and maintain the process-specific detailed information about a particular customer interaction.

This allows the business to keep customer records focused and easy to understand while allowing business-specific systems to remain mostly decoupled and only lightly integrated with the central CRM.

CrossFit is a high-intensity training program that can be suited for anyone. Phase2 created an inclusive and transformative digital presence for CrossFit’s millions of devoted athletes in over 120 countries across the globe.