reat club operators tell us they take time each week to
walk the gym floor and see how their staff interact with
their members. The warm smile and friendly ‘hello, how
are you?’ from reception, the encouraging comments
from the fitness staff as members go through their workouts, the
duty manager that holds the door open as a member walks in are all
part of the complete package consistently offered by successful
clubs.
So how do we guarantee these extra touch points are experienced
by our members?
We know all too well that members value personal service as an
extremely important factor in their overall satisfaction of your club.
We also know that the level of personal service received in the early
weeks of their membership is directly related to the length of time
that person will remain as a member.
What can we do to make sure that personal service is delivered,
thereby increasing customer satisfaction?
G
The 5-minute mission
Recently, a club owner I have known for many years told me about
how they had raised the issue of interacting with members at a
meeting with their fitness staff. They run a busy facility in a large
town with just over 1,500 members and five fitness staff. Personal
service is how they differentiate from the large multi-site operator
that opened down the road and a new boutique that opened recently.
They set themselves the mission of holding a five-minute
conversation with each member, every two weeks. They felt that
five-minute conversations were the least they should deliver for their
monthly membership dues. Divided between the five staff, this was
300 members each.
Next, they worked out how this would impact their already busy
days:
300 members x 5 minutes = 1,500 minutes or 25 hours every two
weeks for each of the fitness staff.
So, 12 hours – or almost a third of each of the fitness teams’ time
out of a 38-hour week – would be used up, in order to deliver just one
aspect of what was felt to be an important element of the experience
in the club. Still, they knew this was a valuable and honorable
thing to do, so set about the task with their usual enthusiasm and
commitment, agreeing to review their progress in three months’ time.
You can’t chat with people who aren’t there
Pretty soon, the team members discovered that they were each
experiencing the same issues. Many five-minute conversations
were being held with members, but it became clear that the same
members were being seen over and over. These were committed
exercisers who used the gym many times a week and had no issues
with the facility. A couple even expressed a wish to be left alone to
get on with their training.
Something was clearly wrong with the 5-minute plan. The staff
were committing a third of their time to interacting personally with
members, yet they were still seeing the same rate of cancellations as
prior to the change of strategy.
THE QUICK READ
• Research has shown it can cost up to
seven times more to get a new member
than to keep an existing one
• Gym-floor interactions with members
are great, but can be more useful when
specific members can be targeted for
attention
• Research shows that if an individual’s
club usage pattern drops by over 50%
from their usual pattern, they are at risk
of cancelling their membership
• Member retention software that
highlights at-risk members can help
clubs to focus staff efforts on
integrating, motivating and retaining
those members.
At the next staff meeting, they went
through all the members that had left in
the previous several weeks, and it became
apparent that they hadn’t been chatted
with before cancelling their memberships.
Why? The answer was clear, over 90% of
the leavers had not been seen in the last
six weeks and thus had not experienced
the club’s personal interactions. After a little
more digging, the data revealed that most
leavers were those not experiencing the
club’s high level of service for the simple
reason that they had stopped visiting in the
previous two to four months, and no one had
noticed.
The cost of retention versus
acquisition
We know interacting in a positive and
constructive manner with members in our
clubs is a prerequisite for a successful and
profitable operation. We invest many dollars
and copious amounts of time in staff training
and systems to ensure these interactions are
delivered to a high standard. We congratulate
ourselves on our sales efforts that ensure
we have adequate members contributing
to our ongoing revenue streams. Yet, as we
become more sophisticated as an industry,
we are learning more facts about the efficacy
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