With the Olympic Games fast approaching, our attention will soon turn toward watching the world’s best athletes compete.
Those who are the best-of-the-best will walk away with gold medals. It’s truly impressive to watch performance at such an elite level. So much time and preparation has gone into a just few moments of competition. We respect the effort and marvel at the results. Shouldn’t we be striving for the same level of performance in our businesses? Don’t our members deserve such a diligent effort and commitment to excellence?
As you consider your commitment to providing an exceptional member experience, here are five factors to consider.
Have a plan.
Think through how you deal with the business’s most common issues. While we don’t ever want to be in the habit of merely quoting policy to a member, we do need the framework of policy to serve as a guide for decision making. It creates an environment of consistency and consistency is easier to scale and replicate—thus enabling our business to grow. We should also carefully consider each policy to ensure it makes sense for our specific business model and isn’t simply the fitness industry norm.
Clearly worded membership and service agreements.
While we know that most states mandate specific language and guidelines for fitness contracts, we’re not required to word our entire agreement in foggy legalese. Why not simplify the terms? Strip down the superfluous text? Make it easier for our members to understand? If we’re asking a member to jump through a series of hoops to manage their relationship with us, we should at least clearly lay out those hoops.
Have a system.
A sure fire way to botch the handling of a member’s account is poor communication. What was discussed? When? With whom? Our system should be easy to use (or it won’t be used) and should ideally allow for follow-up and interaction directly within the system. When it comes to account changes, clearly notating a member’s profile is a key first step to ensuring that what was “promised” is delivered. Member history should be accessible to all necessary staff members.
ClubReady has a very simple, yet detailed member tracking and interfacing platform embedded directly within their club management software. The easy to use interface, WorkIt, allows for the addition of client notes, the ability to send out a text or email (which automatically saves as a copy to the member’s notes), notate a phone conversations, add a member alert to ensure all team members are aware of important details, and set follow-up tasks assigned to specific team members. It also allows for easy contact reporting so management can monitor and direct all interactions. Speaking of reporting…
What’s measured is improved.
One of the biggest mistakes we see owners making is simply not knowing the volume or causes of member issues in their clubs. How do we get better if we have no knowledge of what’s wrong?
A good analysis starts with identifying what should be measured. What’s import for our business? What’s our retention goal? How many cancellations are we seeing each month? What is causing them? Are members able to easily contact us and get a resolution to their issues in an acceptable time frame? What is an acceptable resolution time? Targets should be established, an information collection protocol developed, and reporting templates produced. From there, let’s institute a consistent schedule to review, analyze, and improve. For example:
Joe’s monthly cancellation target is less than 25% of the new member packages sold. So, if he sells 100 new memberships, he hopes to only see a fall off of 25 or less from his total member count. Last month he noticed that his percentage of cancellations had climbed to nearly 50%. He pulled the cancellation roster from his club management software to review. He was happy to see that his staff had properly tagged each cancellation with a cancellation type. However, he was concerned to learn that a significant number of cancellations stemmed from members moving to a defaulted status because they hadn’t made payment in 90 days. From there he accessed his past due members report and reviewed outbound contacts made by his staff. It was uncovered that they weren’t hitting their outreach target for billing issue resolution. He scheduled a meeting with his GM to address this. During the meeting, it was determined that the lack of contact stemmed from an oversight during a staffing change. Outbound contact had once been the job of the afternoon front desk rep. When she left and was replaced, the task had never been reassigned. Joe and his GM established a new protocol of weekly contact auditing, assigned the task to the new front desk rep and reassessed the results until the process was back on track.
In our example, Joe started his review thinking only about cancellations and soon realized that it was unresolved payment issues causing his current cancellation spike. Proper reporting is like a treasure map. It guides us to the important areas for exploration and can uncover a wealth of information. Sometimes that information isn’t positive, but knowledge is always a good thing. And if we keep looking, we’re bound to find the path to gold!
Look in the mirror first.
Finally, we should always hold our facilities, team and services up to the light first, before addressing a member’s concern. Have we delivered what was promised? Are we being fair? Sometimes members’ reasons for leaving are very valid. It’s easy to employ a strict letter of the contract approach to how we deal with these concerns, but I’d argue it’s far less likely to have positive effect in the long run. Let’s listen to complaints focused on resolution and improvement. The value that exists in a lost member is learning how to prevent it from becoming lost members.