Boost Membership Retention with Effective Customer Service Principles for Gyms

Customer service plays an important role in improving membership retention – 73% of consumers said they would consider purchasing from a brand again if they had superior customer service. In addition, customer experience is predicted to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020. Put more simply, excellent customer service is a great way to distinguish your brand and what you offer from your competitors, keeping your members coming back for more.

“Don’t worry, I already provide great customer service”, you might say. However, do you know if this is really the case? Rather startlingly, Bain & Company found that while 80% of CEOs believe they deliver a superior customer experience, only 8% of their customers agree! To avoid this, this article will walk you through 5 important tips to improve your customer service and boost retention rates at your gym.

1. Make a good first impression

The first interaction you have with any customer is absolutely vital since it will set the tone for all further engagements. People are prone to the halo effect, a form of cognitive bias where, if an observer likes one aspect of something, they will have a positive predisposition toward everything about it. If the observer dislikes one aspect of something, they will have a negative predisposition toward everything about it.

As such, start off on a sour note with a customer, and their entire impression of you will be tarnished by their bad first impression. You will have to work even harder the next time (if they even give you a second chance!) to convince them that your offering is worth their time and money. In addition, you may have to bear the consequences of them detracting from your brand since 95% of customers talk about a bad experience. In contrast, make a good first impression, and you are not only more likely to be forgiven by a customer for any future slip-ups but also (and this is particularly the case for gyms) a happy first-time customer might commit to a long-term membership straight away as a result of their positive experience, guaranteeing their business for an extended period!

Many elements go into making a good first impression, such as being particularly welcoming to new customers, or ensuring that any queries or concerns they have are quickly addressed. The physical venue of the gym is also of vital importance since customers will often interact with your physical space before they meet a member of staff: is your gym easy to find? Is there ample, affordable, parking? Is it clean and tidy? Even though a detailed look at making a first impression is beyond the scope of this article, one key aspect of customer service is strategically ensuring that your customers have a positive first impression of your brand.

2. Equip & empower staff members

In the context of online purchases, It was discovered that some of the most important factors driving good customer service impressions all entailed an issue being resolved as quickly as possible by a friendly, identifiable member of staff:

(Chart Source: EConsultancy)

One great way to ensure that customers’ issues are resolved efficiently and simply is to ensure that your staff is equipped to do so. How can this be achieved?

The first step is to invest in employee training. An employee that has received adequate customer service training will not only know what the best decision to make in any given case is but is also more likely to be calm and confident in high-pressure scenarios. In fact, household names like Disney and Zappos are well-known for the excellent customer service training that their staff members undergo.

In addition to being trained, staff must also be given the authority necessary for important client-facing decisions like payments, discounts, and on-boardings. While it may seem tempting to prevent staff members from having too much ‘power’ over the gym’s decision-making, unnecessarily restricting what your staff has the authority to do prevents them from efficiently handling customer concerns in a way that would benefit both your customers and your business.

3. Go beyond the call of duty

At the heart of positive customer service is each and every one of your customers feeling truly cared for and appreciated. According to research by Forrester, emotion was the #1 factor in customer loyalty across 17 of 18 industries studied. Furthermore, A Gallup study revealed that enduring relationships result only when companies pay attention to meeting the important emotional needs of their customers, not just providing faster service.

So avoid inauthentic, canned, interactions with clients and try to get to know them for the people they are, not just as cogs in the machinery of your business! This can be accomplished through acts like sending out personalized emails to check on how your members are progressing along with their fitness journey, sharing resources you know they will find helpful or interesting, or even something as simple as addressing your customers by name whenever they visit the gym or get in contact about their concerns. By going beyond the minimum acceptable standard of what one might expect from consumer service, you will not only improve your customer’s experience but also alter the relationship between you and your customer to one that emphasizes meaningful engagement, omitting one of the several main reasons why customers churn.

4.  Measure customer satisfaction effectively

Finally, the most crucial aspect of providing good customer service involves regularly and effectively checking in with what your customers are experiencing. At the start of this article, I introduced a statistic that showed that there was a great gap between what CEOs believed they were offering their clients and what their clients experienced. In order to avoid this sort of information asymmetry, regularly assessing your customer’s satisfaction with your brand is vital.

There are a variety of ways to measure customer satisfaction, ranging from surveys to the Customer Effort Score, to the Net Promoter System. Whichever you choose, understanding how your customers perceive the service you’re providing from their perspective will undoubtedly yield important insights. You can then regularly act upon these insights to provide good service – a fortuitous cycle that will result in improved customer service and improved membership retention!