Are Your Policies For Your Members?

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION):

Hi, Blair here with MXM. One of the fears that most club owners have, even those that have reopened because they’ve only been open for a couple weeks, is "how many of my members are going to come back?" "How many new members am I going to get that are going to trust us with their workouts?" "What are my cancellations going to look like when I ramp up dues? Kind of makes you pucker a bit right? I mean you just don’t know.

A lot of clubs that were running real member experience strategies going into this and measuring that data have a much clearer idea of the answers to those questions. They understand exactly what their member sentiment was and how much trust they had with their customer base going into this. They have a clear view of how many members are going to come back and the relationship capital that they have in their marketplace.

This is going to be a time to excel in the fitness industry which is never take your customers for granted again. I think a lot of clubs, a lot of fitness organizations, talk about caring about employees, caring about the member experience...but on a closer look, you don’t actually see it happen. If you were to inspect position descriptions, if you were to inspect compensation plans, if you were to inspect meeting agendas, if you were to inspect a weekly or monthly metrics package or dashboard, if you were to inspect training protocols around the sales process or training protocols for front desk staff, you would frequently find no evidence that there is a member experience strategy taking place.

This time, coming out of this, no one should ever take their members for granted again. Everyone should have the right data in front of them so that they can manage and coach their teams and their organizations from top to bottom in order to focus on the member experience to ensure that every policy and business practice process happens for the member and not to the member. It also needs to happen for the business. But that can’t come first.

If everything happens to the member and for the business, you won’t have members anymore. I would encourage everybody to inspect what they are doing to measure the customer experience from here on out, really understand that as you come back on. Within those first two weeks, you better really understand what member sentiment is. You may have it spot on but you may not and we can help with that. That’s it for now.

Stay distant, stay active, stay safe!