(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION): Hi there! Blair here with MXM. Still taking you through our Member Experience Manual. Right now we are focused on our Nine Freedoms and Obligations. This is all about empowering front lines to deliver a very memorable member experience. Number 1 and 9, think of those as the ends of the field. Number […]

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION): Hi, Blair here with MXM, we've been talking for a while about VUCA, volatility, uncertainty complexity and ambiguity. Volatility, "the how fast things are changing", that's a lot of dynamics happening and those dynamics interact in different ways and that's the complexity. Two dynamics right now are social unrest and the pandemic and […]

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION): Hi, Blair here with MXM and we’ve been talking about VUCA, Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, I’m going to give you a real example here. One of our customers that was using the Shutdown Feedback System, took the main themes and made lots of changes around those themes. They were closed just a […]

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION): Hi, Blair here with MXM. I started talking about this concept of VUCA, Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity…I want to stay on that topic a bit because we are facing it in a number of different ways. It’s really an army term for when they had to adjust how they looked at the […]

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION): Hi, Blair here with MXM, back a little bit on customer experience and some tools for you to use to help build a more member-centric culture. With the new rules, as I call them, the new rules of member conduct and the need for our teams to make sure that conduct is taking […]

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION): Hi, Blair here with MXM. We did a lot with our staff to make them really aware of how they are perceived out on the workout floor, especially starting with trainers in a way to increase our trainers engagement with others, other than their own clients. All of this falls under the heading […]

(VIDEO TRANSLATION): Blair here with MXM. We talked a lot about best practices and also next practices. You know, best practices have quickly become widely adopted, well perhaps not so quickly, but I’ll say this…during this lockdown, best practices have become widely adopted and rapidly adopted. Before, if you think back to just even last […]

(VIDEO TRANSLATION): Blair here with MXM. I got asked, when you are running an operational member experience management program, should you respond just to your detractors or to everyone? It depends on your organization, the best practice is to respond to everybody and we have a lot of recommendations on how to set that up […]

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION): Hi, Blair here with MXM. We are all thinking about ways to improve the member experience so that we can improve member loyalty and have a higher return on investment. NPS is a leading indicator of that, that’s not how you manage the member experience, there are a lot of other things that […]

(VIDEO TRANSLATION): Hi there. Blair here with MXM. Yesterday on a call, we were talking about “what are the inputs of member loyalty”, or “increasing member loyalty”. This comes off the back of the conversation about influencing NPS. I have made the argument that the inputs are the number of changes you make. So, big […]

(VIDEO TRANSLATION): Blair here with MXM. I was in a conversation yesterday talking about a concept that Dan Ariely talks about in his book, “Predictably Irrational” regarding the difference between a social contract and a market contract. A purely market contract is pretty transactional, I’ll pay you this if you do that. And it’s a […]

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION): Blair here with MXM. We have some of our customers coming back on and our philosophy here around sampling and understanding the customer experience, is Day One, Member One. Right now, start inviting them to provide feedback and make sure that feedback is coming into a voice of customer system that can give […]

We all know that getting healthy, and staying healthy isn’t always quite that simple. At the beginning, we have a rush of motivation to lose unwanted weight, and get fit. So, we sign up for a new membership at a local fitness center, with the best of intentions, but finding that motivation to actually continue […]

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION): Hi, Blair here from MXM. Over 100,000 pieces of feedback have come in from the Shutdown Survey. Again, that window is still open, it’s free to anyone in the fitness industry. Think beyond the survey, think about the system and the analytics around the data and the ability to drill in and find […]

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION): Hi, Blair here with MXM. I’m going to share two ideas with you that came from very good friends and colleagues of mine in the last few days. One from Scott Gillespie in Saco, Maine. He’s been doing his shutdown survey and getting some great information, great data. He shot about a 2-3 […]

In today’s world, a business must sell constantly in order to retain customers and obtain new ones.  Afterall, keeping customers happy is the key to customer success management – and ALL companies seek growth. The Net Promoter Score is a simple one to two minute survey metric that can stimulant substantial growth for a business, […]

Let’s start with the basics here so you can learn how improving net promoter score helps fitness clubs increase member loyalty and retention. What did NPS come from? NPS was introduced in 2003 and developed by Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, and in cooperation with Satmetrix, a California consultant company which provides […]

We are making all of our free products available to any organization in the fitness industry. Whether you have one club or 1000 clubs, you can benefit from the data and feedback you will rapidly receive during and after the shutdown. We have made this free, easy to execute, and we make sure you have […]

1. Timing is Everything When it comes to asking your members for referrals, timing is everything.  Finding the right moment in your member’s journey is important, as these are the times when they will be most open to giving you a referral.  If you ask your members at the wrong time, you run the risk […]

Okay, are you ready for this? These are lessons that I learned during my 20+ years managing health clubs. Simple to identify but harder to implement. Three practices used by top Customer Experience Management practitioners that can help you begin to manage the experience at your business vs. just putting out fires as fast as they […]

The product of the health club business is the member experience.  Just as the product of a restaurant is not only the food but the overall experience.Say this in a group of gym owner/operators and most will agree.  Asked if they deliver an excellent, average, or poor member experience and I bet at least 80% […]

"Great athletes have great proprioception. Great customer experience athletes have great “social proprioception.” Proprioception is an individuals’ ability to sense where they are “in space.”  Without video, coach feedback, or seeing with one’s own eyes, they still have a high degree of awareness as to their entire body position. Rory McIlroy knows exactly where the club is […]

If you ask a company executive if customer experience (CX) matters to them, they will most likely say yes. But how do you get them to invest in and commit to a robust, long-term CX management practice? In a recent webinar, Medallia shared its approach to helping organizations quantify the financial linkage of their CX management […]

Member retention is always a huge concern for fitness business owners. Even when you’re regularly adding new members to your gym, you still need to focus on retaining the members that you have with exceptional customer service. Did you know that it costs six to seven times as much to win a new member as […]

Medallia is proud to announce that we received a perfect score of 100 on the 2019 Corporate Equality Index (CEI). The CEI is the nation’s premier benchmarking survey and report on corporate policies and practices related to LGBTQ workplace equality, administered by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation. Medallia joins the ranks of over 560 […]

Once you have members signing up at you gym, you must ensure that the next step, the Member Onboarding Process, goes smoothly! Developing a frictionless onboarding strategy will maximize your member retention and improve your member experience. The most important time period in the membership lifecycle is the first four weeks, and you should be making contact frequently […]

When your employee retention rate is as high as possible, it keeps the work and the cost down and it will also reflect in your levels of membership retention too. Hiring gym staff can be like jumping on a treadmill that’s reeled up to eleven; it’s hard work that takes all your time and another […]

As the owner or manager of a health club, your main concern should be providing great customer service for your members. As we’ve discussed in past blogs, you should have information on all levels of your team that allow you to be immediately responsive to feedback you receive. This allows you to grow and create […]

The goal of all health clubs is to increase member engagement, because members that actually use your facility are more likely to continue to use the club. However, 44% of all gym members are showing up to health clubs less than four times a month, making them high cancellation risk members. It is difficult to entice those […]

As we’ve discussed in previous blogs, a customer experience platform is one big way to stand out as a health club. It gives your customers a place to give feedback and be heard, and enhance their experience. But as a fitness club owner, what should you look for when finding the right customer experience platform? We’ve compiled […]

I was talking to a customer the other day regarding his MXMetrics/Medallia CEM product and he said – “I think we should not be asking people to give us feedback so frequently.  I think it should be twice a year instead of four times because some people keep bringing up something we can’t do anything […]

There are two things to consider, survey response volume and survey response rate and before we go straight into how to increase your response rate, let’s consider whether you need to or not. In a business to consumer (B2C) environment it is important to consider both response volume as well as response rates. In the […]

The race to deliver a great customer experience is on and you are in it – whether you like it or not. OCEM software is the vehicle you will be driving if you are to compete in this race. Your vehicle must be quick out of the gate and ready to go for a long time. Selecting […]

There are thousands of ways to start a gym member referral program these days. Most referral programs offer an incentive of a free months of membership to your referring member. But, why not give out cash instead? If you own a gym, and you don’t currently run a ‘refer a friend’ type of program, you’re […]

"Gentlemen we will chase perfection and we shall chase it relentlessly knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way we will catch excellence." Vince Lombardi Lombardi’s quote is the essence of Operational Customer Experience Management (OCEM). If you seek excellence you are chasing perfection. If you only chase excellence you […]

Other fitness clubs can copy your successes, such as your facility, machines or prices. What they can’t copy is your relationship with your members. The best way to provide great customer service in your health club is to keep those relationships strong and meaningful. In a world with social media, online reviews and instant information […]

You pride yourself on your club’s service and hospitality. You are much better today than you were yesterday but not nearly as good as you want to be tomorrow.  You work very hard to hire right, treat staff right, treat customers right, and to constantly improve. These efforts seem to be rewarded. The questions is can […]

We write a lot about how to be a great health club and how to deliver great customer experience. We recently worked with Keith Catanzano of 2River Consulting in Washington DC to do someamazing segmentation on our member data.Keith created a “predictive model” using historic membership data to find our common segments reflecting different cancellation rates. This gave us […]

As the owner of a gym or health club, you want to do whatever you can to stand out to your members. The little things can make a big difference in the long run, and help you promote your fitness club and be successful. One tool to do this is through a customer management software. […]