The race to deliver great customer experience is on. The vehicle you will be driving if you are to compete in this race is a customer experience (CX) management product. Your vehicle must be quick out of the gate and ready for long distance. Here are six components that your CX software must have.
1. Head Room. The fitness business is more complex than other transaction-focused retail environments. Understanding the fitness business is critical to designing a system that aligns with the member’s journey and will support your own growth and learning. Outgrowing the software quickly will be frustrating and will have your team trying to figure out how to get higher scores, instead of how to improve the member experience.That is a bad place to end up.
2. Engaging. If the software isn’t easy to use and doesn’t have “slap you in the face” analytics and reporting, it won’t be engaging. When you are trying to “operationalize” your member feedback system, the software better be helpful, effective and grab the attention of the people who are running at 100 miles per hour every day. Having great mobile apps, crystal-clear dashboards and fast workflows is critical.
3. “First Degree” Accountability. I love Net Promoter Scores (NPS). I love the alignment it creates in any size company. But in operations, it only provides “third degree” accountability. If I’m a front desk staff member and you tell me our NPS is trending downward (or upward, for that matter), my feeling of responsibility to that outcome is three degrees of separation away. You need to capture the member journey in a set of metrics that can measure the touch points that matter.
4. Dynamic Reporting. The industry tends to think of this as real time reporting. And it is. But dynamic reporting isn’t only real time — it is instantly informative. You need real time reporting that shows up as a spreadsheet or a table and doesn’t give everyone brain damage trying to figure out what the report says. Live reporting is real time, instantly informative, useful for decision making at any level of the organization, and an accurate representation of the member experience.
5. Member Segmentation. Segmentation allows you to get a deep understanding of your members’ experiences. Being able to segment by age, gender, different experience categories, members that bring guests, members that do not bring guests, etc., can create clarity out of chaos. What happens when you can identify hundreds of members at a single location who love the equipment, love the staff, plan on staying a long time and have had great fitness results? You can specifically target them in a referral campaign. Member segmentation is critical for understanding issues, but it is also an immediate driver of new business.
6. Root Cause Analysis. When you have the tools to get this right, you are able to annihilate an entire species of complaint. So often companies are not digging deep enough. They keep solving a symptom of a problem over and over for individual members. Getting to the root cause of a problem allows you to solve a much bigger problem once, and have it affect all members. This is the big lever bar for improving member experience.
Blair McHaney owns and operates two health clubs in Washington State. In addition, he is a noted CEM Educator, Medallia Institute Contributor and the president of ClubWorks, A Medallia Partner Company. He can be reached at blair@medallia.com or visit mxmetrics.com.
