Fitness Results and Member Experience

Understanding your members’ satisfaction with their reported fitness results is as relevant in your customer experience management program as “sleep quality” is to a hotel. It’s core to the job your member is trying to get done.

When we compare the trailing 90-day Net Promoter Score (NPS) for members that report satisfaction with Fitness Results (FR) a 9-10, they score a near impossible 75.4 NPS. This compares to a frightening -7.1 NPS for those scoring FR 0-6. When we dig deeper the message is clear — “help me be successful and I will love you for a very long time.”

Fitness companies broadly fall into three main categories relative to taking responsibility for “customer success.” At one end are companies that have no “customer success” strategy beyond providing access to plant and equipment. They have too much inertia around outselling their attrition to think about the complexity of solving the “customer success” problem.

In the middle are companies trying to adopt a “customer success” strategy, but have no means to measure or understand the impact of their strategy or whether it is truly being executed. It is more marketing than substance at this point.

The third category are companies that have taken their “customer success” strategy to a new level. It includes a very thoughtful and personalized onboarding process, multiple human-to-human touchpoints, technology that allows the process to be measured and a real understanding of the entire member experience. 

This brings me to an important metric when trying to innovate and deploy new processes — which is exactly what you will be doing if you seek to tackle customer success. The metric is called “percent of perfect process.”

Here is how it works. Suppose you identify your onboarding process as follows:

• Initial screening session
• Hands-on training session
• Nutrition prescription
• Eight semi-weekly calls
• Forty-five-day follow-up session

This new metric can help you understand process and whether you are able to execute this new innovation. If you have 100 members qualified to go through your onboarding process, you want to understand the percentage that execute all five steps. If you find that your “percent of perfect process” score is 15 percent, you can inspect and see where the process is breaking down and how to drive the score up.

I learned this from the chief medical office of a large healthcare provider. They used it most recently to drive their six-part process for managing patients with diabetes. In one year they drove the process score from 17 percent to over 50 percent. The result? Tremendous success for patients in managing their diabetes.

Proprietary processes add value to your company. Start thinking about your processes around delivering customer success and measure how effective you are at delivery. That is very hard to compete with.

Blair McHaney is president of MXM, Medallia’s partner company to the fitness industry. You can contact him at blair@medallia.com.