Why Customer Success Should be Operationalized

For many clubs, retention is an uphill battle. There are a variety of factors that affect retention, included cleanliness, the friendliness of your staff, and the effectiveness of your programs — to name a few.

But according to Blair McHaney, the president of MXM/Medallia, the one factor that many clubs overlook when it comes to member loyalty is customer success. “The member’s perception of their results — how successful they have been — has a massive impact on loyalty,” he explained, in a recent webinar hosted by Club Solutions.

As a result, “The sooner a member feels successful the greater the chances they remain and build a habit,” he said.  

Member success doesn’t necessarily require the member to have achieved a fitness goal. Success could be understanding how to use certain pieces of equipment, or feeling as if they belong. The key, said McHaney, is getting the member to say or think, “I love my experience, I use the product and I feel successful.”

However, understanding the importance of customer success is just the first step. The second is creating specific tactics for delivering a member success strategy. According to McHaney, some of these tactics could include:

• Creating criteria for determining a member’s level of expertise.
• Designing (or redesigning) your member onboarding process.
• Using tracking technology (such as Myzone).
• Adopting an operational customer experience management system.

According to McHaney, that last tactic — operational customer experience management — is where clubs can have a huge impact on customer success.

“When we say operationalize, we mean that on a daily basis [clubs should] understand how they’re doing with customer experience, you’re using information to coach, you’re using information to recognize and reward, teams take ownership of a responsibility to customer experience … everybody is involved in winning the customer experience management game,” said McHaney. “Everyone knows what their contribution is and everyone’s involved in it.”

So the next time you evaluate your retention, be sure to consider customer success, and ensure your club has a operational customer experience management system in place to manage it.

To watch the full webinar, click here.