Winning is all about getting a return on the investment you make in your customer experience initiative (CXI). And every company should have a CXI. The CXI should be constantly moving through phases with clarity on objectives. As your CXI advances from year to year, you realize ROI on multiple fronts — some of them unexpected — but the list is long:
- Reduced cost of collecting and reporting on customer experience (CX).
- Saving individual members.
- Increased length of membership for individual members providing feedback.
- Overall reduction in member churn.
- Increased frontline engagement.
- Reduction in employee churn.
- Increased spend per member.
- Increased rejoin rates for cancelled members.
- Increased response rates to targeted marketing using specific member segmentation.
- Data driven capex that improves member retention.
- Improved review site ratings.
That being said, to get this kind of ROI, your CX program must be operational and involve your frontlines. Evidence of CX as an operational disciple includes:
- Voices of customers flowing in every day.
- Feedback being collected at multiple touch points in the member journey.
- Common metrics and attributes that are used across multiple touchpoints.
- Frontline teams being the first to see the feedback.
- Frontline workflows that allow for engaging with members based on their feedback.
- All frontline team meetings that begin with team-level (front desk, personal training, kids’ club, etc.) metrics and specific member feedback.
- Positive feedback being continuously used to energize team members.
- Negative feedback that’s used for daily coaching.
- Team metrics that are used for setting expectations and developing “brand standards.”
- Leadership teams supporting the CX initiative with resources.
- CX measurements getting equal billing with financial metrics in monthly, quarterly and annual reporting.
- Every team owning part of the CX initiative
There is certainly more that could be listed, and all these activities apply to any size company. Often, larger enterprises believe because of the desire to “standardize,” they need to bring the feedback in through a more centralized, “above club” approach and then send reports to GMs or frontline teams.
The problem with this approach is not just the delay between the member feedback and the opportunity to engage with the member immediately, but it is a supreme waste of the opportunity to infuse purpose into the day-to-day activities of all frontline roles and ensure they get engaged in constantly improving the member experience. ROI, on an operational approach to your CXI, begins immediately upon deployment and increases over time as your program advances.
Customer experience is always an operational problem that can be solved by leveraging technology to enable everything that can drive ROI. With an operational approach to your CXI, your company is animated with the information and actions that change behavior as individuals and teams, and for the enterprise. This is how companies “behave their way” into a customer-centric culture.
Blair McHaney is the president and CEO of MXM, Medallia’s partner to the health, fitness and wellness industry. For more information, visit mxmetrics.com, and Blair can be reached at info@mxmetrics.com.
