Russ Hosea, the chief revenue officer for FitnessEMS, shares how to create a quality member experience with asset management systems.
The lack of staff accountability in equipment and facility maintenance creates confusion and ultimately leads to a bad member experience. In most cases, there are two components that create problems:
- Knowing the difference in accountability and responsibility and installing both.
- Having a system in place to manage both.
Responsibility – Duty to fulfill assigned task, or ownership.
Accountability – Experiencing consequences for performance or actions, or measurement.
Every staff member on the floor should be responsible to the members perceived quality level of health club operations, operational state of fitness equipment and the general condition of the facility. In other words, it’s not enough for the operators and staff to believe the gym has quality equipment and services. The members need to perceive this quality as well.
Quality – a measurement of customer satisfaction which can be described from the customer viewpoint as “fitness for use”.
Worn belts, noisy bearings, sticking cables and even stopped up plumbing can begin a process that ultimately has only two outcomes: customers perceive the club as a quality operation worthy of future transactions, or they leave. Club operators need processes and metrics to hold staff accountable for being responsible for perceived operational quality.
A responsibility/accountability initiative can be easily implemented. Most of the effort should be focused on general process improvement, ownership of member perception of quality and a system to log issues, resolve issues, track and collect data based on those activities.
Today those systems are typically called CMMS or computerized maintenance management systems and they come in a variety of functionality and user friendliness. In most cases, they are generic in design making them harder to implement and utilize in the dynamic world of health club organizations. With that in mind, you should seek out industry specific CMMS systems for easier implementation and better results. These applications will have best practices/processes built in and the system designers understand the roles and filters needed specifically for the application. A well-designed CMMS will provide transparency and oversight for managers and a sense of duty for staff. Secondarily, CMMS platforms provide scalability for organizations with high growth models by building in standardized practices across operations and quality management.
