Game, Set, Match: How a Sports Club Won its Members Back

A particularly surprising addition centred around transparency at boardroom level. It had never occurred to the leadership team that members might have any interest in how the club was run. It became apparent that the title of “member” meant something entirely different to the customer than it did the club, which shifted their perspective on how they had to view their members going forward.

Of course, it wasn’t just the eye-opening Expectations Map that was of value to the CEO. He also needed to know how well they were performing against each individual expectation in order to determine where they had to shift focus to engage membership again.

That’s where another set of surprises were revealed. Performance scores showed that two areas in particular were attracting low scores: the number of fitness studios and child facilities available. A potentially enormous outlay awaited the club if they were to address those two concerns.

A ‘single point’ scoring system and focus on the lowest scores would be considered standard practice with most satisfaction survey approaches, but it’s a trap for many companies and often a source of wasted investment. In reality, each score is meaningless without context, and a low score at face value might even be considered acceptable by customers.

Because we use an ‘intelligent scoring’ system in our performance assessments, we were able to determine how the club’s scores compared with what members saw as an ‘acceptable performance bandwidth’ in each area, which we call the ‘Zone of Tolerance.’

Customer engagement and loyalty kicks in at the high end of any Zone of Tolerance, so this became the lens through which we viewed the actual scores given by members. The gap between the top of the Zone of Tolerance and the club’s performance score is much more vital than the individual score in isolation.