Article by: Cathy Fennell
A well-established, prestigious sports club nestled somewhere in the idyllic countryside seems like a foolproof business model. That is, until its leadership team noticed a steady decline in membership numbers and lower levels of overall engagement from its resident members. It could be safely assumed that they had rested on their laurels for some time, and its CEO, desperate to reverse the downturn, decided that the solution was to become more ‘customer-driven.’
“Aha,” they thought. “Let’s run a customer satisfaction survey to find out what we need to improve!”
With logical brain they listed the items that they wanted to test in a DIY satisfaction survey: Customer Service, Fitness studio, Court facilities, Lounge Facilities, Changing Facilities, Value for money.
One might think they produced a fairly obvious set of survey questions, but as we pointed out to them: their intended survey wasn’t customer-driven at all. Rather, it was guided solely by the guesswork of management.
Not only were they in danger of excluding what might be important to customers in their survey, but such a simple polling method was unlikely to give them any real diagnosis. That approach was likely to simply codify their guesswork whilst getting them no closer to solving their problems.
Fortunately, they were willing to try a different approach. In a process we refer to as Expectations Gathering, we began to accumulate the ideal attributes of such a sports club as defined to us by the members themselves, who we then asked to score the club by each individual attribute.
The results came as a huge surprise to the CEO: their members’ priorities were simply not what they had anticipated. While there was some degree of crossover between our Expectations Map and their original survey, several key areas had not been accounted for.
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.
In this instance, the two areas with the lowest scores were now seen in a completely different light, and while they would have been expensive to rectify, they were not the performance gaps that had the greatest potential to impact customer engagement.
There were a few more expectations that are not shown in the pictures here, but when pulled together, the club saw quickly saw the major gaps that needed their attention. The biggest gap happened to be in relation to food and beverages, and although management expected some dissatisfaction, they had no idea it would emerge as the club’s most pressing concern. Unlike the two performance areas with lower scores,
it was much cheaper (and faster) to improve their menu and quality of food, and yet it had a far greater impact on customer engagement. Just a short while later, members were spending more time (and consequently money) inside the club.
The other largest gaps initiated changes that had immediate benefits. Better communications with the Members increased confidence in the club’s management, and website improvements quickly enabled Members to access their information and book sessions at the club in a pain free and convenient way. Membership engagement was once again on a healthy upward trajectory.
The CEO’s original intention was for the club to become more ‘customer-driven,’ and they can now say with confidence that their turnaround was indeed totally driven by the customer. The same could not have been said had they proceeded with their original satisfaction survey.
If you wish to discover how Promising Outcomes can help you implement a more state-of-the-art way to gather, analyse and display customer and employee data, contact us below for more information.
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