26 Oct Survey tools to connect with your membership
There’s nothing worse than developing an amazing new swim class or fitness course and having only one or two people show up. So how can you know the project you are working on will succeed?
Making sure you understand your customers is vital, both for launching new products and for staying relevant to existing members. After all, if you don’t understand what they want, they can easily take their business elsewhere.
But gathering customer feedback can be challenging in a sports club, leisure facility or fitness centre. You need to build rapport and give members and visitors confidence to share what they really think, then gather feedback in a way that is time efficient for you, and simple for those using your services.
At Centaman, we’ve developed a range of tools to make understanding your membership and customers easier. We also partner with other organisations to deliver a range of leisure management software that can help you understand how others see your business.
Keep track of what your members are telling you
Centaman’s memberships module has a built-in ‘Correspondence’ feature to record when members or customers have called or emailed, and allow staff to make notes about what they have requested. These notes can be reviewed at regular interviews to help you establish a better picture of why and when customers come calling, and what ongoing support they may need.
The Correspondence feature also integrates directly with Centaman’s email marketing partner WordFly to provide an easy way to manage communication with current and prospective members. If an email address is no longer active when an automated membership reminder is sent out, this will be detected by WordFly and displayed in Centaman, allowing staff to identify bouncebacks and follow up with a quick phone call.
This integration makes things easier for customer service staff too. If a member tells you they didn’t get an email, staff can check if the customer was included in the list, or identify if the email was received so the member can check if it was filtered to their junk mail folder.
Technological tools from our partners
The leisure and fitness industry is highly competitive. Most businesses are aware of the importance of feedback. But interpreting sporadic feedback from individuals is unlikely to give you a clear enough picture of what your full membership wants to see, and staying ahead of the competition takes a concerted effort.
In these situations, good leisure management software can help you gather data and run coordinated campaigns to gather feedback. Centaman partners with a variety of other software providers through its parent company Jonas Leisure. One of these partners is market intelligence company getsmart, which offers custom-designed surveys.
The getsmart system is built around a Customer Experience Index, which can be accessed online and set up to provide weekly updates with the latest customer feedback – emailed straight to your inbox – and monthly reports tracking trends and confidentially comparing how your product or service is performing against the results of the competition.
Email alerts from getsmart can be set to trigger immediately when you get very positive or very negative feedback, allowing you to recognise exceptional staff performance or get on top of issues before they escalate.
Centaman also partners with customer experience specialist TRP, which offers solutions catered specifically for the leisure and fitness industry and works to create ‘raving fans’ for your business.
TRP uses a Net Promoter Score (NPS), which gauges how likely someone is to recommend you to a friend, family member or colleague. This information is gathered with an easy-to-use online survey form.
TRP also offers a set of tools for analysis of survey results and identification of business improvement opportunities. These tools can help you improve customer loyalty and identify which of your members will benefit the most from interaction. TRP’s exclusive ‘risk of dropout’ algorithm is particularly valuable as it allows business owners to identify customers who are most likely to leave so they can be re-engaged before they decide to take their money elsewhere.
The Centaman database can be set up to export your membership data and construct distribution lists for these surveys and complement the data they provide, enabling you to better understand how members and visitors view the experiences you offer and cater your experiences to what they want.
Looking for better ways to understand your members and visitors? Please don’t hesitate to get in touch to find out how we can help you.