Despite being just over a year old, when a commercial health club competitor came to town, we found ourselves vulnerable. Attrition increased as soon as pre-sale began at the new club.
As a medically-integrated, hospital-based centre, our overall experience and offerings were genuinely unique. However, we weren’t doing a good enough job at getting this message across to the broader community – or even our existing members.
The team took a strategic look at member engagement and retention efforts, and developed a new approach to programming and services that were unique to us in the market.
These initiatives included: new member orientations with a fitness specialist qualified to degree level; warm water aquatics; reformer pilates small group training; complementary childcare and ‘Mommy & Me’ group exercise and aqua classes; speciality training and group exercise; active senior/arthritis programmes; and empowerment programmes.
To enhance the overall experience, we also conducted in-house service training across all departments.
We believe that ‘what gets measured, gets managed’, so we added Medallia software as an engagement and retention measurement tool. This system enables us to capture customer feedback, understand it in real time and take action to improve the customer experience, as well as carrying out NPS on our behalf.
With the centre’s brand and retention strategy more solidly in place, and measurement tools set up to track progress, the team is increasing community outreach and building relationships for physician referral and so on – all ways of continuing to grow the membership and improve retention.
As a result of all this, retention improved by 13 per cent year-on-year and our NPS score was an impressive 64, compared to the overall US industry benchmark of 44.