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Providing your clients with the best possible customer experience is at the core of retaining members. The classes you deliver, the interaction with you and your team, and how easy it is to book sessions and communicate with you through your gym management software all play their part in delivering great customer service.
Tying all the best parts of your business together in this way creates a seamless customer journey that flows easily for you, your team, and most importantly your customers. From how to make it easy to receive customer feedback to how to ensure all customer journeys are a positive experience, this guide gives you some examples of how you can create a personal customer experience as your business grows to keep your clients content and coming back for more.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience (CX) is the way your customers feel about their journey with your business from start to finish. Creating a great customer experience means paying attention to every detail, from the first time they visit your website, to how they book classes and communicate with you. It's about preempting what your customers expect, delivering what they need, when they need it, in the most convenient way possible to ensure client retention.
Why is it important to have an unbeatable customer experience?
Customer expectations are getting higher when they sign up for a new fitness business be it yoga, CrossFit, or dance studios so it's increasingly important to create a positive customer experience and encourage brand loyalty. It creates happy clients who want to keep coming back time and time again for your classes and sessions. You don't have to hire customer service teams to improve overall customer satisfaction.
There are ways to boost your customer experience and keep customer satisfaction soaring without having to fall back on a customer service team. For example, ensure that your gym or studio is a place people want to come back to. If they enjoy your classes and build a rapport with your trainers, you've already set the foundations.
Add on meaningful engagement throughout the customer journey and some little incentives along the way, and you're going to have your customers telling friends and family to come and give it a go as well.
Ideas to boost and personalise your client experience
As your client base increases, it can become more difficult to offer a bespoke, more personal experience for your customers. You and your team have less time to give each individual client as much attention as you could when you first started your fitness business.
But there are things you can do to give a sense of a personalised customer experience to your clientele. There are features in TeamUp's gym management software that will help you to create a more personal approach for clients throughout the customer journey from your onboarding process to maintaining engagement for long-term members.
1. Let your gym management software help you create a good customer experience
By choosing the right gym management software, you'll have some great tools at your disposal to help you create a better customer experience throughout the whole customer journey. TeamUp's gym management software is designed to make your life as a gym owner or manager easier so that you can focus on giving your clients the best possible experience throughout the entirety of a customer's journey.
You want your customer experience to be as smooth as possible from the moment a client signs up to the moment a customer's journey finishes. Ensuring that signing up for a membership and then booking classes is as quick and as simple as possible is a good starting point. That's why using the right gym software is not just important for you running your business's day-to-day admin, it's important for your customer experience strategy as well.
2. Use automations to improve your onboarding process
Integrating your TeamUp account with Zapier gives you access to 3,600 apps that not only help you better run your business but also help you expand on the ways you can interact with your clients throughout the customer journey and adding an extra facet to your customer experience strategy.
For example, you can create a trigger that tells you to send out a welcome gift to new clients. Or you can set up monthly newsletters that get sent out by apps such as MailChimp or ActiveCampaign to let your clients know about any offers or new classes coming up.
Setting up a drip campaign via Zapier also means creating the content you want to go out once, and then it automatically does the rest. Engaging with your clients won't become a continual or arduous task.
3. Personalise communication with your clients powered by your CRM
Zapier certainly expands what you can do with TeamUp's gym software, but don't forget that you can still achieve a lot in terms of communicating with your clients using the features you already have in your TeamUp account.
A great way to maintain engagement with your clients is with milestone emails. At the end of a course, send out an email to the participants congratulating them on their achievements. Send an email to celebrate an anniversary of being a member of your fitness business, or even send out messages for your clients' birthdays.
Reminder emails are important to give your customer experience a boost. Reminding clients that they have a class coming up or their membership is going to expire soon will help to ensure that they keep coming back to classes and renewing their memberships.
4. Use Kisi to give your clients access control
Our Kisi access control integration has helped to give you a new and improved customer experience. Access control automates who can enter your facility with locks installed at all your entry points. You can manage access through your Kisi and TeamUp accounts.
This means setting up access periods so you can decide which memberships and registration types can enter and when. This doesn't just give you more security, it gives your clients peace of mind as well. For 24-hour gyms and fitness businesses, you want your clients to feel safe when they use your facility.
You want to be sure that your fitness business continually gives your clients a positive experience, and knowing that a fitness facility has good security, from secure lockers to knowing only other clients will be able to enter your business will leave you with satisfied customers.
5. Boost your online brand experience with on-demand content
On-demand content has grown increasingly popular since 2020, and it's a fitness trend that only looks to increase throughout 2022. Your on-demand content is a really useful addition to your customer experience strategy.
If a client can't make it to one of your classes, by recording the class and then uploading it to your on-demand library, you give them the chance to catch up at a time that suits them. It also gives those who did make the class the chance to repeat it.
Your on-demand content doesn't have to be exclusively recorded classes. You can create content to supplement the classes. Added workouts to keep clients focused on their goals is a really nice addition, and it adds a more personal touch to your customer experience as your business continues to thrive and grow.
6. Design an effective referral program to increase customer loyalty
Your clients can be one of your most effective marketing and recruiting tools. A lot of fitness businesses have found that a good number of their current crop of clients found them after being referred by a friend or family member.
By creating an effective referral program, you give your clients an incentive to go out there and spread the word about your services. You could, for example, offer a discounted class to your members which will help to increase customer loyalty, and you can also offer a free class to referred customers so they can come and find out more about your business.
Follow this up with a thank you email and a link to sign up for a membership to keep up engagement with them, and to turn that lead into a paid-up member.
7. Create a great mobile experience
Your clients are busy people. Often on the move, commuting to and from work, or couriering the kids from school to activities. Consumers are spending less time on their desktop devices to shop or book.
An intuitive member app for your clients makes it easy for them to book a spot in classes, renew memberships, and even fill out necessary forms and waivers. When they get the notification email on their phone reminding them it's time to renew a membership, they can do it there and then.
With your calendar in the palm of their hand, they can book classes on the go and even view your on-demand content if they were unable to attend a class in person.
8. Make the most of your social media pages
Social media provides businesses with a unique opportunity to connect with their customers on a more personal level. By using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you can share a lot of information about your fitness business, keeping your members in the loop to any new memberships, classes, or promotions.
Posting any updates about your products and services is a great way to keep up client engagement, but your social media also gives you the chance to respond to your clients' inquiries and customer feedback in a timely manner, while also giving other members a chance to see the query and your response.
This helps to improve the overall customer experience by ensuring that customers feel heard and valued, and it also means that you're essentially addressing any potential FAQs in a public forum so you don't have to keep answering the same queries in private emails.
9. Offer additional services
One way to stand out from the competition and improve your customer experience is to offer additional services that your customers will appreciate. For example, if you're a gym, you could offer personal training services or nutritional counselling.
If you're a yoga studio, you could offer private yoga sessions or meditation classes. By offering these additional services, you're showing your customers that you care about their individual needs and are willing to go the extra mile to help them reach their goals.
Using appointments in TeamUp's gym management software, you can easily schedule and manage these additional services so that your customers have a seamless experience.
10. Make it easy to give feedback
Finally, one of the best ways to improve the customer experience is to make it easy for customers to give feedback. This could involve setting up a comment box in your gym or studio, sending out surveys via email, or simply asking customers for their feedback in person.
The important thing is that you listen to what your customers are saying and use their feedback to make changes that will improve their experience and in turn help you to improve customer retention in your fitness business.
No one can tell you more about the positives and negatives of your customer experience than your customers. Creating a brief survey for them to fill out gives them the chance to share their thoughts. But remember, brevity is key here.
Create a survey to collect customer experience data
Collecting information from a brief survey helps you to make sure you're not offering a poor customer experience and will also give you the information you need to keep providing great customer service and improve customer loyalty.
No one wants to spend too long on a survey, so keeping it to less than 10 minutes makes it more likely they'll give you objective feedback about the overall customer experience (CX) that they had during their customer journey.
There are two points in the customer journey that you could consider creating a survey. First off, when a course or a membership ends, use that as an opportunity to add a short survey to the automated email that goes out to congratulate them and to remind them to re-sign up.
Secondly, when a member decides to cancel their membership, ask them if they'd be willing to give feedback on their time being a member of your fitness business. No one wants clients to leave, but as sure as they are to join, inevitably, people leave for various reasons. Use this time to try to learn something about your business and create something positive from it.
To sum up
By following these tips, you can be sure that you’re providing your customers with the best possible experience. In turn, this will help to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. gym management software will help you organize your business and make it easier to provide a great customer experience.
Find out more about which key features in TeamUp's gym management software can help you to keep on top of your fitness business.
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