Welcome back to our series on member retention strategies.
In our last article, we talked about using action lists to keep your staff organised when it comes to member follow up.
If you missed it, you can read this article here- http://www.greenedesk.com.au/wordpress/?p=17727
You know how important member follow up is when it comes to member retention. So, you want to make sure that each member receives several contact points throughout the first 90 days.
Despite setting up an action list to keep gym instructors organised, we find that many of our clients only see a small improvement in the amount of follow up their trainers are completing.
This is often frustrating but something that is common for most clubs.
You see, whenever you implement a new process for your gym instructors to follow, there will always be a percentage of them that revert back to their original habits.
You may find that for the first week or two, everyone is using the action list, however, compliance slowly begins to drop and after a couple of months, only a few trainers are completing all of their follow ups.
It’s at this point, you probably feel like giving up!
Unfortunately, most health club managers do throw the towel in at this point and let things revert back to how they have always been.
However, giving up is not going to get you an improvement in your retention rate.
The missing ingredients here are accountability and persistence.
If you enforce accountability through monthly performance reviews of your staff actions, you can slowly turn your follow up system into a habit which is ingrained in your club’s culture.
It’s the first few months particularly of implementing this new process that are the hardest and where continually reinforcement is required.
You can maintain accountability through FitDesk’s action reports.
Through establishing an EOM (end of month) reporting process for what we call “action completion”, you will be able to ensure all of your gym staff members are completing the necessary amount of member follow up and nurturing.
FitDesk action completion report provides our clients with a clear summary of the number of actions that staff has completed for the month, the number they were assigned and their completion percentage.
This information does not lie!
It gives you a clear view of which staff members are complying with your follow up plan and those who are not.
We recommend that this report becomes a part of your monthly reporting process. If you are using a paper based communication diary, get your staff to record every call and action. This may be tedious but worth the investment if it results in your members feeling a sense of greater support and assistance.
You should share the results with your staff each month and highlight areas where improvement can be made.
You may even consider opening this up where all staff can see each other’s performance as this really drives accountability.
This depends on your management style as to what you think motivates your team best.
By following this process, your follow up completion should reach close to 100% signifying that all members are receiving the support and nurturing they need.
Action Steps
Here are some action steps to help implement this process in your health club.
.Determine how you are going to track member follow up actions (paper v software)
.Build into your monthly reporting process a review of your team’s action.
.Share these results with staff and do workshop with them to improve results
.This will require some ongoing maintenance, however, after a few months, this process should become automatic and a part of each of your team’s ongoing processes.
In our next article, we will share a secret to help make your chances of retention success even higher.
Until then, enjoy getting stuck into the action steps above.