Today’s member retention article will focus on an essential part of member retention, member follow up.
Follow up might be face to face contact with a member, it may be in the form of email or a phone call.
Basically, follow up is all about seeing how the members are going, seeing if they are comfortable and if they have any questions or if they need any additional support.
Now, it’s important to be strategic about the way you manage follow up at your health club.
The best way to do this is by having clear expectations on when a member should be followed up, it shouldn’t be something that is done randomly.
Does your club have certain points along the member journey when it is expected that a member is followed up?
There is no perfect follow up formula, it will vary from club to club, however, the most important thing is that there is some form of follow up to make sure members are happy and progressing.
At a minimum, we recommend having a contact point with new members after 10-15 days of joining and a second follow up point between 60 and 80 days. This structure provides a basic foundation for supporting members but we encourage you to devise your own ideal structure.
If you have a clear plan for member follow up at your health club, this is a great start, however, the most essential part of follow up is implementation.
Your gym instructor staff will generally be the ones taking action and making contact with members. This is done best when the staff responsible for inducting a member is the one making the follow up contact because they are aware of the members’ primary goals, preferences etc.
A lot of health clubs actually have a plan of attack when it comes to member follow up.
However, it doesn’t matter how well planned your member follow up process is, if your team does not take action and make the contacts, then you will receive none of the benefits a follow up program can bring.
Typically we see a 20-30% compliance rate of follow up actions by health club related staff for centres that have some form of follow up program.
This means that only 20-30% of the potential benefit is realised.
To lift the completion rate of actions at your health club, one of the best things to do is to make it as simple as possible for your staff to follow.
The best way to achieve this is through scheduling. You may be familiar with the saying “what gets scheduled gets done”
You want to take advantage of this principle by scheduling all of your future follow up activities.
Some health clubs achieve this by maintaining a “communication journal” where future contact points are entered into a date in the communication journal. The problem with this approach is that it relies on the staff member entering the contact points into the journal which can easily be forgotten and is often time-consuming. This means such an approach produces mixed and inconsistent results.
A more effective approach is to use an automated system to schedule future contact points for you at exactly the right time.
This can be achieved through our FitDesk software through a feature we call action lists.www.fitdesk.com.au
The action list feature of FitDesk is designed to make follow up easy for gym instructors and trainers.
Think of the action list as a “to do list”
It essentially keeps track of who to follow up and when so all the staff members have to do is to complete the follow up action.
The reason why follow up does not get done in most health clubs is because it’s too hard for the trainers to keep track of what needs to be done.
Follow up action rules can easily be set up from the settings page within FitDesk.
From here, you can set up a range of actions to fit in with your planned follow up process.
For example, If you want to schedule a 60 day re-assessment follow up for each member, you would simply name the action, choose the action type (perhaps a phone call), choose the action owner (the members assigned trainer), choose the trigger (their first completed appointment) and the time frame (60 days).
After pressing, please save. This action will be visible on your actions setting page.
This will mean that for every new member, after 60 days an action will appear prompting your staff to follow up.
Pretty cool huh!
This simple feature can take a little time to set up (1 hour max), however, it will provide your club with the benefit of a well organised follow up process that reduces the chances of members slipping through the cracks.
By using the follow up scheduling feature of FitDesk, your health club can start to improve action completion rates which will see your member’s receiving more follow up and support.
In our next article, we will explore the reporting concept of action compliance and how this can be used to maximise your member follow up.
For more information about improving your health clubs member retention, contact us on 1300 181 665 or email@ info@greenedesk.com