Do you get a lot of new gym members but have trouble getting people to come back? Your fitness center success revolves around keeping clients because you can only find so many new people.
Before you close your gym down, consider the current state of your customer service. If you can improve it, you may be able to turn things around.
Read on to learn more.
Provide a Good First Impression
The first impression is crucial to the success of your fitness center. If someone walks in and has to find stuff without help, they can get lost and overwhelmed.
By having your staff available to help from the beginning, you can give new customers a good impression. Then, they will look forward to coming back to work out.
You and your team should be at different spots in the center so that new and returning members can find someone. Everyone working at the gym should wear a uniform to identify them.
When deciding how to set up your fitness center for success, consider what you would want to see. Use that to determine how to provide a good experience from the first visit.
Offer Attention
Whether someone is new or not, you should give them as much attention as possible without going overboard. If a client has a question about the equipment or accessing lockers, you or someone on your team should pay attention to them.
Listen to the situation so that you can give the best answer and show the customer you value them. When you come off as bored or wanting to do anything else, you might make the customer feel bad.
If that happens often, the customer will probably cancel their membership, affecting the success of your business. Make sure to meet with customers whenever they have a problem so that you can resolve it and keep them coming back to your fitness center.
You and your team should also be genuine when paying attention to customers. Try your best to focus on the customer and their needs so that you can do your best to help.
Build Relationships
As you answer questions, you should build relationships with the people who come to your center. Even if someone never needs much help, say hello to them as they come for a fitness class.
When someone needs to check-in or pay their bill, use the silence to ask about them. Learning more about your clients can make them feel seen, and they might look forward to coming to your gym.
You can also use those relationships to help build a loyal community of fitness lovers. If someone feels like part of a group, they may not want to leave and go to another gym.
So even if someone moves farther from your center, they might make the drive to come back. Having relationships with clients also allows you to diffuse customer service problems down the line.
Communicate Regularly
Another vital role of customer service for your fitness center is communication. Of course, you can communicate with people in person, but people may not always visit you frequently.
Consider how you can use email and physical mail to communicate with people. If you update your business hours or need to update a customer's profile in your gym management software, you can alert them.
Then, you don't have to wait until someone has time to come and work out. And you don't have to worry about clients coming to work out at a time when you're no longer open.
The phone is also a great way to reach out to clients about customer service issues. You can discuss the problem in more depth, and they don't need to find time to come in to see you.
Take Messages
Not only should you be able to communicate with your clients, but they should be able to communicate with you. If a client has a question about your business hours or an upcoming fitness class, they might call the center.
You should have someone who can answer the phone and answer those questions. Some things you can even program into an automated answering system, such as your operating hours or location.
That can save you and your customer service team a lot of time. Instead of answering phones, you can ensure the success of everyone at your fitness center.
Encourage Repeat Visits
When running a gym, you want people to come back so that you can stay in business. If you offer poor customer service or no customer service, it won't matter how many machines or classes you have.
People need to know they can get the help they need, so they will want to come back. Sure, you can use something like a body scanner to track changes to client fitness.
But they might only come in to use the scanner. You want people to come to you whenever they want to move their bodies, and that means offering a good product and good customer service.
Reduce Turnover
If you don't offer good customer service, you'll lose clients as soon as you get them. Having such a high turnover rate can make it hard to predict how much revenue you'll earn and how many people you'll need to hire.
One of the benefits of running a gym is that you can usually predict how much you'll make for the next few months. To make the most of this, you need to lower the number of people who want to cancel their contracts.
You and your team should all focus on offering the best possible customer service. When your facility is clean and people are happy, they will want to keep coming back.
Follow Through on Promises
As our fitness center grows, you may want to offer more services or features. Around the holidays, you may offer discounts on classes or personal training sessions.
However, you need to make sure you can follow through with these offers. For example, maybe a lot of your clients have busy schedules and can't always get to the gym.
You tell them you can start offering virtual training options so that they can work out at home. But if you don't follow through with that plan, those members might leave for more convenient options.
Before you make any new promise, set it up on your end. When you see the new changes are a success, you can slowly make more changes to your gym.
Listen to Complaints
Even the best fitness center will have complaints at some point. Perhaps your locker rooms have been dirty, or customers have a hard time paying for their membership each month.
Good customer service means listening to client complaints and paying attention to them. Maybe your clients don't want to continue with the old ways of working out.
That feedback can help you adjust how you run your gym. If your facility isn't as clean as it should be, you might decide to take more time to clean it throughout the day.
Or if people want different equipment or workout classes, you do your best to provide those things. You can't make everyone happy, but you shouldn't ignore client feedback either.
Be Consistent
Another vital part of customer service success for your fitness center is consistency. You and your team need to be consistent in multiple areas, such as:
- Uniform dress
- Payment processing
- Phone greetings
- How you answer certain questions
Implementing a uniform policy will help clients know who to go to with questions. Other things, like how you great customers on the phone, can give people the same experience regardless of who is working.
For example, if some people don't say the name of your facility, it can confuse customers. When it comes to payment processing if one person accepts checks but another doesn't that can also be frustrating.
Consider giving some customer service training and general training for your team. That way, they all know how to answer phones and interact with customers to give that consistency.
Gain Credibility
Credibility can turn your small fitness center into a regional success. Fortunately, you can gain credibility in a few ways. You could join a passport program to attract members of other local gyms.
Another way to gain credibility is for your current members to leave reviews of your fitness center online. However, you need for these to be positive reviews, and good customer service can help you get positive reviews.
Even if someone's experience starts off poor, customer service may resolve the issue. Perhaps someone couldn't find a locker big enough for their belongings, so you gave them access to a different locker room.
Things like that can make a big difference for customers. The client in question may decide to leave a review of your gym and of what you did to help them.
Is Easier Than You Think
Whether you just opened your gym or it's been running for a while, you're probably dreaming of fitness center success. You can do a lot to build a good gym, from offering different classes to adding more equipment.
However, you can't forget about customer service. If you can't serve your customers, all of the fancy classes and equipment won't make your fitness center a success.
Are you ready to take your fitness center to the next level? Consider how a body scanner can help you and your clients.
