The right strategy can help you move from being a retention business to an
experience business (right); involve all stakeholders in the design phase (left)
WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR STAFF,
BASIC COMPLIANCE
ISN’T ENOUGH – YOU NEED THEIR ACTIVE COMMITMENT
individual isn’t practical, you can usually identify fairly specific groups with similar characteristics (young mums, older couples, working singles etc) that have similar needs, interactions and ‘moments of truth’. This can best be achieved by creating ‘personas’ (see Experience Design Toolbox, p48) that describe the characteristics for each segment. The difference with personas over other forms of segmentation is that you need to humanise the persona, so you view the people in the segment as
‘real’ rather than just some marketing exercise – this is key. Since experiences must be designed
and optimised around certain member personas, you need a clear idea of who your important – and not so important – member segments are. Prioritise your experience design by starting where most people will be positively affected.
LET THE GAMES BEGIN
Making a commitment to great experiences starts with the design process itself. A fun, engaging and interactive process will usually produce better results than a dry, academic exercise. In order to achieve this, there are a number of well established design tools available for you to use that are quick, effective and don’t cost the earth (see Experience Design Toolbox, p48). It’s important to include the key
stakeholders in the process – and yes, that includes your members. This concept, known as co-creation, makes those “I think this and that” conversations redundant: ask some members instead. Also, inside staff are often the worst people to lead the design process, as their point of view is skewed by knowledge of your organisation that members don’t have: members may not know (or care) about the special names, acronyms
january 2012 © cybertrek 2012
and the vagaries of your organisation chart, or the many information silos and departments it contains. In order to build co-creation into
the fabric of what you do, you’ll need to initiate a Voice of the Customer programme (VoC). The good news is there are many cost-effective tools available that turn customer feedback into a community activity via social media. Sites such as
getsatisfaction.com and
uservoice.com enable you to quickly create a member community that will help you to track complaints, praise and feedback, as well as enabling you to vote the best ideas to the top of the pile for a complete feedback loop. This is a much more efficient method of collecting member information and feedback than the more traditional lengthy questionnaires and email campaigns. Once your experience journey is designed, it’s important to prototype,
test and refine numerous times before releasing it ‘into the wild’. Toolbox items (p48) will help you to obtain feedback in a way that it can be rapidly fed into the next version of the customer journey. The testing process would then be repeated until all member expectations are met as a minimum – or even better, exceeded. However, before introducing your new experience journey, you will need to engage your staff first.
POWER UP YOUR PEOPLE
When it comes to your staff and their role in the member experience, basic compliance isn’t going to be enough. If you don’t have their active commitment, your efforts are doomed to failure even before you start, as this quote from the 1994 Harvard Business Review explains:
“Value is created by satisfied, loyal and productive employees.” Properly paid and incentivised staff with the right training
Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital 47
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