The Challenge
Retention is a key word in the fitness industry as it is a clear indicator that customers like the products and services they are subscribing to and ultimately paying for. Improving retention rates, without significantly increasing outgoings is an ongoing challenge for operators and recognising this, Serco Leisure sought to proactively address the topic at their 2019 Retention Convention.
The Solution
To improve retention operators must increase customers adherence to their facilities. The question is how do you increase the frequency of visit, per week to the establishment?
To answer this question, operators have to ensures customers must want to come to facility for more than fitness. Instead they should be attending because they feel like they belong there and that they enjoy the experience of actually attending. One way to ensure this is to have positive interactions with the people there. This means educating the staff on how to effectively communicate.
The Result
Excelsior was requested to attend the SERCO Leisure 2019 Retention Convention to stimulate the management teams thought processes and facilitate discussions around how to better serve and empathise with customers. Chris from Excelsior attended and delivered to the team, encouraging them to identify how they differentiate the experience from competitors and how to effectively empathise with customers.
We have now worked closely with Chris and Keith for several years and for the foreseeable future intend to continue to tap into their knowledge and expertise. This is why we immediately considered them as speakers for our Retention Convention. In addition to the convention, other recent projects with them have included up-skilling our teams on working with both younger and older populations, how to better utilise digital and as guest speakers at the last few years conventions. From our perspective the Excelsior team’s real strength, is their ability to understand both the industry in general, while being able to empathise with our customers. This insight enables them to create engaging presentations, educational content and training sessions, which focus our teams on our customer needs and wants. The staff feedback is fantastic every single time Excelsior deliver, and our teams then return to work re-energised and concentrating on our customer needs. We look forward to continuing to work closely with Excelsior, as they develop their digital solution which we hope will further support us.
— PAUL STREET,
NATIONAL HEALTH AND FITNESS MANAGER, CITIZEN SERVICES, SERCO UK AND EUROPE