PHOTOS: MYZONE
Myzone’s Tamara Bailey says finding a way through the coronavirus crisis will mean taking an honest look at how successful your member engagement really is
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ost of my career in the industry has been spent focused on the challenge of retention and strategies to improve it, either as an operator or as a consultant and supplier of retention tools. Throughout that time, I’ve seen operators fall into four categories:
Denial
While some operators have a handle on member engagement, anyone who says “we don’t have a retention problem” has always been a red flag to me. It’s usually quantified by “we get great customer satisfaction scores” (not a measure of retention), “our attrition is low” (not a measure of retention) and “we make great sales” (not………you see where I’m going!)
Silver bullet hunters
Those who accept they need to improve retention but think a single step/tool/ change will bring about immediate results. That isn’t how retention works.
Best intentions
Most operators fall into this category. They know retention is critical, that they need to improve and that it will take time and the creation of a strategy they are willing to work on. Unfortunately the urgent overtakes the important and it slips down the priority list to end up on the back-burner.
Doing it
There are some clubs and operators who are fantastic examples of commitment to member engagement, who have teams driven by their central purpose and who live and breathe it daily because it’s who they are. I don’t know where you believe yourself and your organisation were sitting up to 20 March 2020 but I highly recommend you ask yourself the question and be honest with the answer, because you will have noticed that shit just got real! In a matter of weeks we went from the New Year influx of new members and implementing our 2020 plans to having to consider exactly how we could keep our business and our teams afloat. The reality is, the coming weeks and months are going to be extremely challenging for us all and, if you didn’t have a real and effective strategy to stay connected to your members before the 20 March forced closure, there’s a real risk to the future. However, as a good friend and ex-colleague once quoted to me, “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second best time is now”. The real opportunity here is the chance to use the closure time to focus on the business rather than just working in it. It’s unlikely we’ll ever be given this chance again, so we need to act and act fast and be aware of the facts:
Some operators are fantastic examples of commitment to member engagement ©Cybertrek 2020 April 2020
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