It’s time for health clubs to start looking after the needs of their members if they want to stay in business, says consultant Paul Bedford, writes
MOST PEOPLE who have handed a significant amount of money over to a gym at some point and then been left to simply get on with it would probably feel they could teach the owners a thing or two about customer service.
Paul Bedford, though, has been trying to make them see the error of their ways for more than a decade, and it’s only now, he reckons, that the message is finally beginning to sink in.
Bedford started out in life as a fitness instructor but hit the books in a big way. He has completed a doctorate on the industry, compiling a truckload of data to tell us what many of us already know: the people who run gyms generally don’t do nearly enough to help their customers (or themselves) by encouraging members to keep coming back.
“It’s frustrating in a way,” he says, “that people are still paying me to tell them this stuff. The fact is that for years operators have tended to concentrate on building clubs and selling memberships, but recently they’ve reached a stage where they can’t do that any more, so what we’re seeing now are clubs starting to make more effort to keep the people they have already signed up.”
As part of his research, Bedford has amassed considerable first-hand experience of the problem. The London-based consultant regularly takes out gym memberships, turns up for induction sessions and talks to other customers about the quality of the support they get.
His experiences are fairly startling, given the level of investment in other areas routinely undertaken by those involved in the sector, both private and public. He recalls one instance when he approached a member and asked when the person had last been sounded out about how he was getting along; it turned out to have been five years earlier, by Bedford, on a previous expedition to the club.
There was also the induction session conducted by a cleaner: “He said that it wouldn’t be as detailed as normal because the person who usually did them wasn’t available and, to be honest, it wasn’t the worst I’ve ever had.”
That particular honour, he reckons, goes to the local authority gym which left him waiting 40 minutes for a scheduled induction, while the person supposed to conduct it was sitting a few feet away, but hadn’t bothered to inquire about the whereabouts of their “appointment”. Eventually, he was whisked around the entire operation in 17 minutes without getting on a machine.
“That was particularly bad,” he says, “but the problems certainly aren’t confined to any one sector of the industry. In a lot of cases the inductions are actually okay, but that will be pretty much the last time that any one employed by the club will make an effort to talk to you.
“It applies even to clubs that would consider themselves to be five-star operations. Now, if you stay at a five-star hotel you would expect people to be interested in how your stay is going or how your meal has been; the manager will often take the time to make sure you’re happy. But in a lot of fitness clubs the manager is hidden away somewhere and staff don’t seem to see, or aren’t encouraged to see, that their role is to approach people, either offering help or getting feedback. Ideally, I’d love to see the equivalent of a maître ’d, somebody who could check in on people and see whether help is required, make sure it’s provided where it is, and leave well enough alone where it’s not.”
Next week, Bedford will address Fittsport, an Institute of Technology Tralee-organised fitness conference, with speakers such as Niall Quinn, Caitriona McKiernan and Jack O’Connor. He doesn’t tend to blame staff in the gyms but rather those in charge because, he admits, in many cases the people in a position to make a difference either aren’t given the proper training or feel under pressure to do other things.
“They can find themselves cleaning machines or maintaining the pool and all too often their employers can be guilty of seeing inductions, but not follow-up chats, as work. But what I repeatedly find is that people have what they feel to be unrealistic targets set for them and then struggle to get help when they start to fall behind.”
The difference, he claims, that even one “intervention” per person per month can make is remarkable, with dropout rates in studies he has conducted slashed by two-thirds. To a club operator, that can mean revenue increases of more than 40 per cent. And the rest of us shouldn’t begrudge the owners their money because, he insists, as we’re going more often and getting healthier, we’re up on the deal too.
Fittsport, the Institute of Technology Tralee's fitness conference, starts tomorrow. Details are available at www.ittralee.ie
