Month: July 2023

Knowing how to acquire new members is essential to running a successful fitness franchise. However, do you know what makes your members stay versus what makes them run to a competing franchise? Member feedback via NPS® surveys can tell you — if you know how to make sense of the data to change the minds of unhappy members and convert them to loyal members.  

Learn how to analyze member feedback to make data-driven decisions to drive the success of your fitness franchise marketing plan. The member experience is guided by reviews from other member feedback and especially negative feedback. Member churn is a natural part of running any business, but using a net promoter score survey can help improve member loyalty.

A high score in net promoter score surveys will create a better member perception of your brand loyalty.

The Importance of a Net Promoter Score for Fitness Franchise Leaders

The member feedback loop is a member experience strategy that is meant to enhance and improve your fitness franchise services based on member reviews. This will give actionable insights to help turnover unenthusiastic members and bring light to negative reviews to improve the member base.

The loop begins when your fitness franchise sends an NPS® survey and members respond. Your franchise analyzes the feedback and makes the desired changes. You then communicate the changes to the member, closing the feedback loop. This can go from survey responses to follow-up questions to determine the primary reason a member’s experience was negative or positive.

Your fitness franchise should pay attention to who is using your fitness services and how outside forces like the economy may affect when, where, and how they go to the gym, this is the natural member churn. By focusing on continuous improvement and sending regular NPS® surveys to gauge member loyalty, you ensure that even the smallest changes make your fitness franchise better, easier, faster, and more profitable. Qualitative feedback can help your member service team implement more beneficial marketing campaigns, track performance correctly, and help gain insight into what the member face.

Well-planned NPS® surveys can help your franchise collect valuable data for your member support team to make necessary adjustments to help existing members stay happy members, and find a target audience. Knowing how members from varying demographics like gender, age, and location rate their loyalty can influence your decisions when considering adjusting services. You can also learn what services are the most useful to your members and which ones can be eliminated from your menu.

6 Ways to Make Data-Driven Decisions for Your Franchise Network

Determine Your Key Performance Indicators for Member Loyalty

What is it that will make your fitness franchise successful? How will you know once you’ve achieved that goal? Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are quantifiable measures of performance over a specified period to meet an explicit goal.

Having your KPIs in place when analyzing NPS® results is important because it gives your fitness franchise a goal to aim for, like a certain NPS® score, better member sentiment, or an increase in actionable feedback to work on. Measuring data without an understanding of what you consider to be a success will compromise your ability to make action-oriented decisions, which is why understanding NPS® feedback and NPS® analysis is a key factor into a good NPS®. A good net promoter score question will target a certain response to look at in the NPS® analysis.

Collect and Organize Member Feedback

Sort through and compile the kinds of member feedback you have across franchises and place all collected data in one central place. In addition to NPS® data, look at all the places where your members leave you feedback, including online reviews, member experience surveys, member support team reviews, and social media. These additional feedback avenues will help you narrow down the meaning of your NPS® results so you can decide where to start making improvements first, so make every survey question meaningful. Also, note what detractors respond with to any of the questions in the survey results to try and raise a bad NPS® score. New members will look for a net promoter score that is higher than lower.

Use Technology to Categorize, Slice, and Dice the Data from your NPS® Score

Once you’ve collected the data, it’s time to decide how you want to evaluate it. Do you want to segment it by region? Demographics? Years each franchise has been in business? There are many ways to use the data you have in order to understand what factors are contributing to member loyalty. List the areas you want to focus on and organize the data accordingly. These data points are worth noting to figure out how to have a good overall NPS® score and gain points in your NPS® rating and NPS® analysis.

Compare the Results Across Several Metrics

Now that the data has been categorized, start to compare it across franchises. Comparisons can be made by location, region, franchise size, services offered, etc. This is where the data tells a story about how your members experience your fitness services franchise-wide and why they are loyal to some franchises and not others. A member experience management platform is a great way to organize NPS® survey responses.

Determine High-Priority Areas of Improvement

You can’t do everything at once. Decide your business priorities by revisiting your KPIs. Did you meet your company goals? Where are you experiencing the most success? What are your members saying about what needs to be improved? Use your KPIs to help you determine your highest priority areas of improvement, budget increases or decreases, and employee training to keep up employee health, and make sure to track any NPS® response that leads to a better NPS® score. 

Document Areas Where You Need More Data

Every time you conduct a survey, you’ll discover more areas where you’ll need to collect more data. Do you want to know more about member motivation to use your fitness services? Do your members need childcare? How much are they willing to spend on these additional services? These are the kinds of questions that can be built into future member feedback strategies and show up the next time you calculate NPS®. Ask specific questions in your net promoter survey to get valuable information on your target market or member loyalty overall.

Improve Your Member Feedback Analysis with Listen360

Knowing what member feedback is available and having a detailed plan to understand what it means can make or break your fitness franchise. When you know how to calculate net promoter score and analyze member feedback, your fitness franchise is in a better position to build lasting member relationships. Listen360 is a member engagement platform that can help you collect important data about your members and make sound decisions about how to keep them coming back and improve your member experience and NPS® scores. 

It’s common for fitness franchises to use NPS® surveys to learn about the loyalty of the people who use their services and the overall member experience. Unfortunately, some companies don’t put in the effort to figure out how to conduct surveys properly.

Net promoter score surveys are a great way to go about measuring member loyalty and member service metrics in an easy way for your member base to give member insights. This is important to foster brand loyalty and make sure existing members stay in your member sentiment. Any company can get quick feedback from a survey, but being able to use NPS® results as a way to have business growth is what competitive offerings new members want.

 Collecting member feedback via NPS® surveys involves more than making up a few questions and sending out an email. When done properly, a good survey can help your fitness franchise discover what keeps your members coming back and help you make better business decisions as a result. Consumer behavior is measurable with most NPS® surveys and can be key in making unenthusiastic members and unhappy members become loyal members.

The Cost of Inaccurate Feedback on Your Net Promoter Score

Member feedback is a way for your fitness business to measure if you’re on the road to keeping happy members. But how do you know that the feedback you’re getting is accurate? Inaccurate data leaves you with information that is false, unreliable, or ambiguous. Worse, inaccurate data can lead you to inaccurate conclusions about your members and what they expect from your business. This can attribute too much blame on the natural member churn, or discourage honest feedback from members.

By improving the accuracy of member feedback, your fitness franchise gains a foundation by which to understand who your members are, and how to better serve the target market. It’s difficult to build a thriving business when you make guesses about what made them choose your fitness franchise over others. Quality member service builds member trust and improves member loyalty. Referral marketing and using the member’s experience in a net promoter score question can improve NPS® scores and create actionable feedback that your support team can improve upon.

Recent research shows that 80% of consumers consider trust when making a buying decision. Taking the time to build the right system for collecting and managing member feedback will save your fitness business time and money and help you make good decisions on how to serve your members and actively promote to members. A carefully curated NPS® question is the best way to improve member experience so the NPS® survey is helpful for both member and the company.

Active vs. Passive Feedback and Member Loyalty

Collecting active feedback involves reaching out to the member directly to seek their opinions on your fitness franchise services. This can be helpful because it’s an opportunity to connect directly to the member to collect information that is targeted, contextual, and specific. Negative feedback is just as important as positive and is the primary reason a business will change a factor of their business. Negative reviews will lower the NPS® calculation but can help better the member perception of your business when addressed correctly.

Passive feedback, on the other hand, is feedback that is initiated by the member. This may look like the member using social media to express their pleasure or grievances about using your services. This is also beneficial for you as a business because it allows the member to express themselves freely. This might include negative words about your business, so reaching out about a member’s answer can improve member loyalty and help create a good feedback loop between members and the business. A member experience management platform can also help elongate the member lifecycle, and higher net promoter scores to predict member loyalty and help your member service team measure loyalty more effectively.

Both types of feedback help you gain a better view and measure loyalty — but active feedback is what you’ll need to get accurate results from net promoter score surveys. For even greater accuracy in your surveys, follow the six best practices below to improve member experience and loyalty at your business.

6 NPS® Feedback Best Practices

1. Define terminology, scales, and rankings

Every survey has its own terminology it uses to describe the NPS® score system. In NPS® surveys, members can choose a score of zero to 10 to indicate how likely they are to recommend your business to others. While you cannot share how the ranking system works regarding detractors, passives, and promoters, you should indicate that zero is the least likely to recommend your business and 10 is the most likely to recommend your business. This is what goes into a net promoter score calculation.

It seems straightforward, but it never hurts to address a potential miscommunication in a member’s journey. Communication can help a member’s loyalty score increase and improve the way a member interacts online regarding your business. Being attentive to members will help a low score improve and gain more insight into a typical member.

2. Make surveys easy to complete and submit

The beauty of an NPS® survey is that it is only two questions — very easy for any member to complete. But you can make the process easier by automating survey distribution, so the question pops up while they are using or thinking about your product or service. If they can quickly access the survey and answer it — without having to log in, respond to an email, or click a series of links — you’ll increase the likelihood of getting more members to respond. And the more responses you get, the more accurate your final NPS® score will be. Survey results are higher when the survey is easily accessible to members and when follow-up questions are concise, as well as any NPS® question.

3. Ensure you have a large enough sample size

Determining how big your sample size should be is important to get the best results. For example, the members who use your fitness facilities in the afternoon may be a different kind of member from the early morning or after-work crowd, and you want to be sure you get responses from each of these groups. During the survey planning phase, it’s important to devise a strategy for getting the most responses possible with the widest range of demographics so the results accurately represent your member population. NPS® data should be a well-rounded estimate of your member base to get the most accurate net promoter score and overall picture of your member experience.

4. Be careful with incentives

It’s common for businesses to offer an incentive to those who complete a survey. These can be a referral program or can be anything from a free healthy workout snack to being entered in a drawing for a free month of gym access. While incentives are fun and will likely increase the number of surveys you receive, they have the potential to compromise accuracy if they aren’t done well. Remember, the point is to collect accurate feedback, not receive the highest number of poor survey responses in the shortest amount of time. This will not give accurate data on the member;s effort or response rates, nor the most accurate net promoter score.

5. Consider survey frequency

Members are often happy to share their experiences by offering feedback. However, there is such a thing as survey fatigue. Consider how often you need to ask members to fill out a survey. You’ll want some kind of regular frequency so you can compare your results over time. However, you may have a use for a relational NPS® survey that can be distributed on-demand versus a transactional NPS® survey that is sent following a specific event or transaction, such as a monthly membership. A net promoter score survey doesn’t need to be sent too frequently, and if overdone will likely lead to fewer members responding, and an inaccurate way that it will calculate net promoter score.

6. Practice member feedback aftercare

Members appreciate when their feedback makes a difference in your fitness business. Be sure to thank them for their response and notify them about new services or changes throughout the business. Letting them know you take their input seriously encourages your members to want to engage in the next survey, as they know that their time leads to real change. An NPS® survey is a key factor in your business growth, so make sure to help your member journey benefit from the responses.

Get started with Listen360 to get the Best Net Promoter Score NPS®!

If you are looking to build a better relationship with your fitness franchise members, then consider adding Listen360 to your marketing plan. Our digital member engagement platform helps your fitness business to gather quality member feedback so that you can retain more members. With Listen360, you can be sure that you’ll have the right system that helps you to make better marketing decisions and have a successful net promoter system in place to improve your NPS® score.

Your members hold your reputation in their hands, and member retention impacts your bottom line. That is why it is so important to send net promoter score surveys to survey members. Regardless of how you crunch the numbers, recruiting new members for a fitness franchise is more expensive than retaining existing ones. And a 5% increase in existing retention can yield a 25% increase in profits.

Using strategies like NPS® surveys is the best way to get positive member feedback and gain valuable insights into the performance of company. These tips will boost your net promoter score survey response rate and help you reach your NPS® benchmarks in your survey responses. Having an intentional NPS® survey design is a great way to maximize its capabilities.

The Critical Role of NPS® in Your Fitness Franchise Business

Evaluating member loyalty across several franchise locations requires many variables: member experience, online sign-ups and services, member support team, brand trust, membership options, staff interactions, and available equipment and classes. One effective way to measure and improve member loyalty in the fitness franchise industry is through Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) surveys.

NPS® surveys are simple member loyalty surveys that provide insights about your members’ willingness to recommend your franchise to others. Knowing where you stand with existing members is crucial to your fitness franchise growth strategy. Your member base is the best way to get to your target market, which is why it is so key to collect member feedback. This can also gauge member loyalty and maintain member NPS® data.

NPS® Surveys and Why Every Fitness Franchise Needs One

Developed in 2003 to evaluate the member experience, an NPS® survey asks, “How likely are you to recommend (business name) to a friend or colleague?” It asks loyal members to respond with a numeric rating between zero and ten. Zero is not likely to recommend, and ten is extremely likely to recommend. From there, follow-up questions and email surveys will ask the member why they decided on the rating they provided. This is how you can measure NPS® and determine how many members will give qualitative feedback and explain their member’s experience at your business. This is how to use the NPS® best practices to your advantage.

It is an easy and cost-effective way to compare franchise performance across multiple locations and different subject lines. In addition, the open-ended follow-up NPS® survey questions give you an opportunity to look at common areas where each franchise is performing well and where it needs improvement from respondents. 

How NPS® is Calculated

It sounds simple enough, but NPS® scoring is more than a numerical score from zero to ten, it’s more involved than just positive or negative member sentiment. Here is a brief overview of how to calculate NPS®.

The NPS® survey responses are split into three numeric categories:

• Promoters (score 9-10) indicating high loyalty and a strong likelihood to recommend your fitness franchise
• Passives (score 7-8) indicating they are somewhat loyal but not enthusiastic about your brand or service
• Detractors (score 0-6) indicating low loyalty and the potential to spread negative word-of-mouth

Let’s learn more about the impact of each of these categories in different member segments and the overall NPS® survey best practices to avoid survey fatigue.

Promoters vs. Passives vs. Detractors

Promoters are loyal members who will continue to use the franchise’s services and actively advocate for them. They are more likely to refer new members, measure member loyalty, positively review the franchise online, and can contribute to the long-term success and growth of a franchise. This will encourage more member engagement and raises your average nps score.

Passives fall somewhere in the middle, are relatively indifferent, and may be easily swayed by competing offerings. They may or may not return to your fitness franchise but are unlikely to promote the experience to others. This group possesses the greatest opportunity to convert more promoters. Switching their member journey to a more positive relationship and overall member success, which is why passives are key to send surveys to.

Detractors pose the highest risk to the franchise’s reputation and may deter potential members through negative feedback. They are more likely to tell their social circle about their experience and may even go out of their way to leave a negative review online. This can overall lower your member sentiment and lower positive response rates. They will be much more difficult to bump up to promoters but could be swayed into becoming passives.

Remember that 95% of members will search online reviews before purchasing, and 40% have avoided a company based on negative reviews. A single negative or 1-star review can weigh more on members’ opinions than your average rating. Therefore, your NPS® feedback and NPS® scores have real consequences when it comes to member experience.

NPS® Scoring System

The absolute NPS® is calculated with the total percentage of promoters subtracted from the total percentage of detractors response rates. The total NPS®, or absolute score, ranges from -100 to +100, with higher scores indicating a higher proportion of promoters relative to detractors.

The absolute score itself is less important than the trend it represents over time. Fitness franchising companies should strive to improve their NPS® by increasing member services, offering additional employee training, and using members’ NPS® responses to make measured changes across the business.

Absolute vs. Relative

While the absolute NPS® number is helpful for internal tracking and benchmarking against previous results, the relative NPS® provides industry context. It is essential to compare each franchise NPS® with all your locations, competitors, and the overall industry standard to understand its significance and identify areas for improvement. NPS® results will vary depending on how the survey is conducted. Scores are higher when it is accessed with ease, from an NPS® survey in-app that can measure NPS® regularly.

How to Run Your NPS® Survey

These are essentially pre-built, so all you need is an NPS® survey tool to send NPS® surveys and having the right NPS® question in your surveys. You can create a manual delivery system using email lists, in-app surveys, SMS, web plugins, or even phone calls. We recommend an automated system like Listen360 that sends an NPS® survey on a regular cadence of your choosing, and can even offer a list of follow-up questions.   

In addition, Listen360 member engagement software collects member data and analyzes it to automatically calculate your NPS® and provide detailed reports about your franchises in real-time, and can even have your NPS® surveys in app.

What Transactional NPS® Survey Scores Mean for Fitness Franchises

Generally, an NPS® score of 0-30 is considered decent in any industry. A “good” NPS® score in the fitness franchise industry depends on factors such as local competition, business size, and trends in member experience. Your NPS® survey response rate is a key indicator of how others perceive your business, and how the calculate net promoter score has a major effect on your popularity.

According to our most recent Fitness NPS® Benchmark Report, the median score for a gym was 57. Gyms with a score of 71 or higher put them in the top 25% of all gyms. For studio and boutique fitness franchises, an NPS® of 88 or higher will place them in the top 25%.

It’s important to note that achieving a score of 100 is rare due to the inherent variability of human preferences, naturally, there will be a member churn for a variety of personal reasons. Contact us today for the full report from our 600,000 member responses from the NPS® survey results. 

Click here for Listen360’s full ebook, The Franchisor’s Guide to NPS®.

Get Started With Listen360’s NPS® Platform Today

Member experience is important to the growth and sustainability of your fitness franchise, and early identification and intervention are crucial in preventing reputation-damaging experiences. However, lengthy satisfaction surveys can detract from members’ willingness to help build your brand and reputation and will lower the response rate and valuable feedback or lower the NPS® survey response rates.

If you’re ready to learn about your fitness franchise’s NPS® and how to assess the pulse of your member base, consider starting with Listen360’s member engagement platform. Together we can build stronger member relationships, gather meaningful engagement feedback, and ultimately retain your loyal members.

Contact us today for the complete reports mentioned here or to learn how we can take your fitness franchise to the next level. 

Support Your Franchises, Satisfy More Members

When fitness buffs love their gym or fitness center, they keep coming back. Simple as that. But if it was that simple, all your fitness franchises would be swimming in happy, loyal members with no problems whatsoever, right?

Not quite.

Ensuring member loyalty is a difficult job — especially when you’re responsible for a franchise network with multiple locations and a variety of needs and a corporate office that oversees the strategic direction of the business. To improve member loyalty, you first need to define member loyalty and understand what it entails. It starts by creating the right environment and incentives so that all your franchises can prioritize and serve existing members effectively.

Here’s a closer look at the strategic value of member loyalty and some of the most important strategies for helping your franchises build long-term member loyalty.

Member Loyalty: Your Most Valuable Strategic Asset

Member loyalty is so important that:

• Eighty-six percent of consumers will pay more for a terrific member experience.
• More than two-thirds of businesses compete mainly on member experience these days.
• More than a quarter of consumers say they stopped buying from a business because of a bad experience.

With all things “member” so directly tied to revenue and competitive advantage (or lack thereof), it’s no wonder that member loyalty is considered a business asset. If your members are satisfied, you can grow your franchise network and beat the competition. Boom. Economic value. If your members aren’t satisfied, you lose economic value and opportunities.

It’s not enough to say you want to make improvements, though. Fitness franchise owners and managers are busy with day-to-day operations. They have their hands full just keeping the gym or studio running. Given this reality, the corporate office plays an integral role in clearly laying out member loyalty objectives and supporting franchises in achieving them.

5 Strategies to Build Member Loyalty

Loyal members don’t just happen. It’s the result of thoughtful, high-level strategies and everyday practices that work together to attract new members and keep them coming back. Here are five practices you can put into place at the corporate and franchise level to help build member loyalty.

1. Invest in member-centered leadership

Member loyalty starts at the top. One of the most important things you can do is to invest in corporate leaders that value the member experience. Whether it’s hiring a Chief Experience Officer or stacking the rest of the C-suite with member advocates, when leaders are champions for putting the member at the center of business operations and objectives, it’s easier for everyone else to follow suit.

2. Congratulate and replicate

Some of your franchises already have member service figured out. Congratulate the ones that excel in member service and study what they’re doing so you can replicate their success. What practices are they routinely using to achieve high member loyalty? Do they have a loyalty program in place? What can other franchises learn from them about member retention? When you recognize and promote successful member-centered work, you give your entire network the tools they need to do the same at their own franchises and begin building member loyalty.

3. Award and reward

Franchise employees are on the front lines of member service. Encourage your franchisees to award and reward the employees and managers that go above and beyond for members. This type of positive reinforcement helps build a healthy workplace culture in which employees at all levels are empowered, supported, and rewarded for delivering excellent member service. When employees are confident and happy, they make members happy too which contributes toward a loyal member base.

4. Balance fixing with building

Member loyalty is a give-and-take of solving problems and building better experiences. Though it’s easy to do, don’t just focus on what’s going wrong or needs to be fixed. Spend equal time or more on what’s going right — and do more of that to increase member loyalty. You reap what you sow when you give quality attention to building and expanding positive member experiences. You get more positivity and happier members — which means you end up with fewer issues to fix down the road.

5. Find out what the problem is with NPS®

Of course, none of this is to say you won’t have dissatisfied members at times. If you see that members are unhappy, find out more. Franchises can do this by sending their members Net Promoter Score (NPS®) surveys, to find out the likelihood that members will recommend the business to others. This will give you a straightforward understanding of how your franchises are performing overall. This industry-standard survey also includes a follow-up question to elicit specific member feedback about what’s going well and what isn’t.

Using member feedback, franchises can pinpoint exact issues and come up with solutions that lead to overall improvements in member loyalty.

Get Started with Listen360

In your fitness franchise network, measuring member loyalty and optimizing the member experience can turn all your franchises into top performers. To get started, consider Listen360’s member engagement platform. Backed by an experienced team, Listen360 can help you survey and collect important member data and make smart business decisions that keep members coming back.

For more information, contact us today, and we’ll be happy to chat.