NPS® Member Feedback Best Practices for Your Fitness Business and Member Loyalty

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.