The Importance of 5 Star Customer Service
by Machelle Lee
(Santa Cruz CA)
Machelle Lee and Ryan Andrews The Invisible Gym Mobile Fitness Training
Do you ever notice that in certain industries (the big players) pay little attention to going the extra mile in ensuring a positive customer experience? Take the airline industry, for example. When was the last time you departed an airplane and said, "Wow, what a wonderful experience - I can't wait to do that again!"
Keep in mind that your clients’ experiences becomes even more important than ever in a down economy. When times are tough, most customers will be open to the prospect of switching providers or discontinuing his/her personal training program unless their current experience is one they aren't willing to trade.
The bottom line is: It is more important than ever to keep the customer not just happy, but excited about the quality of their experience because that translates into loyalty.
Keep your personal training business on top by remembering that Customer Service is one of the most important parts of owning any kind of service business if you want to keep your clients!
Why 5 Star Customer Service?
The answer: everything!
Remember that your clients are people first, and their status as one of your clients comes second. Knowing how to tend to the needs of your customers will literally make the difference between a long and prosperous career in the fitness industry.
In order to assist you in walking down the success path, here are some methods that you can use to "WOW" your clients on a regular basis, keeping them happy, loyal to you, and engaging in long-term prosperous business relationships.
They are:
contact, date and event recognition, listening, forward thinking, and over-delivering.
Contact
When you get a new personal training client, many people will still second-guess their decision to hire you. After all, a personal trainer can be an expensive asset, and your clients need to believe that they made the right decision. One of the easiest ways for you to ease their mind in the beginning as well as during the course of their training program is by simply staying in contact with them.
Most clients will see you at most 3 times each week, and some clients even less than that. With at least 4 days in each week when your clients don't see you, you are influencing them less than 50% of the time! Many clients hire a personal trainer because they need constant guidance and support, and less than 50% could hardly be considered constant.
An easy solution to this is to send your clients a few emails a week, or mail them an actual snail mail letter once in awhile. Clip an appropriate article from a magazine and make copies of it to mail to your clients, or email them the URL of a great motivational story about weight loss that you found on the Internet. Forward them funny anecdotes about health and fitness, or drop them a postcard congratulating them on their latest progress.
For that matter, pick up the phone! Call Suzie to let her know that you just got done updating her client record and had reason to again marvel at how great she is doing with her program. You just can't pay for the type of customer feedback you will get from something like that!
Stay in contact with your clients in between training sessions, and the increased attention will remind them on a regular basis that in the beginning you committed to a one on one training program for them, not just to stand there 3 times a week while they exercise.
Date and Event Recognition
Recognizing special dates in your client's lives is another great way to show them that you are thinking about them in between training sessions.
- Send your clients a birthday card, or even a small but thoughtful gift.
- Congratulate them on their wedding anniversary, or even send flowers or a card to their house.
- Give them a special award every time they lose 5 pounds, or drop a percentage of body fat.
- Attend the race or other fitness event that you have been training them for.
As you can see, the possibilities are limitless. The lesson that you want to take away from this section is that you went above and beyond the call of duty to recognize a date or an event that was important to your client. They won't forget that when it comes time to decide whether or not to keep working with you!
Listening
The fact that you should listen to your clients should go without saying. If your title is "Personal Trainer", please take a moment at this time to re-read the first word! Too many trainers fall into the familiar trap of just taking their clients through workouts. Your clients aren't paying you to workout with them. They are paying you to give them dedicated one on one service, and the actual workout is only one part of that.
In addition to the exercise programming, you must again think about the fact that your clients are humans before they are clients. As humans, they have as many outside considerations as you do. If you are only seeing them 3 hours per week, that leaves 165 hours each week when you are not around, and the lifestyle events that happen during that time will spill over into the training sessions.
Your clients will talk about their jobs, their spouses, their relatives and in-laws, their children and their neighbors, their gardener and their mailman, etc. Any good personal trainer realizes that although we have no business actually dispensing professional advice on personal or spiritual matters, we are a 3 time per week sounding board for our clients, and that is just part of the job. Listen to what your clients have to say, help out without leaving your professional boundaries, and let your clients know that you care about what happens to them, not just about what happens during the training session.
Forward Thinking
This is as much of a sales technique as it is a great customer service tool. In a nutshell, it means that you should always be planning for the future when it comes to your clients. Talk to them about how you are going to start running with them once they get their weight down enough for their knees to handle the stress. Explain to them how much fun it will be when you can start taking them through the new training protocol that you put together. Get them excited about how good they are going to look on the beach this summer after several more months of working out with you, or about how their cousin Sally is going to be so envious at Christmas time this year when she sees how much weight your client has lost.
All of these things plant the seed for your clients that you are thinking about their future, and not just taking them through a workout. Let them know that you have great plans for them in the future, and that you can't wait to see their results when they get to a certain point in the program that you have them on. Again, your clients are people, and they want to be made to feel important, needed, and respected.
Over-delivering
Over-delivering value to your clients is probably the most important technique out of any that have been listed so far. It is last in our list of customer service secrets so that it is the one that you remember the most!
Over-delivering is just what it sounds like - giving your clients more value for their money than they originally expected to get. In fact, all of the items listed above are great examples of over-delivery. Do you think that when your clients hired you they expected to be getting birthday cards on their birthday, expected you to be excited about the graduation of their children, or that they could vent to you about their mother-in-law during training sessions? These are all examples of the infinite number of ways that you can over-deliver value to your clients.
In addition to what has already been listed, you can get much more specific with your over-delivery efforts. Each of your clients has a very well defined fitness goal that they are diligently working towards. As a fitness professional, you should be regularly keeping up with the latest news stories about health and fitness, as well as getting Continuing Education Credits.
Remember that every successful personal trainer runs a business, he or she doesn't just workout with their clients.
The Bottom line: find ways to "WOW" your clients everyday!
Machelle Lee and Ryan Andrews own and operate The Invisible Gym.
www.the-invisible-gym.com
Our frustration with the lack of resources for the mobile trainer led Ryan and I to start presenting at Health and Fitness conferences and we also created a resource manual called, The Mobile Fitness Guide To Business Success!
http://www.the-invisible-gym.com/mobile-fitness-professionals.html
It is our hope that mobile training become an integral part of the health and fitness industry and we are trying to create a mobile training community!
If you have any questions about mobile training you can contact us at: getfit@theinvisiblegym.com
Keep a pair of sunglasses handy, the future of mobile fitness training looks bright!
