Health clubs are often criticised for their poor standards of customer service – but it needn’t be that way. Executive business coach Andy Bourne offers his advice

If health and fitness operators want to improve customer service, they need to think about their organisations, their people and their customers in a totally different way – and that starts by asking themselves some notably different questions.

In the first instance, the CEO or business leader must build and sustain a culture where everyone understands how excellence in customer service provides a competitive advantage. This may require the CEO to ask themselves the following sorts of questions:

• What’s the real objective of customer service in my organisation?

• What’s the intended end result?

• Am I ready to make customer service a competitive imperative?

• What will success look like?

• Am I thinking like the customer?

• Do I really understand what my customers are thinking?

• How do I influence, rather than control, staff at all levels to deliver my vision of customer service?

• How are my behaviours regarding customer service influencing others?

• How might I be more influential in energising, enabling and releasing others in the organisation to better serve the customer?

• What must I do personally?

Lateral thinking
After considering these issues, the CEO will no doubt have a number of unanswered questions and may well turn to his/her senior leadership team for their views on the subject.

The challenge here is that, in my experience, senior leadership teams often contain functional experts who are trained to think in a linear dimension, which involves rationality, logic and analytical thinking – whereas I believe this issue will benefit from a combination of linear and non-linear thinking styles. Indeed, if you want to make customer service a competitive imperative in your organisation, your efforts will be boosted by adopting an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that isn’t immediately obvious and involving ideas that more often than not won’t be reached via traditional step-by-step logic.

The CEO must be prepared to encourage this non-linear approach, allowing the team to draw on intuition, insight, creativity and emotions to arrive at novel and unexpected conclusions.

The Employee Experience
The first question the senior team will need to consider is: What behaviours are required throughout the organisation to create a culture where service excellence is regarded as the competitive imperative?

It’s important to recognise here that improving customer service can often lose out to other competing concerns such as short-term sales goals, cost-cutting or the ‘we’ve never done it that way before’ mentality – but you won’t bring about a change in behaviours if your teams are pulling in opposite directions.

Don’t expect everyone to automatically put the customer first every time. There will be some who believe ‘customer experience’ is a buzzword disguising an actual goal to improve performance metrics among frontline staff. Some may not buy into the vision and may still see things from the perspective of ‘How can we do fewer things that upset our customers?’ as opposed to ‘How can we delight our customers?’

Only when there’s an acceptance that everything must be aligned to the customers’ goals will you be ready to move to the next question: How will we drive customer service performance throughout the organisation?

Richard Branson is reported to have said: “The way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers.” The leadership team should therefore ask themselves questions like:

• Are our employees treated well?

• Do my employees enjoy working for the organisation?

• Do I know how it feels to work for my organisation?

If employees don’t enjoy working for the organisation, it’s difficult to influence their behaviours to provide top rate customer service – and influence, rather than control, is the key here.

One effective way to gain a deeper understanding is for the leadership team to work alongside employees serving and helping customers. I’ve found these frontline experiences to be hugely insightful and transformative. If leadership teams do this on a regular basis, their understanding of the employee and customer experience will be real and front-of-mind.

The business leaders should ask the frontline teams these types of questions:

• Why are we doing it that way?

• What’s holding you back from providing better service?

• Why are we not providing good service to our customers?

• How might we take a step forward, even if only an imperfect step?

• What’s important about this for you, your colleagues and our customers?

• What do you think?

• How can I help?

Also ask yourself if your front-line teams have the discretion to make decisions relating to customers without having to continually refer the matter to head office or senior management. While employees must be accountable for their decisions when dealing with customers, they mustn’t be afraid to make decisions – and empowering them to do so will lead to better customer service, as well as higher levels of job satisfaction.

Lead from the front
Ultimately, business leaders should try and make the lives of frontline staff easier, removing any obstacles that stand in the way of making customer service a competitive imperative. Start by reviewing management structures and processes, as well as the funding that’s available to bring about real, meaningful change – change that will immediately benefit the customers, as well as the organisation in the longer term.

All that said, improving customer service first and foremost requires good leadership, with a focus on behaviours that positively influence the choices, commitment and behaviours of everyone in the organisation.

I accept that high standards of customer care can be achieved more easily in smaller organisations, but I firmly believe it’s possible for larger, multi-site companies to make a major step change. After all, Richard Branson has been able to create and deliver a vision across a number of companies and thousands of employees. Surely we can improve standards across the health and fitness sector.