We’re going through this crisis of COVID-19, and you need to make sure you can serve your members safely and effectively. This webinar is focused on how you can get insights from your members to engage and retain them.
We’re joined by Blair McHaney, Jenny Hymer, Saranda West, and Andrew Nelson to talk about the surveys you can use to get information from your members during this time.
Short on time? Here are the takeaways:
- Now is no time to be shy. We should all be heavily communicating with our customers, defining communication as both conveying meaning and gaining understanding.
- Communicating with members frequently and at scale has presented problems for club leaders. MXM has developed a shutdown survey for clubs to deploy to their members.
- Because the surveys have been developed for clubs, they are ready for clubs to share quickly.
- Clubs need to make every member an extension of housekeeping.
- All staff have to become compliance ambassadors, because for seven years, some of the biggest drivers of loyalty are staff friendliness and club cleanliness. Staff members have to be able to hold members accountable and still drive up friendliness.
For the full webinar, read below or play the recording above.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Maria Morton: We’re going to go ahead and get started because we have a lot of information to get to, and I know that our panelists are very excited to speak to you all. First of all, thank you very much for joining our webinar today, and thank you to our panelists for joining us. A few housekeeping announcements, which I’m sure given the webinars that we’ve put out recently, you guys are probably all familiar with. Everyone is on mute. That’s just to cut down on background noise so everyone can hear what our panelists have to say. However, we want you to stay as engaged as possible during this webinar.
Please do feel free to ask questions using the Q&A button that is at the bottom of your screen or using the chat feature that you guys have been using already to tell us where you’re located. We will try to answer those questions throughout the duration of the webinar. We have also allocated about 10 to 15 minutes of time at the end of the webinar to get through those questions. If you have to step off the webinar or if you aren’t able to stay for the whole thing, we will be sending out a recording of the webinar as soon possible afterwards. Keep an eye on your email for that. Without further ado, I would like to hand it over to Saranda West, our Director of Product at Daxko who will be helping lead this conversation. Saranda, to you.
Saranda West: Thank you, Maria. Thank you everyone for joining us today as Maria said, and for chiming in. I actually don’t know if you can see all the way through the chat, but we have lots of people joining us from all across the nation and actually some from Canada as well. Welcome to everyone!
I’ll do a quick introduction of myself. My name is Saranda. I lead a team of product managers at Daxko where our job is to focus on understanding you, our customers so that we can make sure we build the right solutions. As you know across all of our products, we’ve been developing this rapid recovery toolkit.
We’re going through this crisis of COVID-19 and making sure that you can serve your members in the best way, not only while we’re in the middle of this situation, but also, I know what is top of mind for everyone is when we get back to our new normal, what is that going to look like? In doing that, we actually were talking with one of our partners, who I’m going to introduce to you today. Today, this webcast is going to be focused on how you can get insights from your members. We’re going to be joined by the team at MXM, so Blair, Jenny and Andrew will be joining us talking through how we can get a couple different surveys out so that you can get information from your members during this time. Team, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
Blair McHaney: Awesome, great. Thanks, Saranda.
MEMBER FEEDBACK BEFORE COVID-19
SW: Blair, let’s start with you and just talk at a high level. I know MXM is well known for helping businesses learn what their members are thinking and helping them get actionable feedback and build best practices. This has been the case before COVID-19. What did you see as a club owner yourself and then also, what is the feedback you’re getting from members before COVID-19?
BM: So, a couple of things. We do operational member experience management system to work with about 700 clubs in multiple countries. When you think about that, not to make that sound like a bunch of corporate speak, but when you think about that, I want you to think about being able to review customer data in real time and actually take action on it. I want you think the opposite of market research. What’s actionable right now? What’s happening right now? We can benchmark stuff later on, but what’s happening right now? That’s what we do. We’re built on the Medallia technology, so Medallia is an enterprise-level technology publicly traded and they handle very large global companies. In January, this noise around COVID-19 it’s starting to ratchet up and now, I want to back go back to something you said.
We’re also club owners. We have our own two clubs and we’re going on 40 years in business in a rural part of the state of Washington in Wenatchee, Washington. We sit at the nexus of really understanding customer experience management from an enterprise level, from a small business level and especially from club operations level. Sitting here and starting to witness the noise coming in from members, with all of our existing customers, they’re starting to talk about a lot of different things. My own teams at our own two clubs are starting to look at the individual customer comments and we started to see some critical themes going into this shutdown. Some critical areas of concern from members across our entire portfolio where people were saying, “This is sort of scary to me.” We found those main themes going into this.
SW: Blair, one of the things I wanted to mention, and I should have mentioned this earlier for those joining us today. You’re a club owner, we actually have multiple different types of organizations that are listening in. We have some JCCs, we have some YMCAs and we have some clubs. Help me really put in context, this is just member feedback, right? This is applicable to any type of organization that has a fitness component?
THE SHUTDOWN SURVEY
BM: That’s exactly right and I’ll speak to our own two clubs here for a minute. We have two clubs in the middle of the state of Washington, but some of the groups that are coming on to this have 100 clubs and they’re very sophisticated high-end clubs. Some are more boutique fitness. This is agnostic. This is completely agnostic across any business model. This is really learning what are the concerns and fears that your customers have. Right now, the job to be done as you’re sitting there in shutdown is to come out of this, to be able to bounce out of this as fast and as high as possible. The most valuable asset that you have sitting out there that may be untapped is your member feedback. What are they thinking? What do they see through their thousands and thousands of eyes that you missed? And by the way, a lot of them are just expressing ideas that you can innovate on as well.
SW: Yeah, and one of the things as I’ve been working with my own customers and talking to them, one of the things that they have been doing during the past few weeks in shutdown and a lot have had to furlough staff and different things. They’ve been just trying to call people, right? Stay in touch with your members, but that’s incredibly difficult to do at scale when you’re talking about thousands of people.
BM: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I hope everybody’s trying to really communicate with their members right now. This is no time to be shy. We should all be heavily communicating with our customers. I always like to couch communication as conveying meaning and gaining understanding. People are mostly doing one way communication instead of asking, instead of saying, “Going into this, this is what we saw, we would like your feedback right now.” Because we’re going to use that feedback and understand your feedback in a way that we can make improvements to products, processes, whatever. The things that you need to make improvements to so that those members now are saying, “Boy, I trust what you’re doing more.” Because that’s going to be a huge deal. Do I trust you to keep me safe?
SW: Absolutely. Blair, I think that leads us into the next piece, which is that the MXM team has developed a shutdown survey in direct response to that.
BM: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I’m going to talk about the main three themes we saw going into this, and then the one that we saw as the shutdown came in. When we talk about this shutdown survey, I want you to realize that it is informed by tens of thousands of pieces of feedback that we saw going into this. There are three kind of key themes, and then I’ll actually give you the experience of taking the survey. Remember, what is it you’re trying to get done? And the thing the customer is trying to get done is to come in and feel good about their exercise and their workout. The fears are escalating as you’re going into the shutdown and now, the problem to solve for clubs is how do I get back to business sort of as usual?
It’s not going to be as usual. What is that new? What is the new usual going to look like? And how do I get there as soon as possible so I can get the most members happy and the most members coming in as soon as possible? I’m going to take you through the three themes first here. The first theme is, and I want you to think of this as how satisfied the customer is. That you are following best practices and expert advice on cleaning and sanitizing. Generally, when I say that you need to think well, how the heck would the member know if I’m following best practices on cleaning and sanitizing? And the answer is… This is a communication question because you’ve communicated it really well.
Because if you’re not communicating it really well, you’re not building trust. Communication has to happen in voice, but it also really has to happen in action. If you’re saying you’re doing best practices, then people actually have to come in and see that play out. This interpretive dance of best practice is that I can watch and I can say, “Wow, I do think you’re following best practice.” That was a first theme, is not following best practice. Two is you make it really easy for me to clean and sanitize equipment before and after usage. Ease is the key point here. By the way, all of these have their own nuances depending on your location.
Third one is how easy you make it to sanitize hands. Oftentimes we think we’ve made it easy and then the voice of customer comes in and they point out the obvious to us or sometimes the nuance that is not making it easy for them. So those were kind of the three main themes going in after the shutdown started, then the feedback comes in around how you handled my membership going into this. So those are sort of the four key themes around the shutdown, but we’re also trying to understand a couple other things and so I’ll share my screen and take you just directly into the survey. Okay, and you can all see this now?
SW: I can.
BM: Okay. One thing I want to point out is that it’s super easy to get started. It will not carry our logo; it will carry whatever your logo is and you’ll be sending it out and providing a subject line and an invitation to take the survey. But, let’s just quickly go through this. I don’t want spend… Relative to your experience with us before and during the shutdown, how satisfied are you with the following; We’re following expert advice. Made it easy to clean and sanitize before and after. Made it easy to sanitize hands. The handling of your membership. Now we’re trying to understand a couple other things that sort of go right to the core purpose of clubs and organizations.
How confident are you that you’ll be able to maintain regular exercise during this period? We’re seeing this consistently being the lowest score, which should be good news for a lot of people, right? This is consistently the lowest score. I’ll add this: if they give you a low score and they also leave contact information you have a major opportunity there, right? But you might be doing a lot of digital programming and stuff that you can vector them to. You might also have just picked up a potential personal training client when you start to reopen. Then lastly, how likely to continue to come back into exercise once we reopen. The metrics are critical here, because you will be able to benchmark against everybody in the system.
It’s anonymous, and you won’t be able to see them they can’t see you, but you’ll know how you’re ranking. Now if you have multiple locations, you will be able to rank your locations, but we have industry wide benchmarking in here. Then lastly, and this is intended just an open box. We don’t want to pick list here that says what’s most important to you? Is it social distancing? Is the cleaning? Mm-mm (negative). We just want a text, we want you to say anything you want that’s most important to you hear because we have very powerful text analytics on this. That’s it. It doesn’t take long to finish it. That’s how it flows, and I’m going to take you in to some of the reporting here. Okay, did my screen shift? I hope it did.
SW: It did.
BM: Okay. What I’m going to share with you is real data. I’m protecting it by just showing you… I’m there? Yes, I’m still here. By just showing you our two locations here. This is what you would get. I’m going to give an example of how fast you actually get this information. We brought on three clubs this morning, they sent their feedback out, they sent their invitation on feedback out. I think it was around 10AM this morning, and the owner texted me and he said, “It went out. We already have six responses.” By the time I went in and looked, I emailed him back and I said, “Well, you now have 660 responses.” Now one of the things that’s important if you’re a practitioner on this remember, you don’t have to close the loop on all these cases.
Not all of these are not going to be leaving you even contact information. I’m going to lay out sort of four levels of value that you’ll derive from this. From I’m all by myself and we have 10 locations, what am I going to do with this information? To you have some people that have some capacity to do some work. I’m going to take you through those four levels of value, but let’s just look at the dashboard. And by the way, my team that’s on here if you think I’m missing something here or need to slow down or make a bigger point, please jump in. This is what you’ll get. These are our own two clubs in Wenatchee, Washington. These are people that are giving us their feedback against those and we’ll just take a look at a piece of feedback here.
You can see what it looks like if you were to open up one of these. This person decided to give us their contact information and what we do at our clubs, we have some people that are not furloughed, that we’re paying and they’re actually doing some work. One of the high value things they’re doing is they’re responding back to customers that do leave us emails. I won’t bore you with what they said what we’re replying with, I guarantee it’s pretty good. “Getting back with my trainer, what’s most important is getting back with my trainer. Knowing things that are clean and safe. I’ve seen many people in the club not cleaning equipment after they use it.
They just walk to the next piece of equipment or sometimes they do a quick swipe, but not a good one. I think… Okay. Then how they scored us, and they’re not really confident maintaining their exercise, their likelihood to return is 10. That’s what a case looks like. I’m going to jump back out to the dashboard and we’ll just scroll through. The main metrics. Here we go. Right on your dashboard you’ll be able to see, so we have a very high likelihood to return and that’s good news. Confidence maintaining exercise is below a seven that is an opportunity and a way that we know now on social media how we need to be communicating out with all of our members.
One of the main metrics we’re measuring here, and you know in the survey is says handling membership. They like how we handle membership. We have made it easier and easier to clean equipment. Okay, and these are all really high scores, my preference is that we’re at 9.0 or higher on our clubs on everything. As we scroll down, we can see how Medallia Text Analytics is adding sentiment. It can even take a full sentence that’s parsed. “You make it really hard to clean and sanitize, but your people are friendly.” It can put positive sentiment on people are friendly and more negative sentiment on the first half of the sentence and I’ll show you why that becomes more and more important.
You need to be able to drill down and make this actionable. Here is all of your reporting that crossed here. Now, I’m going to go through these four layers of value that you can get, which actually is going to take me further to the right to begin with than I normally would. I usually work left to right, but I want to speak to the folks out there first that say, “I don’t have people that are going to be closing the loop on this. I don’t have employees that can review these and put their own ideas in here. It’s me and what am I going to do with 2,000 responses?” I’m going to take you through that right now.
Jenny Hymer: Hey, Blair.
BM: Yes, Jenny.
JH: Sorry, everybody. I don’t have my camera on because of internet issues. Can you go down to the Likely to Come Back score? The return right there. I just wanted to share with everybody during this time, it’s kind of everybody’s uncertain. We’ve had lots of people that had lots of customers and non-customers come in with this information and say, it’s brought tears to their eyes. Because just knowing that people are going to come back and having that feedback saying, “No matter what we trust you to do the right thing. We can’t wait to come back.” All of this data is great, but just knowing that how your people are feeling is that warm, fuzzy during kind of this gray time, I just had to say that.
BM: Oh, no, Jenny, I love that. I love it. One of the big things here as I go through these four values is what Jenny’s doing. She’s humanizing all of this big data. That’s one of the pieces of value that you’re going to get out of this in using that to communicate with your furloughed employees or all… We’re all trying to engage two different constituents here, right? We’re all trying to engage our members and keep. We don’t want our members to become unmoored from our culture, but we also do not want our staff to become unmoored from our culture. When you can take these incredible positive responses and use those as sort of free morale and free energy that you can be sending out to your team sitting at home, especially those that really speak to the brand that you are.
The ones that Jenny said, “Bring tears to your eyes,” you’re actually humanizing all this big data. Jenny, I appreciate that. Now, what I’m going to do is I’m going to look at I’m just one person, and I have all this data. Let’s go to MX Review. This stands for member experience review and it’s so straightforward. You have two tabs MX report and benchmarking. You don’t need to be an analyst or a researcher to understand what this means. On top of that, each of these are dynamics. If I were worried about the ease of cleaning equipment, and I have less than… But it’s only 0.4%. But I could immediately click through to that and I can get all the responses… That’s great only two.
Of people that scored us a zero to three on that metric. It’s this immediate click through and I would encourage and I would go back to MX review here. That one of the things that you can do, and depending on how many locations, how many people you have, but right down to the location level. People that are not furloughed, if they’re focused on their location could be here and simply be starting with the zero to threes and move left to right and be looking at the information and reading the comments so you can understand what people are seeing. What you’re seeing through the members eyes. This is very simple. The next is benchmarking and let’s take a look. I’m going to just switch the filter here. I’m going to select just our Wenatchee location for example and just run.
JH: Hey Blair, while set those filters I just want to mention a couple of things. These questions are set for the very reason that you’re showing right now. You can’t go in and edit the questions, it’s very, very basic, very minimal just to get a sense of how people are feeling. You can use that and Blair’s going to cover that more. I just wanted to throw that in, but I do want to remind everybody it’s free. I also want to just say that because of this, what Blair is showing you here, the benchmarking the questions are set, we cannot change those.
BM: I also want to emphasize that we know this space cold. We know actionable data, we know survey design, actionable data and the fitness space. We know it from an enterprise level right down to leading a front desk team. These are what we would call key shutdown metrics right now. I can benchmark my location. You’ll see there’s 249 with enough data to be in the reporting. As of Friday, we just went over 500 clubs in here. You’re going to see these numbers go up quickly during this week, but it’s nice to see, right? Our Wenatchee location on likely to return is currently ranking seven, on maintaining exercise an 85 and pretty high on cleaning equipment, sanitizing hands, following guidance and how we handle dues.
Okay, what does that mean? I have that score, what does it mean in the broader context of things? Now, what would I do if it was low here? I would be digging into the data and figuring out how I need to communicate out with all of my members to make clear what we’re doing with their dues. Okay, that’s MX review, it has two tabs report and benchmarking. I’m just one person, I can start to look at the data and then understand it better, but I’m going to take you into text analytics here. Now what I’m going to do, instead of just my two clubs, I’m going to reset this filter and you won’t be able to see the clubs. There are tens of thousands of responses.
Here’s what’s happening here. It’s taking that open box where I said we didn’t want a pick list, that we wanted them to kind of freeform on what’s most important to them when they come back. The text analytics is creating the topics, we’re not doing that. The machine is actually taking the words and the sentiment and creating it. You can see what the two biggest topics are, what are the two biggest things all of these tens of thousands of members are talking about? Wipe and equipment. When I hover on that, you can start to see some subtopics so let’s dig into that now. Just with one click, I can start to break this down. Wipe station, wipe towel, wipe continue, wipe maintenance, wipe clean, hand wipe, availability wipe, wipe equipment, let’s break that one down.
Now I can start to dig, wipe equipment availability and now I’ve got the topics over here that I can read and expand on. If I just want the most negative, I can take negative and strongly negative, I can apply that and now I can start to see and start to understand through the members eyes what exactly is happening and where they are commenting because you’ll miss some things, I promise I know we do. We miss some things. I didn’t realize I should have saniwipes in the locker rooms now that I think about it so that they can wipe off handles of lockers and stools and benches when they use them. I didn’t realize is that nobody could see our hand sanitizer because they’re all black or… Okay.
The first layer of value, get the data dump, research it, come up with the key areas that you need to make changes. That’s the first level. Second level, if I have people that can be… Now I’m going to go back here to the read and reply section. Wait a minute, I’m going to stop my share for a minute until I switch it just to my own clubs here again. Our own clubs, so that way I can share anything with you. Okay, here we go. These are just our two clubs now, I’m in read and reply and I can look at each of these cases. Let me just take a look at one of these cases, I’m going to open it up and just… we do have people reading these.
Let’s say we said okay, the highest value thing we can do, we don’t have enough people to be closing the loop with everybody, but we can certainly analyze and decide what we’re going to do. We can have our team start to read these and put their own ideas in here. I’m going to click on process case and you’ll see that I can say okay, they had a suggestion, and we actually do have something in here now. As the team member, your improvement ideas. We need to have saniwipes stations in the locker rooms for members to disinfect locker handles and bench seats. We can also put zip ties on lockers to limit usage and distance. Okay, so I’m imagining that is zip ties on five one open or something like that.
Maybe we can move some cardio equipment… This member probably said something about them being in too close together or something like that. We can move some cardio equipment into the kids club until they have to get open since that will be phase three and we can operate with social distancing at that time. This is something interesting that we’re starting to see come up. Okay, we have to have every other piece of equipment available to maintain social distancing, but some places and probably a lot of you out there have basketball courts and kids clubs, people aren’t going to be playing basketball. Maybe there’s a way to not limit the number of equipment, but move it into some of that unused space so that more and more people can actually exercise.
Okay first level value, evaluate the big data, make some decisions figure out what’s most important, understand process, physical plan, changes that need to be made. Second level, capture ideas from your teams by having them go in and look at the information. Third Level, I’m going to go back to here. Third Level is okay, we’re getting great information and we have a whole lot of people leaving us contact information and I have some people that need to be doing some work, let’s close the loop with them and engage with our members. You can see here in this one, I have the ability to just reply directly to this person right here. It’s already populated with my information here and I can say, “Hi, Jennifer.”
And I can just say, “Thank you very much for the suggestion. This gave me an idea as well. I hope you’re staying safe and we’ll see you when we reopen.” And that’s going to send and everything’s going to get captured right inside this system. I’ll go back. One, analyze the data make decisions. Two, your team can be innovating and giving their ideas. Three, people can be also closing the loop with customers. The last level of value I would say was what Jenny brought up at the beginning. Take these comments that are so powerful, and share those out with your teams that are at home. I’ll remind you that this is free. I’m going to I’m sorry. I’m going to back up to something here Saranda. Forgive me here while I’m opening up-
SW: No, you’re good. I think those four value points, those are good. This all looks great. How do all of these clubs get this?
BM: All right. Let me stop my share and give you back there. Saranda, can I take this on here really quick?
SW: Let’s come back to this when we get down to look at opening up. Maria, go ahead and go to the next one and let’s talk about how just the shutdown survey. Yup.
BM: Andrew or Jenny?
SENDING OUT THE SURVEY IN THREE SIMPLE STEPS
Andrew Nelson: Yeah, thanks Blair, Maria, Saranda. It’s boiled down to three easy steps for everyone to get started. We know that it’s a difficult time and many of you are understaffed so we tried to make it as easy as possible. You really only need one user to get up and running, that’s a person that can just read and understand what’s going on. We’re happy to set up more if you need them to handle the responses if you want to reply as Blair was demonstrating. It’s as simple as going to mxmetrics.com, following our link to the free survey that’s there and filling that out. It’s just a simple form with just a few questions to get you up and running.
If you do have more than three locations that you’re running, it helps us to do a bulk import with a spreadsheet. We’re happy to send you that spreadsheet if you will just contact us directly. We’re going to provide the email and the links in the follow up email that come after this for you to get in touch with us. Once you’ve filled out that form, we get everything set up on our end as quickly as possible. And our customer success team, which includes Jenny will reach out to you with the link you will include in your email, as well as a template for sending that which I think will also be in your materials. We’re really making this as easy as we can to get going.
They will schedule training so you can see the system in action. In fact, if you get your email out, you can see it in action with real data and start to understand how to read and reply and manage that data. If you need more users later, we can add them then, so don’t worry about getting everyone in the system immediately. Get that key person or people who need to be trained and we’ll go from there. At that point, it’s as simple as getting that link out and getting responses back.
JH: I’m just going to pipe in on top of what Andrew said. As you can tell, Blair and all of us on our team here at MXM are very passionate about what we do, about connecting with your members. We have lots of data, it’s hard to limit us to talking to a certain time limit so we did task Saranda with keeping us on time here. To Andrew’s point, once you click the link to sign up, you guys it’s super simple. You’ll get a link from our team and this link is a unique link that you will put out in an email blast from your system. I think Saranda and Maria will chat with you guys about maybe some ideas on how that works. And then you send out that email blast and then kind of the next steps are getting logged in. All of that stuff is taken care of via email. We have training videos, we have live trainings, all that stuff is at your fingertips.
SW: I think Blair go back to the part where you needed to circle back is this is available for everyone complimentary right now.
BM: That’s right and I saw a question about a survey for tennis club. This is a survey for a tennis club. That’s why it says exercise and not workout by the way. We recognize that and we have a lot of tennis clubs using this right now.
SW: As Andrew mentioned, we will have all of these links included in the follow up email as well. So if you’re interested in wanting to get started you definitely can. Blair let’s move into… I guess just recap, recap real fast. We went into this COVID crisis, you were already seeing information coming in from clubs you already had using this tool. You’ve developed a simple survey to offer it up to everyone just to give feedback during this critical time that were shutdown. Because I know I am and all of us are looking forward to when we can open up facilities, right? What does that look like and what have you seen in terms of… You started getting into it, even from the feedback it’s all-around sanitation and this is a perfect time to learn. What else have you seen in terms of looking forward to when we open facilities backup?
LOOKING FORWARD TO RE-OPENING
BM: Yeah, so a few things. We actually are going to be coming up with a restart, what we call a healthy club survey that’s also free and will also be deployed the same way and it will map back to these metrics. As you’re looking at this data and saying this is what people were saying when we were shut down and we made these changes. Now, when you open execution is everything. Is it happening and what are people saying and are they feeling confident and comfortable? We’ll have both of those stages of the customer journey. There are five, I do want to point out now five areas that we’re saying. Think of these as five strategic directions that we’re seeing in all this data.
TAKING ACTION AND COMMUNICATING WITH MEMBERS
BM: I did these like a list of ingredients on a cereal box like the one that’s the noisiest and then tried to create a strategic direction without a bunch of noise and tactics around it. The first thing is and you saw in one of those comments, clubs need to make every member an extension of housekeeping. Our VP of Sales, Dale, is probably cringing because he doesn’t like the idea. I wouldn’t use this as your marketing, but this is the strategic direction. What’s happening right now is when people see other people not clean off the equipment, they look at it as bad social behavior. It’s almost like they’re watching somebody break into a car out on the street.
They know that’s bad behavior. Somehow, you’ve got to get… That starts with making new laws and new expectations. Second one, because of number one, everybody on your staff have to become what we call compliance ambassadors. We know for seven years some of the biggest drivers of loyalty are staff friendliness and club cleanliness. Staff members have to be able to hold members accountable and still drive up your staff friendliness so that means compliance ambassador training. It’s not a memo you send out, think about how you’re going to train people. The third one is whatever tools you’re making available to your customers to clean and sanitize they must be broadly distributed.
That could be any number of ways. Do you have a cleaning bottle on every single piece of equipment? Maybe. If you’re using saniwipes you got to have those, you’re going to have a lot more than you did before. Go through an exercise, go walk through as though you’re doing an exercise, do a customer journey walk and just see how long it takes you or how far it is to go get something to execute cleaning and sanitizing. Three and two are driving number one in this. Number four, hand sanitizing also must be broadly distributed. Until people get really educated about some of the new hand sanitizers that are out there that can kill for four hours until that’s out there, then it has to be broadly distributed as well.
By the way, broadly distributed could mean that they can carry it with them. The idea is you’re going to have to innovate on these. Last one is your best practices have to be well communicated. Right now, there are so many clubs that have gone radio silent on their marketing and advertising. At our own clubs, we’ve doubled that budget because we’re listening to our customers, we’re making changes and that’s the very thing that we’re out there communicating. Here’s what we’ve changed. So that’s the five broad strategies. As you get your member feedback coming in, your tactics should roll up probably under those five.
SW: Yeah, absolutely. Help me understand a little bit in terms of timing because we all saw the federal suggested guidelines come out last week. States are all making their own decisions and hopefully we’ll see a lot of that coming in over maybe this week even as early as May 1st. Timing wise in terms of getting a survey out like this so you can actually start coming up with these action plans, is it too late? Or I guess help us understand timing?
BM: No. Right up until… You could probably be running that shutdown survey right up until even a few days after you open and the thing about that is the reason this is so often is because this is a data dump. Normally we’re huge believers in operational, so on a daily basis you’re only in taking as much as you can manage. Here you don’t have to close the loop on everything. Within 48 hours like I mentioned, these guys just went live this morning, they have three clubs and I’m eager to see when they cross a thousand responses today. But all of that information is going to come in at once and you’ll immediately have relevant data to start analyzing and making decisions on immediately. And by the way, the club I’m talking about I talked to them Friday afternoon was when I discussed them going live these three clubs in the Seattle area, they went live this morning. That’s how fast we can execute.
QUESTIONS
SW: That’s awesome. I think we’ve covered all of the main topics so let’s move into some questions because I think some more will come up. For those of you joining us today you can either use the chat option or the question option in the bottom of the Zoom panel and we will talk through those. A couple of questions, I think Blair you probably saw this one as well. I could just speak to again the questions that are in the survey and why those are the set questions that they are.
BM: Okay and I think Dale had something he wanted to mention about the tennis question too.
SW: Okay.
Dale: Actually, you could take it on, and I was just going to explore that it’s not clear to me which questions wouldn’t apply to a tennis situation unless people… Because none of them are about a specific club activity. I think you’re better to take it better than I am.
BM: Well, I’ll say that there has not been any confusion with the tennis club we’ve gone live with the group in and around Chicago and many others. So John you don’t have anything to lose running that. Towel service strategy, I’m going to take these on as they’re coming in or do you want me to triage?
SW: Actually, before you go to that one definitely we’ll get to the towel because I bet that will be a good topic. But before, I guess, go back to someone is interested we just talked through the survey. All it is, is set up an account, you get a survey link, you blast it out to your members and I can definitely help for those depending on which system you use in terms of how you would blast out to email. But that’s free so is there any sign up contract strings attached? Make that crystal clear.
BM: No, it’s super clear. We’re not asking to integrate your data into our system we’re not asking, you send it out. Our templates by the way, we talked about templates for subject line and body and then copy in the email it’s a recommendation. We’ve done it many different ways, but that’s our recommendation. You can do it how you want to.
SW: Perfect. Thank you. I just wanted to make sure. I know that would be a question for everyone. So yeah, based on information that you’ve gotten even from your own club so far, do you have ideas on how the towel service will change?
BM: Yeah, a lot and also, I want to emphasize something else on here. You’re also not signing anything that says, “Oh, it’s free for three months and then my subscription.” It’s nothing like that you guys. Look URSA got canceled, we’re trying to figure out immediately how can we provide a bunch of value out to the industry? We decided we’re probably sitting in the spot to provide as much value as possible to people so they can actually bounce out of this as fast as possible. So several things on towel service on different levels. What we’re changing in our own clubs instead of having the spray bottles out on the floor with towels on the spray bottles, we’ve removed all those and we’ve purchased black microfiber personal cleaning towels.
When a member comes in, they will receive a white terry cloth sweat towel and then a black personal cleaning towel. Right now, we’re doubling up all the bottles so there they will be on almost every piece of equipment. There are also other things they have to think about there. When do you fill the bottles? What are we putting in the bottles? If we’re using Ozone how long does the Ozone last? If we’re using aluminum chloride do people… There’s a lot of stuff that you got to think about on that. So that’s one way that’s changing the other way we’re changing it is with what we’re putting in the laundry and what type of disinfectant we’re using in the laundry. We’ve been able to source some product called My-shield that we’re going to be using as a disinfectant in the laundry.
SW: Great. One of the questions that just came in and I think we had discussed talking about this when we were moving so quickly, we never circle back. I know that from once they sent out the survey you can benchmark yourself against other clubs, but is there also a forum or some kind of community where you can actually talk through different topics with others?
BM: Yeah. So it just so happens that we have another technology Medallia purchased that technology [inaudible 00:44:03] city and we have that platform and when you go into mxmetrics.com you’ll actually see the free shutdown survey and something that we call the MXM Idea Lab. It is also free. The way Idea Lab works it’s a crowdsourcing ideation and innovation platform. There are certain problems and it’s all centered on this COVID-19 shutdown right now. In fact, this morning, Andrew and I were on a call this morning and I said, “There’s a really big problem to solve right now that we need to get framed up and put out there so people can start putting their ideas in.”
And it’s how should we be turning on dues as we reopen if it’s going to be stairsteps into the reopening and it will just like it was going into closing. How do we understand whose dues, who should be allowed in and how am I going to schedule people? That discussion is happening everywhere in the industry right now so we’ll be putting that problem to solve out there as well. That information is also on our website that too is free for anybody to participate in.
SW: Perfect. I saw another maybe another question that came in going back to the email, so getting the survey out and you have an example and actually for those of you… maybe I won’t to JCC on the call that use as you engage, but actually have a template built out from the MXM team using their best practice. Will you walk me through just… Maybe it’s Andrew or Jenny. What is that email best practice to get the best response rate and what has been your response rate on average?
JH: Andrew.
BM: Andrew.
AN: Well, I can give you the response. I don’t have the email in front of me right now, but it’s just a basic email introducing them to the situation that we’re in and inviting them to provide feedback so that we can better serve them upon reopening. The response rates are ranging from the mid-teens up into the 30s. It’s really crazy the amount of response we’re seeing from these people in some of the clubs. I think it’s one is that they’ve got a lot of time to think about it, but we’re just pleased that we’re-
JH: And they miss.
AN: Yeah, and they miss us. Yes, Jenny that’s right. [crosstalk 00:46:30] that opportunity.
BM: And I’ll tell you what else to increase your response rates on this and we’re doing this in our own clubs. We’re going on our third wave of doing this this next week, so it’s not like you just have to run out once. We ran it the first time. Then we pulled anybody that gave us contact information, we removed them from the list. We pushed it back out again and said, “Our apologies if you’ve already responded, but we want your candid feedback.” And so we pushed that out now we pulled it again, then we’re cleaning it from the people that gave us their email and then we’re going to send it out in a third wave. We think before we’re done, we’ll probably be at a 45, 50% response rate when we’re done with all our waves.
SW: That’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone sending out a survey with that kind of response rate.
BM: Yes.
SW: All right. Let me look through a couple more questions here. Blair you touched on the… We’ve obviously been focused on the shutdown survey, so what is the feedback you get from members right now? And then again, hoping we’re opening up in some kind of capacity very soon, walk me back through that healthy club survey in terms of… Because there’s going to be a lot of new policies, new ideas that you took from this one, right?
BM: Yup.
SW: How does that help the club survey fit into maybe all of the new policies you’re putting in place?
BM: Yeah, that’s an awesome question and that’s why the open box, that’s why having text analytics especially, this kind of text analytics is so critical. Because you don’t have to lead the witness too much in asking them how things are going. They can riff with what they see and what’s top of mind to them and then your text analytics can pull that out of there. Right now, going in I would say yes, it’s a great way to gauge policy that you should be considering and putting in place. I also have to say whenever you’re considering policies that are going to go in place, you must think about the enforcement of those policies in a consistent way that is member centric. You have to and that means there’s going to be training that has to take place.
There should be maybe some short training videos, some role playing, and it may have to be everyone. We are actually creating our own compliance ambassador training and will literally be for 100% of our employees. Group fitness, housekeeping, maintenance, front desk, kids club, everybody’s getting trained on that same module of compliance ambassador training. So then you’re going to look at this and you’re going to have to make these changes. So then afterwards, this then is going to interpret what people are seeing and feeling so you have a much better understanding if those policies are working. Make sure the way that you’re implementing them are not doing violence to the member experience.
SW: That’s great. Everyone, feel free to continue to enter questions as you have them. I think we’re nearing the top of the hour. Blair, Andrew, Jenny any final thoughts? I think this is a stressful time, we’re all trying to figure out how to navigate this situation, but any words of encouragement or final thoughts for the group?
BM: I’ve got one, do not overthink this. Don’t waste time, don’t overthink it, you will get the most valuable information, but it is important that you move now. You’re never going to be in this type of situation again to get this type of intimate feedback from your customer. I just would say, “Don’t delay, just move with it.”
JH: And I-
AN: I’m going to… Go ahead Jenny.
JH: I just want to quickly say that I’ve had a lot of feedback about people saying, “Well, we’re already communicating, we’re making phone calls, we’re sending our own emails.” That’s okay, you have this link. It’s a quick simple you can put this into any kind of email template you think. We have our suggestions because we know what works, but if you want to put it into a format that you’ve already sending out, or if you’ve just sent one out, that doesn’t matter. You guys you’re still going to get great feedback and it’s not going to be bombarding the members at all.
BM: Although I have to pile on that one Jenny because I’ve not seen as higher response rates when it’s buried in something else. I’ve not seen-
JH: I agree but it’s better than not doing it.
AN: I’m going to go with the same thing which is that better move sooner than later particularly because we’re offering the rebound and we all hope that’s coming as soon as possible. It will give you a real good feel for how your members felt before and after. Being able to do the benchmarking and being able to do the analytics between time periods is extremely valuable. The other thing is, don’t be afraid. So many people have come into this and been afraid of the feedback they’re going to get. Your members do love you and they generally tell you that. It’s really amazing how positive supportive the members have been of the clubs who’ve done this survey. They really appreciate it.
BM: Yup.
SW: Great. Thank you all so much for joining us today. So just to wrap us up a little bit. So we’ve talked through a lot of questions and gotten several but as a follow up to this webcast, we did record this so if you want to share this with someone else on your team. As a part of registering or logging in today, we’ll be sending a follow up email that will include the recording of the webcast as well as the links that we shared earlier to get to them MXM site although some of you have probably already found it to be able to sign up. In terms of this, for Daxko and Club Automation this all just fits within what we have already been offering as a rapid recovery toolkit. You don’t have to go through us, this is going straight to the MXM team. This is just something that we thought was so valuable actually invaluable during this time and very critical. I wanted to make sure to be able to share this with you all.
BM: Awesome. thanks, Saranda.
SW: Yeah, thank you all so much.
AN: Thank you.
SW: Everyone have a fantastic day. Thank you for joining us.
BM: Thank you.