The Changing Face of the Customer.

The health and fitness consumers are changing faster than ever before. In the past, your customers used to compare you to the competition. Those people who were in your town, maybe in your local area, the same sector, and then slowly they started to compare you to online. Now your customers compare you to every customer experience they have with every brand they interact with. Not only that they look online at images of gyms from around the country, around the world and ask, why doesn’t our gym look like that?

Brands like Uber, Amazon, Netflix, Airbnb, among others have not only disrupted their respective industries, but have changed how consumers shop for products and services.

When customers are exposed to far better and more engaging and personalized customer experiences, they apply these newly raised expectations to other brands and industries.

You know that, far better, more engaging, personalized and more memorable customer experience. Remember when experiences are memorable, we are more apt to share them with our friends and family on social media. That has a huge impact on the business because now more people know that our business has a great experience and they know it from a really reputable source, not from the business, not from the CEO, but from an actual customer/members who happens to be a friend of theirs.

Your competition as a health club owner, studio or trainer isn't just the competition, although they're still there, of course. It's grown to include everyone who creates a customer experience. The customer's experience that you are delivering is being compared to a meal they had the night before at a great restaurant. Think about that, the meal at a nice restaurant and the waiter that's taking care of them and they have this wonderful experience and it might well be a big bill at the end of the night, but they don't even mind paying it because it's been fabulous food and great atmosphere.

Then the next day, they walk into your fitness business, or they go to your website or they talk to one of your staff and the expectation all of a sudden is that it should be as good as that meal they had the night before.

In today’s online offline world you are competing against Amazon, Netflix, Facebook and Google and all these popular sites that people go to, because they're the ones that set the standard for what a good experience looks like. 

Now your customer has expectations about what to expect from other brands, brands that continue to rise based on those experiences. Once they understand what a great experience looks like, they then want that all the time.

U in Manhattan, by David Barton

This is when people talk about a remarkable experience, right?

An experience worth making a remark about, and that's the core essence of word of mouth marketing. As we look at loyalty in general, it's really changing across the board because customer experience is changing so much.

I recently ran competitor analysis workshops in Sweden and Finland with a client where we started with the competition matrix, other health, and fitness providers in their markets. Then we looked at those businesses that compete for our customer’s time. Time that they could spend with us, time when they could be having experiences with us. Once we had completed a couple of additional areas it became apparent that your competition is everyone that your customers are interacting with.

Your customers have a fixed amount of disposable time and money each week and its now our responsibility to make sure that if they choose to spend time and money with you it needs to be an experience worth remarking on.

Your task

Your task now is to review your direct competitors, look at everybody that your customer maybe doing business with or a sampling of that, so that you can ask yourself whether your experience is as good as that.

Then sample those brands yourself, experience the brands that are doing really, really well with the customer experience. Then you will know what your customers see as a great experience, what that looks like and then you can mimic that in your own business.

I once joined four Low Cost High Volume (Budget) operators in one day, just to evaluate the joining process. It was remarkable just how different some of these experiences were. If you have done this in the past, do it again. Look at how this process might have evolved, what are they doing now, stay up to date.

Just don't wait for someone else to deliver a better experience than you can.