Love Your Leavers (Gym Owner Monthly Nov 2019)

This is a copy of the retention article from Gym Owner Monthly Magazine November 2019. You can read the original article and the rest of the magazine here.

Feedback from cancelling members can be the most powerful information that an organisation can get their hands on.

What can you tell me about your leavers? 
“They are moving away?” 
What else do you know about them? 

This is a common conversation I have with gym owners every month.

They say things like, “20% told us they were moving away. We know nothing about the rest” 
This does not mean that most of them are moving away. It means you know nothing about most of your leavers!

Listen, Learn, and Take Action

You need to listen to all your leavers, learn from them, and take action… if not to save them, then to save some more members from leaving for the same reason next month. Don’t be afraid of their feedback; you’ll get some hard truths, but they’ll be much more honest than your new members, who will all tell you that you’re wonderful.

Members leaving is not the first thing you want to think about when opening a gym (which is why we started with the onboarding article last month) but you need a process for leavers.

The Leave Process

One of the issues is that there are many ways to cancel. It would be nice if every member who wanted to leave phoned in, wrote an email, or visited the club asking to cancel. In reality, many members just cancel their payment. Before you get onto leave reasons, you’ve got to handle the payment cancellation. Once that’s done (or while it’s happening) you need to get the feedback. You could ping everyone a survey (some large operators do) but no one changed their mind about leaving after filling in a survey. It’s best to call the member first, try to have a friendly conversation about their reasons for leaving. You won't get to talk to everyone, but you do need to do your best.

Direct Debit providers

A lot of gym owners enjoy managing everything in-house, from payments to debtors, and cancellation calls. But it’s not for everyone, and many operators choose to outsource. DD providers do much more than collect payments and chase debtors. You should see Harlands massive contact centre at their HQ in Haywards Heath. A trained and dedicated team taking calls from gym members. They’re trying to resolve disputes and generally help people out. The gym is their customer though, so if you want feedback from your leavers, they’ll get it for you. 

Leavers Survey

Now you can follow up with a short survey to all leavers; both the ones you spoke to and those you didn't. You might imply that they must complete this form for their cancellation request to be processed (you’ll get more completions this way). Avoid drop down options or multichoice reasons and use free format comment boxes to get true feedback from your leavers. Sure, it's harder to analyse but it will be more honest, and therefore useful.

SOME MEMBERS WILL LEAVE YOU FEEDBACK IN ALL CAPS, OR EVEN VOCALLY IN CLUB. Try to keep listening, don’t interrupt, or become defensive. They’re getting it off their chest, and when they’re finished, you can think about whether you need to respond. All feedback is good, and if you ask for it, a lot of the feedback you get will be very positive.

Check the feedback daily (in case you can turn anything around on the spot) and collate weekly or monthly. If you're collecting high volumes of feedback, checkout tools like MyCustomerLens to show a sentiment dashboard across your sites or membership segments.

What we’ve learnt from leaver feedback

One of the most surprising findings from this kind of process, is that there are always people ‘leaving’ who don’t want to cancel. Either down to a bank error, misunderstanding or mistake at the front desk, there are always members who are immediately saved because they don’t want to leave!

Looking through leaver analysis on a MyCustomerLens dashboard, it’s interesting to see a lot of negative sentiment about customer service, cleaning, and contracts, as you’d expect. But there’s also often big issues with the processes; leaving and joining, and around Direct Debits too. Understanding where these issues are more serious (at which sites, for instance) is incredibly valuable, since these are all problems that you can address, therefore making a difference to your attrition the very next month. Taking action is better than finding out that the majority of members claim to be moving away, in the hope you won’t contact them again!

Analyse and Act

If you can stop any member from leaving, that's a bonus. But the main reason for collecting this feedback is to take action. Measure how many leavers you have feedback for, and try to improve data collection each month. Check for recurring themes, prioritise them if possible, and change what you can. When you're making changes, be sure to announce them to all your current members through your newsletter, social media or a good old-fashioned poster on the wall.

Finally, Say Thank You!

The other reason for listening to your leavers is to show them you care. At some point in the future they may well want to come back, and you want to leave your door open to them. When they give you feedback, be sure to reply, thanking them for their comments, advice or opinion, and thanking them for their business too. Sometimes you might want to close the door behind them, but if you handle it right, many will return one day.

Cancellation process

1. Talk to as many members who try to cancel as possible. 
2. If you can’t save them, send them an online cancellation form 
   Send the same link to the members you can’t get to speak to
3. Follow-up with a thank you
4. Process all feedback, look at all the results, take action