Strategies For Improving Customer Service For A Gym Essay.

Fit and Fab is a well-established CBD gym.  It currently employs a manager, two assistant managers, four Reception/customer contact staff, four full-time personal trainers, two casual personal trainers, and has eight independent personal trainers on its books.

You are the Team Leader of the Reception/Customer Contact Team.  Critically, Fit and Fab continues to receive an increasing number of complaints. 

The staff at reception are young and inexperienced.  Recently, a couple of face-to-face complaints have been made by particularly irate customers at times when no senior staff were available to help the customer service staff.  The complaints rattled the young staff, and one girl ended up crying.

Based on your knowledge as a customer service professional, you have decided to hold a training session on how to deal with customers. 

You will need to:

1. List the main areas of customer service that are critical to the success of your gym.

2. Design a personalised survey form to help you measure customer satisfaction in regard to your customer service. 

3. Develop a procedure that outlines the expectations of your Reception/customer contact staff when dealing with customers over the phone and also face to face.

4. Describe the key points that you will cover in your training session.

5. Explain any considerations that should be covered in order to ensure that legislative requirements are met.

Main Areas of Customer Service

Fit and Fab is one of the renowned gym which has been serving their clients for a number of years. The gym has a good number of staffs who are assigned with their duties and are expected to provide the best service for their clients. However, presently, the organisation is receiving a large number of complains which have hampered the reputation of the gym. The complaints are coming even from the irate consumers who once had immense faith on the service of the organisation. Recent episodes of face to face complaints have really made the authorities to come on their toes and they are trying their best to research over the factors of client’s dissatisfaction. Therefore this assignment will mainly portray light on the recent issues that the gum is facing and how different strategies can be implemented to get over the issues. This assignment will highlight the improvements in the customer services that the gym needs and will also put forward the training needs of the employees of the gym.  The report which is provided below will be helpful for the managers to bring an overall change in the working conditions and hence the reputation of the gym would be revived.    

This assignment highlights the customer services that are critical for the success of the Gym. As given in the case study, the gym have been facing various complaints in the recent times. The gym has faced various complaints regarding the services provided. Most of the complaints focused on the area that the there was no experienced staffs in the gym, to guide the customers. As a customer service professional, the main areas of focus that needs to be considered are as follows:

It is essential that the customer service professional ensure the employment of senior staffs, with previous experience. Since the customers have been complaining that the gym lacked experienced staffs, hence the customer service professional have to employ senior staff members.   

The customer’s needs have to be understood by the customer service professionals and the needs have to be fulfilled. Moreover, in the gym each of the customers have unique requirements, according to the fitness programs suitable for each of the customers. Thus, the needs of each have to be fulfilled.   

While the customers have different workout routines, the gym trainer have to be experienced to understand the requirement of each of them, according to their requirements . If the needs of the customers are fulfilled successfully, then the complaints of the customers are likely to reduce.

Feedback to Measure Customer Satisfaction

Staff communication skills are one of the most important criteria that every staff members beginning form the senior to that of the juniors should all try to develop. Often communication within the clients will be handled with compassion, care and empathy so that the clients do not feel neglected. Their comments should be properly noted and their queries should be reverted back professionally but softly and carefully so that they do not feel that their suggestions are avoided. Proper listening skills, feedback skulls, speaking skills and others are very important to ensure consumer satisfaction.

It should be ensured by each and every staff members that they develop an entire knowledge about the products and services provided by the organisation. Failure to provide a good amount of clarification to a client about the service of the product, make the client apprehensive thinking that they are not supported enough with their query. Confusions and miscommunications among the staffs regarding different services and products would be clarifies by the trainers in the training sessions they should be provided with brochures containing information about the services and products, it should be ensured by the managers that all the staffs develop through knowledge of the services and products.

Attending customers who are disappointed and are complaining about service of products is a state of art in management hat every staff member should learn to handle. Aggression of a client who have not received the right kind of service or products will always be normal. Therefore handling such clients need sskill and experience. The skills and expertise sjould be developed by the staffs who attend them and therefore they should participate in training. The training should be hiven by a trainer who is himself or herself has handled the posiyion for many years. The trainors sjould discuss their own examples of lives and the various experiences they had in thir professions so that the nes saffs can gain an insight anouthow to handle the situations with wit and clarity.

Customer feedback is important because it helps the marketeers as well as the business owners to gain an idea about how they are perceived by their clients and also how they can improve their own business, products, services and overall customer experiences. It is important as they help to improve a product or service. It provides the best way to measure customer satisfaction. It also helps to give an actionable insight which helps in creation of the better customer experience. It also helps in improvement of customer retention. It also delivers tangible data which can be used to make better business decisions. It also helps to identify customer advocates. As an example, a questionnaire is attached in the appendix. It is believed that such procedure will help the managers to develop an idea about their present position among the consumer’s choice list and how they can develop the negative areas into positive attractive features to gain client’s trust.

Training Strategies for Staff Members

While dealing with the customers, the customer executive or the person at the reception have to be careful enough to ensure that the customers are dealt with care. The expectations from the customer contact staff include a courteous response while a query is forwarded to them. Moreover, the customer contact staff have to be experienced enough to deal with critical situations. As given in the case study, one of the inexperienced staffs started crying while the customers complained to her. Thus, lack of experience is not desirable. It is also expected that even if the customer service professional is not able to solve all the problems, she should at least assure the customers that their issues will be taken care. Thus, the efficiency and experience of the customer care professional is desirable. Patience, prompt thinking, customer handling abilities as well as clarity in communication are essential virtues that need to be possessed by the customer contact staffs. 

The training needs that have to be covered in the training session are as follows:

1. The training on the various types of the complaints that might come from the customers, along with the ways to deal with those have to be trained.

2. The clarity in communication with the customers have to be given training on .

3. The ways to deal with the issues of the customers with patients have to be trained on.

4. The training on handling the basic emergency in the gym as well as the basic first aid have to be taught to the employees of the gym as well.      

5. Meeting the legislative requirements

In order to ensure that all the legislations are met, it is essential that the gym gets a complete detailed medications of the customers, before that are admitted to the gym. The detailed medical report have to be analysed by experienced gym trainers, to ensure that the chosen gym regime is best suited for the person. An informed consent form has to be filled by the customers, such that the customers cannot charge the management of the gym in case of any dispute. The training environments where the customers are trained have to follow the basic safety requirements, such that accidents due to negligence do not occur in the gym. The gym needs to ensure that the trainer is qualified enough to work efficiently and train the customers efficiently. The physical conditions of the customers have to be checked every day before their training starts. This would ensure that the legislative requirements of the gym are met successfully.  The gym should clearly follow the important laws like WHS which will ensure that all the staff performs activities within the guidelines of the work health and safety. Privacy law is to be maintained by staffs where they cannot disclose any information of a client to one another as that would lead to breach in confidentiality. Moreover anti discrimination law should also be maintained where the staffs should never discriminate between the client regarding class, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic classes. If all the legislations are followed by the gum and the staffs, they can be ensured of not getting entangles into any legal conflicts with any parties.

1.  Have regular staff meetings to keep everyone informed. Staff meetings allow people to share information with everyone, face-to-face. 

2. Properly analyse the customer feedback forms in order to research the negative feedbacks. Initiatives should be taken to work on them and make the situations better.

3. Slot allotment should be done such that no situations arise where he seniors are entirely absent from the work floor. Allocation should be such that a senior staff s always on the ground with the juniors to handle adverse situations.

4. Monthly trainings should be conducted so that new issues which come up every month can be discussed and the juniors get properly trained accordingly.

Conclusion

Thus, the service areas that needs to be focussed are highlighted in this assignment, along with fulfilling the legislative needs of the gym. The expectations of the customer executive staffs have been also presented, along with a questionnaire that collects feedback from the customers.

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