Fit And Fab Gym: Ensuring High-Quality Customer Service And Legal Compliance (Essay).

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.

Measuring Customer Service Effectiveness

The customer service not only remains limited to the front desk or the reception area of the gym but also other staffs who are providing the services to the customer by being the actual representative of the organisation (Schneider and Bowen, 2010). Considering this aspect the follow critical areas needs to be taken care of for the greater success of the gym.

• First requirement is the start of a communication between a staff and the customer. This is the beginning of the service need request from the customer end and for that the customer must find it easy to identify the appropriate staffs in the gym (Cook, 2017). Therefore for the customer ease uniform would be provided to the staffs and different department would have different colours of uniform. For example training and fitness instructor would have oregano colour, nutritionist green colour, and administrative staffs in formal attire.
• The next step is the actual communication and conversation with the customers. In this process first responsibility of the staffs would be to make their name and themselves familiar with the regular customers to make it easy for the customers. A smiling face with proper greetings to the customer would be important for the start of conversation. The staffs must address the customer by their name to become impactful in the conversation. The staffs must remain active in listening mode throughout the conversation and also must provide specific reply as per the customer’s quarry with great deal of care (Marandi and Harris, 2010). At the time of attending the customer the staffs must avoided any distraction from their mobile phones.
• The next step is delivering certain services. The staffs would have sufficient empowerment to customise certain service as per the customer needs (Schneider and Bowen, 2010). They should not behave as the staffs but as like the business owner as that would reflect their proactive and accommodating response to the customer needs.
• Customer comes with specific goal about their health and fitness. Training staffs must assess them in that process and also must provide continuous encouragement and evidence of improvement.
• Then there are services when things go wrong. The staffs must use the above empowerment to own the customer issues and respond proactively (Cook, 2017). Apologise after listening the problem and than them after solving the issue for being so patient in the process.
• The next step is to meet the expectation of the customer through continuous improvement process. Here a customer service need survey would be done to strategies customer satisfaction development.
• The last step would be recognising customers (Schneider and Bowen, 2010). Here rewards, loyalty program, some personal communication would be utilised.

Your experience of   Fit and Fab’s customer service

Negative Somewhat negative Positive  Somewhat positive

Do you find it easy to find the right staffs to avail your service need?

Easy Somewhat easy  Not so easy Difficult

Do you find the approach of the staffs friendly and reliable?

Agree Somewhat agree Disagree

Do the staffs understand your query?

Totally understand Understand well Somewhat understand   Does not understand

Do you find it quick enough to resolve your issues and meet your service request?

Very fast  Faster than expected   About to expectation  Slow Very slow

Do your find any proactive or customise approach from the service staffs’ part in meeting your requirement?

Every time Majority of time Sometimes Rarely

Do you find it easy to reach your fitness goals through the help of the fitness staffs?

Very easy Moderately easy Not so easy Difficult

Did you notice improvement in our service is last few months?

Yes No

Do you find special offers and communication attractive?

Yes Somewhat attractive No

Would you recommend any one about our services? (0 being not likely; 10 most likely)

0 2 4 6 8 10

Do you have anything to share?

The customer contact or the receptionist staffs at the time of dealing with the customer face to face or through the telephonic conversation must expect the following situations:

• The prospective customers may ask for the gym’s membership costs and the location.
• The prospective customer may want to know about the demographic pattern of the membership and ask for their appropriateness.
• Extra service questions may come with regard to same or additional cost structure. This came in the form of request also and if the service is not available in Fit and Fab, the receptionist must covey but retaining the interest of the customer (Evenson, 2017).
• There could be questions about the personal trainer and cleanness aspect of the service. Existing customer may have complaint regarding these issues and may want improvement or change.
• There could be issue regarding the functionality, quality and knowledge about some fitness equipment.
• Dissatisfied customer may ask for the membership cancellation. Here the staffs must be able to pursue the customer to remain.
• Sometime the staffs may expect violent outburst from the customer side about the service. The staff must keep patient and act as per the guidelines and scope (Evenson, 2017). The goal would be resolution of customer issue amicably.

These following points would be addressed in training sessions.

• Developing mind set of customer service. Judging the situation from the customer’s perspective is crucial here.
• Improvement of skills of customer service through providing training on aspect like patients, empathy, consistency, adaptability, ethical working, appropriate communication, knowledge development, developing a thick skin (Evenson, 2011).
• Cultivating the smiling approach of customer interaction and caring approach of service delivery.
• Customer relation development knowledge and skill development.
• Provide knowledge approach of every touch point based customer service.
• Customer interaction and experience improvement through the approaches like customer interest sharing, development of active listening approach, mistake admission and way to apologise, proactive actions, solution delivery and following up (Evenson, 2011).  
• Customer service goal and strategy sharing
• Customer’s feedback generation tools knowledge and usability.

Sales of Goods Act

The contractual part with the customer regarding the terms and condition of the products and services in Fit and Fab gym, warranties if any, terms of service, regulation of fair trading would be done in the training session to meet these legislative requirements (ablis.business.gov, 2018).  

Health and Safety Act

The business owner as per this law has strong responsibility in meeting the workplace health and safety needs of the employees as well as the visiting customers (business.gov, 2018). In the gym there would be different equipments, noise, and aspect of manual handling and so on. This knowledge would help the staff to maintain their and customer’s health and safety.

Data Protection Act

Fit and Fab would record many personal and sensitive information about the customers. Maintaining privacy, confidentiality, security and storage time of that information would be important as any violation may result in customer complaint and legal complications (Efa.org, 2006).  

Equality and discrimination

There are separate laws for the age, sex, racial, disability and other discrimination prohibition in Australia. Human Rights Commission of Australia is a statutory authority for monitoring that (humanrights.gov, 2018). In Fit and Fab there would be customer from different social background. Considering this an anti discrimination and equal opportunity aspect needs to be met by the staffs to serve customer effectively.

References

ablis.business.gov. 2018. Sale of Goods Act 1896 - Queensland. [online] Available at: https://ablis.business.gov.au/service/qld/sale-of-goods-act-1896/7298 [Accessed 22 Oct. 2018].

Business.gov. 2018. WHS/OH&S acts, regulations and codes of practice. [online] Available at: https://www.business.gov.au/risk-management/health-and-safety/whs-oh-and-s-acts-regulations-and-codes-of-practice [Accessed 22 Oct. 2018].

Cook, S., 2017. Measuring customer service effectiveness. Routledge.

Efa.org. 2006. Data Protection Laws in Australia. [online] Available at: https://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Privacy/privacy.html [Accessed 22 Oct. 2018].

Evenson, R., 2011. Customer Service Training. American Management Association, New York, pp.25-27.

Evenson, R., 2017. Customer service training 101: quick and easy techniques that get great results. Amacom.

Humanrights.gov. 2018. A quick guide to Australian discrimination laws. [online] Available at: https://www.humanrights.gov.au/employers/good-practice-good-business-factsheets/quick-guide-australian-discrimination-laws [Accessed 22 Oct. 2018].

Marandi, E. and Harris, J., 2010. The impact of perceived service provider empathy on customer loyalty: some observations from the health and fitness sector. Managing Leisure, 15(3), pp.214-227.

Schneider, B. and Bowen, D.E., 2010. Winning the service game. In Handbook of service science (pp. 31-59). Springer, Boston, MA