One of the most powerful tools in improving your fitness business, and the client experience, is to listen to your clients.

Not only will this improve the experience for your clients (thus leading to greater retention and referral rates), but it will also ensure that the environment and culture you’re creating will match that desired by your target avatar. Because remember, the avatar you’re targeting should match your current favourite and most valuable clients.

You clients can be the single best form of feedback about what you’re doing well and what you can do better. This is so important that’s it’s worth formalising the process in an annual survey.

There are multiple programs available to run online surveys, including getfeedback.com (used at Range of Motion) and Survey Monkey.

You’re looking for an honest and open assessment from your clients.

Let them know their opinion is very important to you. Tell them you would like to get their feedback on how you’re doing, and that the information they provide will help you to improve the experience for them and the entire community.

Make the survey anonymous so they can be honest and open.

Ensure they know that you’ll be listening and actioning their feedback – and making improvements and changes based directly on their feedback. Let them know you’ll release the results along with the changes you’re planning from the feedback.

Start with their basic demographic details – age and gender etc. Find some info about how they use your facility. How many times a week do they visit? What’s the average time they spend per visit? What services do they take advantage of?

Ask them about their primary goal for attending your facility. It’s useful to know that what people want matches what you’re delivering.

For most questions, it’s useful to first ask how they rate that particular element, then ask for ways to improve it.

The questions you can then ask are numerous and differ based on the services you provide. Depending on the business, here are some of the questions we recommend to Range of Motion Business Mentoring clients:

• How would you rate the effectiveness of the exercise sessions we give you for reaching your goals?
• How can our programming (the exercise we give you) be improved to better help you achieve your goals?
• How would you rate the suitability of our opening hours for your needs?
• How could our opening hours better suit your needs?
• How would you rate the cleanliness of the exercise facility?
• How would you rate the cleanliness of the bathrooms?
• How satisfied are you that we provide the facility and equipment you need for your goals?
• How could we improve the facility/equipment?
• How satisfied are you with the service your trainer provides you DURING your one-on-one sessions?
• How satisfied are you with the service you trainer provides you OUTSIDE your one-on-one sessions when you ARE NOT at the facility?
• How can your coach improve?
• What makes your coach AWESOME?
• If you could design your own perfect trainer, what three qualities would they have? (if your trainer already has these qualities, please still list them below). (This question is useful for staff professional development).
• How satisfied are you with the service ALL staff provide you when you’re training at the facility ON YOUR OWN (i.e. not one-on-one with your trainer)?
• How ‘cared for’ do you feel?
• If you’ve been away from the facility for more than one week at a time during the last 12 months, what was the reason? (this can help identify ways to keep people exercising).
• Are there any services or opportunities that we could provide you (that you would use) that we don’t already? (Be careful with actioning this one, there’s often a difference between what people say they want, and what they’ll actually use).
• Rate your sense of belonging.
• How could we increase your sense of belonging?
• Do we provide enough opportunities for you to interact with other clients in a social setting?
• Please rate the value for money you receive.
• How satisfied are you with your entire experience.
• What can we do to make your experience a HAPPIER one?
• How likely are you to recommend us to a loved one, friend or colleague? (this one is important as it gives you a Net Promoter Score (NPS), a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a businesses customer relationships).
• Have you referred a loved one, friend or colleague to us in the last 12 months?
• What can we do to make you more likely to recommend us to a friend or colleague? (Even if you already do).
• Think of the five people you spend the most time with in your life (who aren’t current clients). What would be the biggest barrier for them starting with us? (this allows you to identify and address pain points and barriers to entry).
• What are the three biggest things we could do to give you a more positive, beneficial and valuable experience.
• Is there anything at all we haven’t asked you that you’d like us to know?
• Can you think of three people who could benefit from our service? If you’d like to, please leave their name and contact details below and we’ll get in touch.
• If you’d like to, leave a testimonial below.

As you can see the questions are broad and extensive. But the survey itself is the easy part.

The real challenge begins when the survey results arrive.

The survey program you use will provide data based on the responses. This on its own will be useful and illuminating feedback.

It’s easy to take feedback and criticism personally. It’s normal and natural to respond like this. It can also be natural to become defensive. The advice is this. Take responsibility. It’s your business and the buck stops with you. If something is going right, it’s your fault. If something is going wrong that’s your fault too.

Once you have the feedback collated, you want to compile this into a report to be distributed to your clientele. The challenge here is to address every single comment. Every one. The last Range of Motion Client Survey Report was 114 pages. 1513 individual pieces of feedback from 89 people, with a response for each one.

This can take several weeks to compile, but if you’re serious about it, do it.

From the survey responses, you need to take action. Compile a ‘to do list’. From the last Range of Motion survey we identified 48 action items. We created a laminated poster which we stuck on the wall at Range of Motion with checkmarks next to each item, so our clients could see their feedback being actioned in real time.

People relish the opportunity to share their opinions. But they aren’t used to actually seeing any changes based on these opinions. Listen to your clients and action their feedback, it’s one of the most powerful sources of business improvement available to you.