Understanding Your Members
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'Understanding your customer' is crucial to the success of every business.
This proposition is even truer in the private club industry. Check out our common sense approach and the tools you have at your disposal to better 'Understand Your Members'.
An unhappy customer may stop patronizing your business. An unhappy member will be back tomorrow and everyone at the club will know about his or her bad experience. A happy member is your best advertisement for a prospective new member.
Having a profound understanding of your members will allow you to provide a level of service which meets and even exceeds their expectations. Membership retention, new membership origination and maximizing of discretionary spending will be bi-products of understanding your members.
What tools do you have at your disposal which will allow you to better understand your members? There are four key tools which you can use.
Intuition, also known as ‘gut feel’, is your innate sense about a situation. You respond using your judgment and feelings, without the benefit of outside information or feedback. Sometimes you are right, sometimes you are wrong. Some people have better intuition than others.
Advice
Using your intuition to make a decision can be dangerous. Intuition is best used to assist in developing hypotheses which can be evaluated and proved using other tools at your disposal. |
Experience is somewhat similar to intuition but your judgment is based on past experiences in a similar situation. The more and diverse your experience, the more valuable a tool it will be.
Advice
Experience is an invaluable tool and should be used in conjunction with other tools available to you. |
Feedback is explicit information received from others. Feedback can be obtained from polls and questionnaires, suggestion boxes, asking questions at a Board meeting or casually interacting with your members as you make your rounds at the club. It can also be obtained from your peers at chapter association meetings or by calling them and asking specific questions about similar issues at their clubs. Feedback can be either objective or subjective and is invaluable information for assisting in making decisions.
Advice
Information gathered through direct feedback is invaluable. Develop as many means as possible to obtain and catalogue feedback as a regular part of your management process. | Data Mining is the process of extracting implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information from your club’s data. During day to day operations, clubs collect volumes of useful data about their members. Whether the data is collected from the POS system, the website or the reservation system, it is invaluable information for better understanding your members.
Advice
Use the tools provided by your software vendor to extract and analyze your data. Just as an appraiser uses market data to establish a value estimate for a property, you can deduce an incredible amount about your members by data mining your club’s data. | Buz Software products provide tools to help you better understand your members:
Feel free to contact to better understand how to use these tools.
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