Introduction
The competition at the leisure level today is very great and the investments made by many companies have been even greater, since given the impossibility of opening their facilities they have fine-tuned those possible business areas and prepare for the new one. season with the clear goal of impressing your customers.
It is clear that there are multiple factors when it comes to customer engagement, starting with a state of the facilities and neat and clean accesses, as well as good signage in all the areas to which they can go, but there are other factors that are the same or more important and to which surely not so much time is allocated and above all budget and it is a protocol of customer loyalty and welcoming.
Why is it important to engage your customers?
Regardless of the nature of our club, be it social / private or commercial, customer engagement is essential for long-term sustainability, as you can see in an EAE Business School post . We need to create “fans” of our facilities instead of clients and that they are the ones who will sell our club, a thousand times better than ourselves, since the impact they will generate by word of mouth will always be greater than the one we can generate by multiple sales channels that we have.
In the case of private clubs, where we have a “captive clients”, we need to generate a very large feeling of belonging, since it is a space that they will recur to either to play golf, paddle tennis, eat or simply go have a drink, because in our club they feel at home.
In the case of commercial clubs, the importance of loyalty is of the same importance, since if we “hook” our clients, it is very likely that they will want to repeat the following year, if we do it very well, they will be accompanied by another group of friends and if we are able to repeat this example with the majority of our clients, we will see how the forecast for the following year will look very encouraging, which will help us to “fill in the gaps” instead of having to sell and sell.
At NGM Golf & Sports Consulting we have developed customer engagement protocols and in this blog we give you 3 keys to be able to increase the satisfaction of your customers:
Create a welcoming plan
When you come to a new place, EVERYTHING seems strange to you. You do not know how to book a green fee or a tournament, where to buy the chips for the practice field or if it is through the club’s app, where the gym or the padel courts are, even when you arrive at the bar to ask for something you don’t know if you have to go in to order, they come to serve you, and so on. Have you ever felt this feeling? Hasn’t it made you a little anxious or a little overwhelming?
At NGM Golf & Sports Consulting we believe that the first experience offered in customer engagement, our customers, should be unique, fantastic and unforgettable, since when you “win” your customers and their perception is very good, they usually recommend your club to everyone, they can even justify small mistakes later since your club is the best, while if the attention you give at the beginning is zero, they may think that if this is the case at the beginning, the treatment offered at the club leaves much to be desired and It may happen that if there is an error or incident with that client, do not delay in leaving us, with the consequent bad name in your closest circle.
If we think about the event that we can organize for the age group between 4 and 14 years old, it has nothing to do with the one that we will organize for the 14 to 22 age group and so on. With good planning and a good recruitment of sponsors, as we explained in another article on our blog, the cost that you will have to assume will be minimal in economic terms, while if you think in terms such as loyalty, branding or brand image, the results they will be very very positive.
Creation of personalized events will improve your customer engagement
When we do an event as “club day” or the “anniversary party”, the resources that we must allocate in order to improve customer engagement is very large, since we have to attend to all groups and tastes at the same time with the consequent planning process.
At NGM Golf & amp; Sports consulting, we think that in addition to organizing the big event of the year, to guarantee customer engagement it is easier at an organizational level, at a budgetary level and planning to make a calendar of small personalized events for specific groups within your club. In this way the “feedback” of your customers will be more positive since they understand that you have specifically cared about their tastes and needs, where they are in an environment totally in line with their tastes.
If we think about the event that we can organize for the age group between 4 and 14 years old, it has nothing to do with the one that we will organize for the 14 to 22 age group and so on. With good planning and a good recruitment of sponsors, as we explained in another article on our blog, the cost that you will have to assume will be minimal in economic terms, while if you think in terms such as loyalty, branding or brand image, the results will be very very positive.
The cost that you will have to assume will be minimal in economic terms, while if you think in terms such as customer engagement, branding or brand image, the results will be very very positive.
A pre and post event communication plan will make the difference.
When we are thinking about customer engagement, one of the first elements that should come to mind is the creation of a communication plan to ensure that our new customers do not feel alone at all times.
If we think about the probabilities of success when it comes to attracting or retaining a customer, or when organizing an event, they basically depend on one element and that is the expectations with which you face that appointment. Let’s see it with an example:
If we are going to play at a top golf course, with which we have been waiting to play for 1 year and we do not have any communication until we are in that field, the expectations with which we hope to face the visit will be those that we have dreamed in our heads and idealized for a year. If when we get to the club we find that the greens have benn aerated or that there are works in the cafeteria, our experience collapses completely, creating a very big disappointment that you did not have, in addition to commenting on it with all the people you can. or on social media.
If, on the other hand, the club inform us of thegolf course conditions and the works, offering us another date or a discount for the inconvenience caused, surely our experience will practically not be affected. If we decide to postpone our visit, we will continue to idealize the dreamed experience and if, on the contrary, we decide to go, we know that we cannot wait 100% but that you will still enjoy it.
The same happens with feedback and how we deal with customer engagement, if we take the first example, we find 2 options:
The club may not be interested in our opinion, which normally generates various effects such as criticism on golf portals or social networks, as well as a constant loss of quality in the club facilities / service and therefore a worsening of our brand image. If, on the contrary, despite not having contacted us at first, they ask us about our experience and we explain how disappointing our visit was, the club will be able to correct their communication deficit and guarantee that it will not happen again in the future.
If we think about the second example and what is your customer engagement policy, having communicated with us before the visit, it is almost certain that they will be interested in our experience in your facilities. Our feedback even in spite of not having found the club in the expected conditions will be positive, since the fact that they told us that it was not perfect would lower our perception of the club, if when we arrived at the club, we hardly noticed that the field was aerated will make us think about how the field will be when it is 100%, that is, we will have a great experience and the desire to return will remain intact.
To resume
At NGM Golf & Sports Consulting, we have developed customer engagement and welcoming protocols regardless of the nature of your club, social or commercial, adapting to the needs and idiosyncrasies that you may have guaranteeing the best possible experience from the first moment your clients walk through the door.
If you want to know this and other strategies, we will be happy to help you.