Is your brand social or antisocial?

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It would appear that many health clubs fall into the latter. If that were not the case, then when a customer chooses to leave, they wouldn’t bombard them with a plethora of calls and emails that have an increasingly threatening tone.

It would appear that many health clubs fall into the latter. If that were not the case, then when a customer chooses to leave a specific health club, they wouldn’t bombard them with a plethora of calls and emails that have an increasingly threatening tone culminating with a debt recovery letter for the three-month notice period they never knew existed in the first place.

Instead, health clubs would adopt a very different approach, which in the first instance might involve actually asking the customer why they have decided not to renew their membership and what can be done to change their mind.

And as you’ve probably gathered, I’m speaking from personal and recent experience.

Just don’t get me started on the whole CRM piece, which is also a retail-wide challenge. And I’ll discuss the whole issue of poor retention marketing at a later date.

But in the meantime this really poor experience got me to thinking about how bad we are when it comes to customer centricity in this country.

Contrast this with a US business I came across recently that puts the customer at the heart of everything it does – Modcloth. It is a fashion pure-play. It truly is a social brand in every sense.

This can be evidenced by its ‘be the buyer feature’ on the website where customers get to vote on potential new styles and comment on what they would do to improve them before these styles are actually produced.

These new styles get on average between 10,000 and 12,000 votes and 600 to 700 comments. And when they are produced, they sell at 2.4 times better than lines that haven’t gone through this process. That’s because Modcloth solicits its customers’ opinions and acts upon them. By the time it launches the new styles it has already got considerable pent-up demand. Now that’s what I call social commerce.

Imagine how much more effective health clubs’ customer retention ‘strategies’ would be if they actually started to truly engage with their customers and listen to them in the first place?