This week’s newsletter features our Top 10 Best Health & Wellness Websites.
We are always looking out for new and helpful websites, so share your favorite health & wellness websites with us, here. As usual, you’ll need to enter your email address to help us keep out spam. Don’t worry, though - we won’t share it!
Does this really serve a useful purpose? I admire their chutzpah, though.
Below, comments and results from our current survey of 5,500+ health and wellness business leaders who responded to this question:
Good idea or bad idea? Massachusetts may require personal trainers to hold a degree, an accredited certification, and pass an Allied Health Professionals board exam.
(And the poll’s still open – cast your vote now through 5/31 and enter to win a free copy of Radial’s guide “How To Win Customers With Compelling Health & Wellness Case Studies”.)
You know your customers think that your gym, yoga studio, fitness center, health club, or wellness center is a hotbed of germs and viruses, right?
In fact, every single person I saw last night at my gym was grabbing the saniwipes and swabbing down the equipment – and trust me, that’s not their SOP!
But I had to wonder…how many people just figured ”Why take a chance?” and stayed home? Meaning, of course – no juice bar sales, no yoga class punch card sales, no nutritionist or personal trainer appointments…etc., etc.
We just led a webinar on customer winback for health and wellness businesses (related article: How To Win Back & Reactivate Clients, Customers, Members In Your Health & Wellness Business)…so I was especially fascinated (and appalled) by the customer service performance that entertained me at dinner tonight at our corner pizza place.
Not many customers in the place. Guy sitting at the counter when we arrive is still there when OUR pizza is ready. He suddenly asks one of the staff, “Are those my pizzas there?”
Long story short, yes. Turns out they’ve been sitting on top of the oven since about 60 seconds after he arrived – but no one noticed.
He’s rightfully furious, because they promised the pizzas would be ready nearly fifteen minutes ago.
OK, stuff happens. No one expects perfection. It’s what you do when there’s a problem that saves or loses the customer relationship.
But then…the counterhelp gives him some blather about how they normally do it and how this time no one noticed (excuses, excuses!). She’s almost making it sound like it’s his fault for not asking sooner. (Guess they didn’t notice he was sitting there for fifteen minutes – even though the place was nearly empty.)
I’m eavesdropping, thinking surely she’ll apologize to him. She finally mutters “I’m sorry” – but it’s very late in the conversation and not particularly energetic.
And finally, offers him a salad to make up for it. Yep, a $5 salad.
Now, this guy just bought $40 worth of pizza, which is now markedly less than fresh. He’s also been significantly inconvenienced, and they failed to deliver on the timing they promised.
If he were my customer, I’d GIVE it to him PLUS his choice of any additional item off the menu he wanted. Also free. Plus coupons for a huge discount on his next visit.
My apology would be immediate, along the lines of: “I am SO sorry, we totally dropped the ball. We should have told you your food was ready. And I’m so sorry we’ve made you late for the people who are waiting for you.”
So he takes his pizzas and stomps off, clearly completely ticked off and not at all satisfied by their superficial attempt to compensate him for this snafu.
Now comes the worst part. The counterhelp start talking about him. We can hear every word they say. So can other customers. And the workers are blaming HIM for the fact that THEY screwed up. It’s quite snarky and nasty. And nothing remotely along the lines of ”God, I can’t believe we left his pizzas sitting there like that.”
So in addition to losing him as a customer, we’re all sitting there wondering, “Is this how they talk about us? Now we know how they really feel.”
I’m not sure I’ll ever feel good about going back. And up til now, we’ve hit this place probably 2 – 3 times week.
Unfortunately, customer service experiences like this aren’t limited to my corner pizza joint. It happens every day in health clubs, wellness centers, yoga studios and other wellness businesses.
And the only way you’ll ever know if it’s happening in your business is if you reach out to customers through surveys and other ongoing feedback methods.
More on customer service here:
Death By A Thousand Nicks – Why Customers Leave
When Respect For Clients Is Lacking: 9 Warning Signs
Do Your Competitors Love Your Customer Service?
Customer Surveys: Nine Keys For Wellness Businesses
Make Suggestion Boxes Work In Your Wellness Business
What lessons have you learned from awful customer service experiences? Share them below (we ask for your email to discourage spammers, but we keep it totally private).
We’ve all heard at least a million times that “experts agree that it only takes about three to six weeks” to form a new habit.
That’s only true if the new habit is…
The Altruism Marketing For Health Clubs, Wellness Centers & Yoga Studios article describes do’s and don’ts, real-life examples and payoffs for health and wellness businesses.
Below I’ve tackled questions about special situations commonly faced by health and wellness businesses:
Sure, examples like this drive customers away:
TYPICAL BADLY-PLANNED & POORLY-COMMUNICATED
PRICE INCREASE ANNOUNCEMENT:
I wish I had a nickel for every conversation I’ve had with a client who told me in January:
And then by June said:
Most health and wellness business leaders and professionals have created vast amounts of data that they’d be sick at losing – client records, workout programs, drafts of books, articles they’ve written for websites, videos and photos of client and customer successes and testimonials, irreplaceable sales and marketing materials, budgets, financial records, employee records….
Right?
These are all real-life examples from Radial clients, so I’m not just spinning scary stories here.
1) Yet many of you don’t routinely make daily offsite backups of your data. If your laptop is stolen – it’s all gone forever. If your building burns – it’s all gone. If your flash drive is stolen out of your car trunk – it’s all gone.
The fastest, cheapest fix I know is a subscription to Mozy, an online backup service. We use it ourselves. An individual subscription runs about $5 a month for more data than most of you have, and a pro version is available for larger businesses. Set it up to run every night and you can stop worrying.
2) And many of you aren’t scanning your desktop or laptop routinely for outdated software that needs to be updated to close security gaps.
The best fix for that one is the free Secunia Software Inspector which scans your system and gives you a report of vulnerabilities. It complements your firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware tools – doesn’t replace them. A paid version for larger businesses is also available.
If you’ve got other free (or cheap) tools you swear by, post ‘em in the comments. We ask for your email to dodge spammers, but we certainly don’t publish your email address.
