OCL are tops for customer service

OCL has been taking part in NPS surveys every quarter for almost two years

Oldham Community Leisure (OCL) has been awarded a Silver Customer Engagement Award for dedication to its customers.

The Customer Engagement Awards were launched by the Customer Engagement Academy (CEA) in September, 2018.

The brainchild of retention company TRP, the Awards recognise and reward health and fitness club operators who are consistently delivering a high standard of member experience in their facilities.

The Awards are determined by the Net Promoter Score® (NPS), a system used to measure customer satisfaction by hundreds of the world’s leading companies including Lego, o2, Sony and HSBC.

NPS surveys ask one simple question: on a scale of one to 10 - how likely are you to recommend OCL to your friends and family?

OCL has been taking part in NPS surveys every quarter for almost two years and is thrilled to have been awarded a Silver Medal in the first CEA Awards.

Awards are based on an operator’s overall Net Promoter Score for 12 months and all winners must achieve ‘above average’ performance in customer experience in order to be recognised. Royton Leisure Centre was OCL’s top site with an NPS score of 62%.

To put this into context, the average NPS score across the fitness industry is just 34% and, across other sectors, industry averages range from a high of 80% for retailer Co-op to a low of minus 13% for car giant Audi.

Pete Howson, head of customer relations at OCL, says: “The NPS is such a simple way for us to get customer feedback.

"Customer experience means everything to us so it’s vital that we understand, and act on, every negative comment we get.

"The old customer service adage – that a good experience is shared among three friends, a bad one is shared with 10 – is hopelessly out of date.

"If a customer puts a bad recommendation on a review site, it reaches 100 times more people within days, and it can live for months.

“NPS helps us to act quickly. We ask our members to fill in a survey every quarter, immediately react to any bad comments we receive and then review the results as a whole and create action plans.

"It gives members an easy way to give feedback without having to stop and fill in forms in the centre.”

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