Three ways we strive for great customer service

As consumers, each and every day we experience countless touchpoints of customer service. From ordering the morning coffee through to contacting online retailers, we reach out to the customer service teams of countless businesses when we’re making a purchase, and when we have questions or issues. Good customer service is paramount to ensure companies can attract new customers and retain existing customers. This is true across every sector and having exemplary customer service in the fitness equipment industry is no different.

To emphasise the importance of customer service across the business world, here are a few key statistics:

• 83% of customers agree that they feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints (Khoros)
• For 86%, good customer service turns one-time clients into long-term brand champions (Khoros)
• 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience (Salesforce Research)
• 90% of consumers worldwide consider issue resolution as their most crucial customer service concern (KPMG)

One of our key values at Life Fitness is being People Focused; this drives our business decisions and is at the heard of everything we do. This relates to both internal people and external contacts, partners and customers – we want to make the world of fitness a happy, successful, and collaborative industry to be a part of.

A key aspect of this is ensuring that our customer service and support team is top notch! This comes from them being reliable, knowledgeable, and responsive. As a company, we have worked together with feedback from our customers and partners to improve and refine our customer support service and the process we use.

1. Experienced, trusted field technicians

We have a team of 43 field technicians who spend their days visiting clubs throughout the country to put things right when they go wrong. This helps keep your members happy with fewer machines out of order for a shorter amount of time. These technicians undertake an in-depth induction and training session, packed with information. They’re also supported by a central support team who can advise on support and help out with any challenges that the field team are less familiar with.

We work towards key KPIs for the onsite teams, including first-time-fix data – the rate at which our technicians are able to resolve an issue on their first visit to a facility. This keeps downtime to a minimum and limits the amount of time the team are onsite. Currently, (May, 2022) our first-time-fix rate is 91%. However, sometimes, it may be that new parts need to be ordered. Even in these cases we will still work to resolve issues as quickly and seamlessly as possible whilst minimising disruption to your gym and working day.

2. Organised, knowledgeable remote support

As well as our team of field technicians who visit our customer sites in person, we also have a strong remote customer support team who manage our phone lines and our customer support email inbox to ensure queries and issues are addressed as quickly as possible. This team also works towards key KPIs to ensure the Life Fitness support offered to customers is some of the best in the industry. Their key targets include a customer satisfaction score of 90% and a 24 hour response time on customer emails. You can read more about the insights behind the internal team in our ‘Spotlight On’ article where Customer Support Advisor, Lisa New, talks about her role and how she supports our valuable customers and partners.

The internal support team also work closely with the team of field technicians, ordering parts and offering them helping hands when needed.

3. Feedback from customers

Finally, we always strive to improve and expand our support offering, using this feedback to develop training or development programmes if needed, and to transfer best practice when things are being done well.

We rely on feedback from customers to keep us informed about the service they receive and what they would like to see form their Life Fitness Customer Support team in the future. Consistent feedback surveys help us understand what we’re doing right, and we can build on this within support, but also transfer these positives into other parts of our business.

We have been working for many years to refine and fine tune our service offering, which has been reflected in some of the recent feedback we have received from our customers. Here are just a few that the team are extremely proud of: 

“Good communication throughout my fault report, quick service appointment made, and faulty parts replace. Excellent – thanks.”

“Very efficient service.”

“Nothing is ever too much trouble and the tech team are a joy to work with. Always happy to help and extremely responsive.”

“Our field tech was fab, really nice to work with and very helpful in resolving an issue with some of our new equipment.”

If you already partner with Life Fitness to provide your fitness equipment, please be sure to feedback when you encounter our Support team. There are Silver, Gold, and Platinum Service contracts available to ensure you’re always covered and have the coverage you need to keep your facility up and running to keep your members happy.