Although you think you may know your business inside out, your current clients may be able to provide you with valuable insights on how your products and services are doing that you may not gain from other avenues.

Listening to your current clients and understanding their needs can help you to tweak the business’ products and services, with the potential to increase client metrics such as retention and service uptake. While on that note, many business owners have been asking what is turf, but it is essentially a super effective consumer preference survey that you can also consider doing to gain better insights into your own targeted audience.

There is a general consensus that a fitness business should survey clients at least every 12 months; using this feedback to develop and enhance the current offering. If you know what your typical client lifespan is, for example 12 months, you would want to survey them at around eight months – this way you have time to ‘fix’ any problems and thereby increase the likelihood of retaining the client.

What Questions Should I Include in a Client Survey?

The variations on how many questions you ask, the format, wording, etc. are vast. Ideally, keep your survey to 10 questions maximum, so as not to lose the client’s interest.

It may be advisable to divide your questions between:

• Quality of training;
• Quality of service; and
• Pricing.

A useful method for recording responses is the Likert Scale, which is usually a 5 or 7 point scale that offers a range of answer options – from one extreme attitude to another, like “extremely likely” (for example represented by 1) to “not at all likely” (for example represented by 7). Typically, they include a moderate or neutral midpoint.

However, ensure that each question has an outcome. For example, if they choose 7 on the rating scale, what would they change?

The following questions can be a good foundation for determining this:

• Are you getting the level of service that you expected when you signed up?
• Are we on time for you?
• Do you find the time slots for training convenient?
• Which of our trainers gives you the highest level of service?
• Is our equipment clean, well maintained and servicable?
• How do you rate the structure of our training sessions?
• How do you find the value for money of training, based on what you receive?
• Are you happy with the payment process that we use to bill you?
• If we introduced ‘x’ new service (e.g. a new morning training class), would this appeal to you?
• If we introduced ‘x’ new product (e.g. a new training shirt), would this appeal to you?

What about Asking for Feedback?

When you are considering getting feedback from clients, it is important to give them a chance to prepare. Let them know that over the next few days or week that you will be asking them to partake in a survey about the business. Let clients know the purpose of the survey – i.e. it will be used to develop and enhance the products and services offered by the business.

You could offer paper-based surveys that clients can complete at the venue (direct feedback), although an online survey may aid clients to give more honest feedback (in-direct feedback).

Email surveys, such as SurveyMonkey, can facilitate this. They offer:

• Expert-written questions and survey templates to quickly get you started;
• Custom themes, add your logo, select fonts, and build custom thank-you pages;
• Survey quality metrics to predict how well your survey will perform;
• Survey’s via web, email, social and more so that you can reach your customers wherever they are;
• Increased completion rates; and
• Extraction and sharing of actionable insights so you can drive the business forward.