Consistently premium

Proinsight’s mystery shoppers have helped David Lloyd Leisure drive consistency in the member experience – and with it helped reduce attrition rates across the group’s 123 clubs.

“Ensuring consistent delivery of a premium member experience – that was the key factor in our decision to implement mystery shopping across our business,” explains Mia Manson-Bishop, Member Experience Director at David Lloyd Leisure.

“With a business the size of ours, and one that’s growing as rapidly as we are – we’ve gone from 91 to 123 clubs and doubled our profits over the last four years – consistency of service is a huge operational challenge. But we know how important it is, and for the last four years have been asking our members to tell us how we’re doing. We get over 10,000 responses each week through tablets located in our clubs, and are increasingly encouraging feedback through our member app too.

“But we wanted to take it even further. We wanted to put in place a system that would allow us to check on all the things we know directly impact the member experience. To delve deeper into all the things that impact our ability to retain members, our revenues, or both.”

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Brilliant Basics

Step forward Proinsight, with a mystery shopping programme that began in January 2019.

Each three-month wave involves 123 shoppers – one per club – who join as members, either individually, with a partner or as a family.

While tasked to report on specific points each visit, these shoppers effectively become fully-functioning members for three months: so embedded in the business and so anonymous are they that even Manson-Bishop doesn’t know their identities until the three months are over and the detailed reports come in.

She explains: “At one level, we wanted to use mystery members to check on our teams’ adherence to what we call Brilliant Basics. These are the issues we know annoy our members if not done properly, and that we therefore have to get right all the time – every hour, every day, every club – to ensure continued usage of our clubs.

“None of these might seem like a big deal in isolation, but if you want to deliver a premium experience, they do all have to be done consistently.”

Mia Manson-Bishop, Member Experience Director, David Lloyd Leisure

“It’s cleanliness. It’s making sure everything’s working all the time. It’s ensuring essence is infused into our steam rooms. None of these might seem like a big deal in isolation, but if you want to deliver a premium experience, they do all have to be done consistently. Our teams do strive to do this for our members and the mystery shopper programme has reinforced the importance of doing this.”

She adds: “The mystery member programme has allowed us to fine-tune other team behaviours too, for clear commercial benefit. In food and beverage, for example, we’ve seen a 10 per cent rise in upselling at point of sale, and 26 per cent improvement in check backs – asking if everything was OK – which, with our roll-out of hand-held tills, provides further sales opportunities.”

“Meanwhile, we know a warm welcome and goodbye contribute to a sense of belonging, so we ask our mystery members to score our teams on this. Both of these areas have improved 4 per cent since the start of the year. Similarly, we’ve seen a 16 per cent uplift in clubs providing one single contact email address for members to use, which facilitates prompt feedback and ensures members feel listened to.

“Our mystery members are helping drive our adherence to all of this, and more recently helping contribute to a reduction in attrition, which we have moved from 37 to 32 per cent over the last few years. It’s the sort of improvement that, multiplied across 123 clubs, adds significantly to our bottom line profit.

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A sense of belonging

She continues: “But we also wanted to use mystery shoppers to explore something that isn’t as easy to measure, yet that’s so vital to member retention: a sense of belonging.

“We had already developed a number of initiatives to help engender this, and mystery shopping has sharpened our focus on these. For example, since the mystery member programme began, the number of new members booking into a welcome meeting has risen by 6 per cent. In turn, this has driven an increase in new member usage of one visit per week, on average, across the first three months – something we know drives retention.

“There is, then, clearly huge value to the business of using Proinsight’s mystery member programme, and it’s something we will continue to invest in to help further reduce our attrition going forward.”

“You can tell it matters to them that we are successful – and in turn, it matters to me that they are.”

Mia Manson-Bishop, Member Experience Director, David Lloyd Leisure

She concludes: “I can’t praise Proinsight enough. Quite aside from the value of the unbiased insight we get from them, they are also a tremendous team to work with. They work hard and are absolutely on top of the detail, proactively coming up with ideas to continually improve the process. They also show an incredible level of care, going out of their way to understand our needs and deliver a personalised service. You can tell it matters to them that we are successful – and in turn, it matters to me that they are. I can’t recommend them highly enough.”