Whether you deliver junior coaching sessions, write member newsletters, develop multi-venue growth strategies, or greet people when they come into the bar, you are being trusted with the customer’s happiness. We all have limited leisure time, and that person has invested their most precious commodity in a visit to your club.

Never forget the importance of what we do in the golf industry.

Whether you deliver junior coaching sessions, write member newsletters, develop multi-venue growth strategies, or greet people when they come into the bar; you are being trusted with the customer’s happiness.

That might seem like a grand statement, but think about the investment a customer is making. Not a financial investment, but time. We all have limited leisure time, and that person has invested their most precious commodity in a visit to your club.

Taking responsibility for a customer’s happiness really focusses what we do. It makes us think hard about our impact, and strive to understand what makes customers happy?

Two things at the heart of this question are customer experience and customer journey. They are key to how a customer feels about your offer and need to be taken in tandem.

A customer’s journey can be seen as a series of stepping stones. Their experience is the ease with which they move from one stone to the next. Ultimately, we want to keep progressing them towards the big stone marked ‘happy customer,’ but for every step along the way the danger is that they slip and get their feet wet, leaving them unhappy, frustrated or even in danger of wandering off in another direction.

And that’s where we in the industry need to focus our efforts. How can we guide a customer from one stepping stone to the next, keeping their experience a happy one and minimizing the chance that they fall off?

You need to know, what are your stepping stones? Are they close enough together? Do you have a process for recognizing when a customer is about to slip?

Some of the stepping stones that are important to our business are streamlined booking systems that customers can navigate with ease and clear pathways from lessons into memberships. But alongside those, you also need to have systems that raise a red flag when the risks of a customer falling are larger than you would like. Your stones will be different to ours, but you need to know what they are and understand how easy it is to get from one to the next.

And I can’t stress enough the importance of those red flags. What are the indicators that show your customer is unhappy?

Our red flags are reduced number of rounds played, reduced spend and reduced attendance at the club. These, among other factors, flag that a customer is not having the experience that a golf club membership should deliver.

We measure everything, and the data we hold identifies certain member behaviors. But the data can’t improve customer experience, it simply shows where we need to intervene.

There are many reasons why a customer might dis-engage with a club. It could be a bad experience, it could be an external factor such as time pressure, or it could be as simple as not being able to find a playing partner. If we can personally intervene with that customer and identify the reason before they dis-engage completely, we can put actions in place that are tailored specifically to improving their experience. We will hold their hand as we plot their personal path back to the stepping stones.

Customers are complex individuals. No two are the same. But the ease of their customer journey and their experience of your service will dictate their happiness and impact the success of your business.

It’s hard to know where to stop with an article like this as we can follow a path into the importance of customer service, the role of a PGA Professional in customer retention and so much more. But for now I’ll leave it with the importance of knowing your customer, knowing your internal journeys and knowing when you need to personally intervene to improve a customer’s experience.

If you have those three things in your sights then you have everything you need to make a person’s day fantastic, or forgettable. And most importantly, you have all the ingredients you need to make a customer happy.

Rob is CEO of Orbis Golf. Orbis works with many of the best known golf management groups in the U.S. and U.K. providing golf programming, software solutions and management consultation. Orbis products and services are designed to connect the dots between the club, coach and customer resulting in improved customer retention, increased customer acquisition and more overall activation delivering on key financial metrics through a golf business. For more information on Orbis Golf please contact [email protected].