In less than a year, I had the chance to talk about customer experience measurement both with Colin Mayes (CEO, Burhill Group) and Guy Riggott (Operations Director, Burhill Group) about customer experience measurement.
It was great to hear from them from first hand about how they use Net Promoter Score at Burhill Group as a customer experience measurement technique.
Recently, the BGL venue, The Shropshire Golf Centre in Telford, was awarded the title of Best Golf Club Experience for 2018 at the inaugural CEA Customer Experience Awards.
The CEA (Customer Engagement Academy) Customer Experience Awards benchmarks all users across the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric over a period of 12 months, with a total of 820 sites eligible across 75 operators.
The awards recognize the best performing clubs in each sector while also providing ‘Medal’ status for high performers based on achieving outstanding NPS scores.
The Shropshire Golf Centre (Stuart Perry, General Manager) was recognized as one of only 88 qualifying sites across all sectors to earn a Platinum Medal.
The following Burhill Golf & Leisure venues received a Gold Medal:
- Wycombe Heights Golf Centre,
- Ramsdale Park Golf Centre and
- Birchwood Park Golf and Country Club.
While Abbey Hill Golf Centre, Redbourn Golf Club, and Hoebridge Golf Club received “only” a Silver Medal.
The Shropshire Golf Centre & the customer experience measurement
We all know what gets measured get done. This is also true when we are talking about customer experience measurement. A Forrester study in 2016 found “customer experience leaders grow revenue faster than customer experience laggards.”
In most cases, I hear from golf clubs and resorts who are measuring customer experience that they are using Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT).
I still think that Net Promoter Score (a retention-related metrics) can show just the tip of the iceberg about the available customer experience in our golf clubs.
It is also the simplest customer experience metric. It will only tell you if your golf club guest or member will recommend you or not.
Let’s not stop at this point of our customers’ experience discovery! We must understand what our customers feel and think when they interact with us and use our services.
Golf clubs must figure out how they fit into the lives of their customers.
The key element of the effective customer-experience measurement is measuring experience at the journey level, as opposed to looking only at transactional touchpoints or overall satisfaction.
As the importance of speed and ease is growing among our customers, the importance of Customer Effort Score (CES) metric will gain momentum. It is a good metric to measure whether your efforts to reduce customer experience obstacles are bearing fruit or not.
At the same time, you will not be able to avoid using qualitative research methods (e.g. in-depth interviews, focus group discussions) to understand the behavior and experience of your golf club guests and members.
To retain golf club members with significant customer lifetime value (CLV) in the era of social and empowered customers, we should complement the old CLV model with the customer referral value.
The importance of Customer Referral Value (CRV) measurement lies in anticipating future customer behavior and quantify social value.
I would also benchmark against competitors and leaders because our customers/guests are also comparing experiences with each other.
Finally, it is not less important to invest in hardwired technology that can capture customer feedback on a daily basis from:
- multiple channels and integrate survey results,
- social-media posts, and
- operational data into comprehensive, role-specific dashboards.
These can provide transparency and drive decisions at all levels.
