It was obvious to me that Burhill Golf and Leisure is doing an impressive job in the field of customer experience development.
Last year at the CEA (Customer Engagement Academy) Customer Experience Awards 3 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.
All this I am telling you because I see a correlation between the 25% golf club membership growth (since 2015) and outstanding customer experience.
The 25% increase in membership was achieved across all categories and venues.
Customer experience measurement metric Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is based on over 6,000 responses, has risen on average across all venues from +37 to +57 since 2015.
Not so long time ago, the group has undertaken several key projects including:
- a £5 million investment into brand-new health and leisure facilities at Birchwood Park Golf & Country Club and
- the development of a state-of-the-art Toptracer driving range at Wycombe Heights Golf Centre.
NPS & Customer experience measurement
I still believe that NPS does not reveal what made our customers feel that way, how to change the way they feel or how to prevent them from feeling that way in the future.
In other words, NPS as CX metrics will not be able to tell you why your guests and golf club members are behaving in a certain way.
I hope that Burhill Golf & Leisure will invest also in understanding the drivers of NPS.
My other recommendation is don’t use NPS in isolation! Try to understand where the NPS was captured for each customer within the context of their unique journey.
Needless to say that we should focus on entire customer journeys instead of focusing on certain customer touchpoints. This will give you a better understanding of your guests’ behavior.
Employee Experience at Burhill Golf & Leisure
If Burhill Golf & Leisure really want to impress its members and guests then it should focus on its most competitive advantage: its employees.
We have to create jobs that not just meet the employee’s personal career goals, needs, and expectations, but jobs that create well-being, happiness, and satisfaction.
To be able to achieve outstanding employee experience, we must focus on root causes like:
- technological environment,
- physical environment and
- cultural environments around the golf club employees.
The advanced companies today are creating environments that are
- helpful and
- stimulating.
We need to shift our relationship with work from feeling like a physical purchase (its effects only a short time) to an investment in an experience where the employees’ satisfaction increases over time.
I am sure that you are already facing the new situation in the labor market where employers are battling to acquire and retain the best, the brightest talents.
In 2019 and in the coming years you have to create organizations where people truly want to be.