The Art of NPS®: How to Improve Your Fitness Franchise Network’s Score

Using NPS® to Optimize the Customer Experience

How do you know if your franchisees are delivering an experience that keeps your customers coming back? More importantly, how do you know if your franchises do this consistently?

A Net Promoter Score (NPS®) is a quick and effective measurement and key to understanding customer satisfaction. NPS® utilizes one simple question, “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to your friends?” “0” means not likely, and “10” means extremely likely. By getting feedback from your customers on this question, you can assess how well you’re doing and where there’s room for improvement.

NPS® is one of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) you can use to measure overall business performance. When used effectively, it can inform how you optimize the customer experience. As one expert puts it, “Your NPS® is a gateway to ensure that your focus aligns with what your customers like most about you.”

Here’s a breakdown of your NPS® score and how to increase it.

The Meaning of an NPS® Score

NPS® scoring works like this:

Promoters: On the 0-10 scale, those who answer in the 9-10 range are considered promoters. They’re loyal customers who are enthusiastic about your business and are happy to refer it to others.

Passives: Those who answer in the 7-8 range are considered passives. They’re generally satisfied with your business but not enough to promote it actively.

Detractors: Those who answer in the 0-6 range are considered detractors. They’re mostly unhappy customers who can hurt your business by talking about it negatively.

Your NPS® score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters (passives aren’t factored into your NPS® score). Scores can range anywhere from -100 to 100.

A “good” score is considered anything above 0, with scores in the 50-80 range considered excellent.

When evaluating your NPS® score, it’s helpful to understand your score relative to your industry. Is your score better than other fitness franchises? Worse? About the same? Regularly monitoring your NPS® score by comparing it to others in your industry helps to understand how you’re tracking against your competitors.

Good relative NPS® scores vary widely by industry. Some of the latest data for the fitness industry shows that for boutique fitness brands, 94 or above is a best-in-class score, with 88 or higher considered good and 72 or below considered low. For gyms, 77 or above is a best-in-class score, with 71 or above considered good and 32 or below considered low. These benchmarks can change as the industry changes in the market, so stay on top of typical industry scores to keep an edge against your competition,

Your score is also influenced by the size of your business. Large fitness franchises will have more customers to survey and more customer service headaches that can lead to more detractors than a smaller franchise network, which impacts the score.

Regardless of your current score, it’s important to focus on improving it. By prioritizing customer satisfaction and continually enhancing the customer experience, you demonstrate your commitment to providing exceptional service within your franchise network.

How to Increase Your NPS® Score

Your fitness franchise network encompasses many people and locations, each performing a little differently from the next. That’s why raising your franchise network’s NPS® score needs to be a team effort. To increase your score across your network:

1. Get every franchise on board

Communicate with all your franchises about your business goals for customer satisfaction and that you expect an all-hands-on-deck approach. Your entire network must be committed to improvement. Otherwise, your score won’t change—and it may even decrease.

2. Set KPIs for each franchise

Conduct NPS® surveys at the franchise level, then use that information to determine the KPIs for each franchise—for example, conversion rates, customer retention, or even employee retention. Let each franchise know which KPIs they should pay attention to, then hold them to it. The collective network can improve when every franchise knows exactly what they’re aiming for.

3. Map the customer journey

Figure out all the many ways in which your franchises interact with customers during the customer journey. Which touchpoints are easy and successful, and which create friction for your customers or reveal gaps in service? This can be an eye-opening exercise that gives you immediate insight into how you can improve customer experience.

4. Automate your NPS® surveys

Automating your surveys saves a ton of time, effort, and resources while also giving you valuable data about customer behaviors and preferences so you can find ways to improve your score. Once the data is collected, you can centralize the data in one accessible location with automated customer engagement software.

5. Ask for ratings at the right time

If there are touchpoints in the customer journey where you’re most likely to get a positive response, conduct quick customer surveys at those exact moments to get a fast, accurate read. The interaction will be fresh in the customer’s mind, so they’ll be able to give you an honest response which will help boost your score.

6. Act on the results

Take what you learn and put it into action. You can use the responses to the open-ended follow-up question to determine where your franchises are doing well and where there’s room for improvement. When you make the right improvements, you can survey again and increase your NPS® score even more.

Get Started with Listen360

In your fitness franchise network, measuring customer satisfaction and using the information to optimize the customer experience can boost your overall NPS® score and turn all your franchises into top performers. To get started, consider Listen360’s customer engagement platform. Backed by an experienced team, Listen360 can help you survey your franchise customers, collect important customer data, and make smart business decisions that keep customers coming back.

For more information, contact us today.