From the very moment a customer hears about your service business, to the moment they hand over their card to pay, to all the moments thereafter – thousands of micro actions, thoughts and behaviors take place.
The combination of these customer touchpoints are known as Member Experience. Member experience is akin to customer experience, and looks specifically at customers who sign up to be a member with your business, where loyalty is key.
For example, customers who join a gym, a credit union, or join a platinum airline membership. Zooming in (or zooming out if you’re stuck in the weeds today) on member experience helps service brands differentiate themselves from competitors, create value, build member loyalty and member lifetime value.
Who has the power? Your members do. In today’s highly competitive market, competitive edge is gained through member experience, rather than the products or services provided. In fact, research from PWC found that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great member experience. If your experience is anything short of awesome, customers simply move on to find another solution.
Membership Experience is important because it helps you differentiate your brand. Say you’re on a New Year fitness buzz, and you’ve decided to sign up for a gym membership. You’ve narrowed it down to two options — Gym A and Gym B. Both have the same quality of equipment, great location and similar pricing. You decide to go with Gym A, because you met with a membership consultant and they were really helpful, friendly and knowledgeable (go frontline team!).
You then find out that the length of the application form could wrap around your body ten times. You get frustrated, lose interest and begin to consider other options. This bump in the road explains why considering membership experience is so important. It’s about learning what’s important to your members, and fine-tuning your experience around that.
When you nail your member experience, it:
A member’s experience speaks to each member’s practical and emotional needs. Let’s revisit your experience choosing between gyms for a moment - remember that lovely membership consultant who swayed you into picking Gym A? That’s an emotional need. The extremely long application form that you didn’t want to fill out? That’s practical. A great member experience is one that carefully meets the emotional and practical needs and expectations of your customers. It needs to be:
Let’s get down to the practicalities. How do you actually go about creating a winning member experience? Here are the key stages:
Enrollment is a big moment for your members. It’s like a mini marriage, symbolizing a level of commitment and trust. If the sign up process has too many barriers, potential members may get cold feet.
Here are some ways to make the enrollment process easier:
Once your member has signed, the work begins. Just like a marriage. Member engagement is about building and nurturing relationships with your members to keep them interested and impressed with your brand. For example, a gym may engage its members through workout events, email communications, membership consultant check-ins and new class orientations.
Be sure to organize and use data strategically to find out who your members are and what they care about, leverage feedback tools to find out what your members want and utilize AI and CRM tools to provide highly personalized experiences.
Benefits:
Everyone loves a benefit. Whether it’s a freebie, an exclusive deal or reward system, members enjoy receiving bonuses that go above and beyond their initial expectations. Benefits serve three main purposes: 1) attract new members 2) engage existing members and 3) promote renewals.
There are many membership benefits you can offer, including:
The key? Understand what benefits your members love. Through collecting member feedback, you may find that your customers loved the free drink bottle they received upon enrollment, or you may find their virtual events don’t add much value. Use member sentiment to craft the most impactful benefit systems into your member experience.
At any point during a member’s experience, they can choose to cancel, and go with another provider. Members need to feel an emotional connection, and see a clear value, in order to renew their membership.
Here are some strategies for boosting member retention:
The more you optimize your member experience, the stronger and more loyal your member base becomes. With increasing product and service competition, differentiating through experience is a must.
Member experience management helps you to understand what matters the most to your members and helps you build a streamlined, personalized and accessible experience for all.
As a credit union, First Commonwealth knows member experience is what brings customers through their doors, and keeps them there. Click here to read about how they invested in the member experience, and started receiving love letters from their customers.
