5 Challenges of new member onboarding
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Five challenges businesses face when developing and designing their new member onboarding process.
1)Siloed departments -A big problem with onboarding is that often our departments within the business are siloed.
We have a marketing department, we have a sales department, we have a fitness department and each of those departments requires information.
There's no overlap and members are being asked the same questions again and again and again.
Start thinking about the onboarding process as one process that different people have responsibility for but where staff can share information.
So it's more frictionless, it feels more personal and it doesn't feel like someone's being processed.
2) No one person owns the whole process - each department is responsible for their own little bit.
If you have a retention manager or a customer experience manager, they are responsible for checking that the process is delivered, they are not wholly responsible for all of the things that happen to a member.
You have to have someone who can look at the big picture and then get the different teams to collectively deliver that service to the new member.
3) Misalignment- between when members think the onboarding is complete and when the staff think it's complete.
The sales staff think the sale is over once the person has signed and received their membership card.
Often the person themselves doesn't think that it's over until they're completed onboarding or even further in and in fact, if you look at it from a perspective of big picture, they're not going to see value from their membership until they've achieved something.
Owning a card is one thing, but actually getting results from being a member is something different.
4) Set visit frequency as your success metric- There may be a quantifiable metric. We sold a hundred memberships, we signed up 80 people to do the onboarding process,60 people turned up.
So you've got a funnel that says how many did each thing but you don't have a metric that says when were they successful.
Set visit frequency as your success metric.
Have they made somewhere between four and twelve visits in the first month?
Your target might be to drive eight visits in month one, eight visits in month two.
Have they completed 24 visits within the first three months of membership or the first 90 days of membership?
You need a quantifiable metric that tells you they've done something that's actually going to be of benefit to you.
5) Evaluate whether that onboarding process is working- When I'm working with operators, they'll often take what they are currently doing, abandon that, put something new in and won't measure the effect of that.
You've got to be able to measure the effect because you want to be able to see what's working and what isn't working.
You want to measure the different elements, even if it is the most simplistic part, just watch to see how many more people complete the onboarding process against your success metric.
