CSAT & Gym Attendance

Customer satisfaction plays a role in every industry. But how great the role is can be often debated. If there is only one large grocery store in a small town, for example, customer satisfaction is going to play less of a role because the need to shop for groceries is going to be too strong for most customers. Similarly, if there is a lot of competition and equally attractive options elsewhere, customer satisfaction plays a much greater role.

Researchers in Taiwan decided to look at the motivating factors for attending gyms in Taipei. They first looked to see if the customers had motivating factors for gym attendance in general, such as weight loss, strength gain, etc. They found little relationship, indicating that either the attendees are there for multiple reasons (or no reason) or there is an equal distribution of those motivations for all of the gym goers.

They then looked at customer satisfaction. They first found that service interaction played a large role, and had a positive correlation with all other important measures (loyalty, etc.). They then tried to find out what accounted for the variations between scores.

They found that the facility itself, which included what weights and machines were available, how clean it was, and so on, all played an extremely large role in the variation, accounting for nearly 90% of the differences in opinions. The research also showed that the loyalty itself may be fickle. They found that "normative" loyalty was what kept these customers at the gym – in other words, they went to the gym because it was part of their routine to go to the gym, not because they had any special feelings for the gym.

That means that satisfaction becomes even more important, because the customers will have less of an issue finding a new gym if their needs were not met.

Overall, most companies are going to learn little from this study. It doesn't have any groundbreaking theories and it represents a very small section of all business.

But what this study does show is how important satisfaction can be for some companies. As soon as they don't meet the needs of the customer, they put themselves at risk for a mass exodus. That's why it is always important to see how your own customers rate, so that you can meet their needs accordingly.