Experience Consistency

For nearly ten years, I have been a customer of LA Fitness. Despite the fact I tend to visit one particular club on my London commute route, I’ve used about five different LA Fitnesses over the years. This morning, I tried a different one, nearer to my home (although still a good 25 minute drive), as an option for those days I want to work from home. LA Fitness have a particular membership scheme that caters for this freedom of access.

What surprised me at this club was that, in contrast to every other LA Fitness I’ve used, this one did not supply towels. In my regular club, you get a towel when you walk in the door. In my next most regular club, also in London, you have to pay a £1 deposit, but you still get a towel. Yet at this club, not only were there no towels given out to members, but they did not even sell them. Having never, ever, needed to bring a towel to an LA Fitness, I was caught out. I had planned to go straight from the gym to another meeting. I could not exactly go after getting all hot and sweaty, and I had to decide whether to forget training at all today (and essentially waste a good deal of my morning), or to train anyway, but move my meeting such that I could go home and have a shower. I took the second option.

Whilst I can understand the rational of having different policies on different sites, having a shower is an integral part of the majority of gym customer’s experience. By not providing towels, this club did not cater for all those members that had bought “anywhere” memberships and were coming for the first time, because it did not provide a consistent experience with other gyms in the network. If it is impossible to provide that consistency, members need to know. On arriving back home I checked the webpage for this particular club that I’d retrieved the address from prior to leaving: no mention of towel policy, at all.

The lesson, of course, is that the fundamentals of a customer experience – the little touches that become part of the Experience DNA and basic assumptions of a customer when using a service, need to remain consistent across an organisation.

Consistent Yet Different

This does not mean, of course, that the overarching customer experience needs to look and feel the same everywhere. If places and services feel too mass produced, they lose character. Organisations need to look, instead, at how they mass customise their offerings, giving a bit of a local feel. This is something that hotels like Malmaisons and pubs like Weatherspoons do very well: each location feels different. Marks and Spencers have, this week, announced that they, too, will be moving their stores from a mass produced model to a mass customized model, with each store varying “the layout and merchandise according to affluence, age and ethnicity, as well as local competition,” according to the Independent.

This makes good commercial sense and provides a more tailored experience to local customers (although it may be somewhat complex to judge these factors in touristic areas). But a tailored experience still needs to ensure that the fundamental customer expectations are consistently met.