Customer Service

Let's face it – if you're a personal trainer or group fitness instructor doing a personal workout at the gym, you always simultaneously pay attention to how other trainers are working with their clients.

Have you ever noticed the trainer-client interaction and the type of customer service the fitness professional is providing?

I recently was working out in a health club when I noticed a personal trainer working with her client. During the 30 minutes or so that I was in the same area, the client only did about 10 minutes of exercise while the other 20 were spent talking. The client would do an exercise and then spend the next five or six minutes chatting with the trainer before performing the next exercise.

Even though I was focused on my own workout, it was hard not to notice this interaction, and it got me thinking about customer service. As personal trainers and group exercise instructors, we are not selling a tangible item that can be replaced if something goes wrong. Instead, we are marketing and selling a service, which author Harry Beckwith defines as, "the delivery of a promise."

But in the over 12 years I have been in this field, I have found that people who have not worked with a personal trainer have two primary stereotypes of the type of service personal trainers (and instructors) provide:

» Personal trainers and group instructors are misplaced drill sergeants who bully clients into exercise.

» Personal trainers are "rent-a-friends" who simply move pins on weight stacks while talking with their clients.

These stereotypes exist for a reason — what I witnessed the other week certainly supports the latter stereotype and I have seen plenty of examples of trainers and instructors who strive to be drill instructors.

Are living up to these misperceptions the best type of service we can provide to our clients and customers? More importantly, are they what our clients expect?

Managing Customers' Expectations:

Research shows that customers get upset when their expectations are not met because they feel the service provider did not care about their satisfaction. In the example I provided earlier, the trainer might not have been delivering the same kind of service that I look to deliver when training a client, but if that is the service that particular client expected, then that trainer was indeed meeting the client's expectations.

As fitness professionals, we should always be looking to provide a high level of service while being mindful of our clients' expectations — does the client want a drill-sergeant, coach, or friend to lead them on their fitness journey?

According to Beckwith, author of the best-selling book "Selling the Invisible," selling a service is based on first selling a relationship. In order to do this, we first need to identify what the client or class participant expects from the trainer-client (participant-instructor) relationship. But keep in mind that even though a particular client might expect a friend and enjoy spending a majority of the session talking as opposed to exercising, other people in the gym (possibly new clientele) will be watching, so it is important that you stay engaged and keep the client moving.

We should also always be looking for ways to improve our customer service because our clients and class participants are the lifeblood of what we do; if we fail to deliver excellent service, then attracting and retaining clients becomes very challenging.