On 23 September 2026, I’ll be with the Active Insight team attending active-net Scotland at Crieff Hydro, meeting leisure operators from across the sector through the event’s focused one-to-one sessions.
And there’s one conversation I’m particularly keen to have:
We spend a huge amount of time thinking about how to get new members through the door. But are we putting the same focus on understanding and retaining the members we already have?
Having spent many years working within leisure myself, this is something I feel strongly about. I started my career as a Personal Trainer before working my way up to Health & Fitness Manager so I know first-hand how much focus goes into sales targets, membership numbers, new joiners and acquisition.
All of those things matter. But so does what happens after someone joins.
Because attracting a new member is only the beginning. Keeping them engaged, understanding their experience and spotting when something isn’t working is what helps turn that new joiner into a long-term member.
You can’t improve what you don’t know
One of the biggest challenges for operators is that the members who speak up aren’t necessarily representative of the whole membership base.
Some members will tell you immediately when something has gone wrong.
Many won’t.
They might notice standards slipping, have a poor experience, feel less engaged or simply start questioning whether they’re getting enough value from their membership. But unless we actively ask them, we may never know.
That’s why proactively collecting feedback is so important.
Rather than waiting for somebody to complain or choose to complete a feedback form, operators can regularly reach out and ask members how they’re feeling about their experience.
It gives you the opportunity to listen before disengagement turns into cancellation.
Where NPS becomes so valuable
Net Promoter Score (NPS) gives operators a simple and consistent way of measuring how likely members are to recommend their organisation.
But the real value isn’t simply having an NPS number on a dashboard, it’s understanding why members have given that score.
- Who are your promoters and what are you doing particularly well?
- Who is sitting in the middle and could become a stronger advocate?
- And, importantly, who are your detractors and what is driving their experience?
- When NPS is collected consistently, operators can begin spotting trends across sites, services and different points in the member journey. It creates an ongoing picture of member sentiment rather than relying on occasional feedback or waiting until something goes wrong.
And that’s where it can become a really powerful retention tool.
Proactive and reactive feedback should work together
This is also why NPS works so well alongside our Feedback Focus service.
Feedback Focus allows customers to proactively share feedback with an operator when they want to tell them something. That reactive insight is hugely valuable because it shows you what’s happening in the moment and gives teams the opportunity to respond and take action.
But it only captures the people who choose to speak, NPS adds the proactive listening piece.
You’re going out to your membership and asking for their opinion rather than waiting for them to come to you. Put the two together and operators start building a much broader picture of their customer experience:
Feedback Focus helps you understand what members are telling you today. NPS helps you understand what the wider membership might not otherwise tell you at all.
That combination gives teams far more opportunity to identify problems, recognise what’s working well and make changes that genuinely improve the member experience.
Feedback is only valuable when you do something with it
Of course, collecting more feedback isn’t the end goal. The goal is to use it.
Good customer insight should help everyone from senior leadership through to the teams working directly with members understand where improvements can be made. Sometimes that might mean addressing a significant operational issue.
Other times it can be something surprisingly small: the way members are welcomed, communication around a service change, cleanliness, class availability or simply making customers feel acknowledged.
Those smaller experiences matter because they’re happening repeatedly throughout someone’s membership.
And when we understand them, we have a much better opportunity to improve them.
Come and have a conversation at active-net Scotland
active-net Scotland is designed around focused conversations between operators and supplier partners, with every attendee taking part in at least ten pre-arranged one-to-one meetings.
So if you’re attending, come and talk to me. Not because I want to spend twenty minutes showing you another piece of software, but because I want to understand how you’re currently listening to your members.
- How much feedback are you receiving?
- Are you hearing from enough of your membership?
- Do you know why your members would recommend you—or why they wouldn’t?
- And most importantly, are you able to turn that insight into actions that help keep more people engaged and active?
- Having sat on the operator side of the table myself, I know how challenging retention can be. That’s exactly why I’m so passionate about helping operators put the right tools and processes in place to understand their customers better.
Because getting someone through the door is important.
Giving them reasons to keep coming back is even more important.
I’ll see you at active-net Scotland.
