Article

By Ben Fowler*

Do You Attract Price Shoppers or Service Seekers?

NGF’s Voice of Customer system gathers customer experience intelligence on many key factors integral to their overall golf experience. Two of these factors are “Affordability” and “Friendliness/Service of Staff.” One piece of data that we have is what factors the customer has indicated are most important to them (where the customer is asked to select the three factors out of a list of 20). This got me thinking, is there a difference between facilities where customers are motivated by price vs. service?

And the answer is . . .

To answer my question, I looked at all of the facilities that have used NGF’s Voice of Customer system to assess customer loyalty. I excluded any properties that had a low response rate from customers (less than 100). This left me data with approximately 250 facilities that each had 100 responses or more from their customers over the past two years.

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At facilities where customers indicated that “Affordability” was of greater importance than NGF’s benchmark, customer loyalty was seven percentage points lower and the average wallet share eight percentage points lower. Facilities where customers indicated “Friendliness/Service of Staff” was of greater importance than NGF’s benchmark, customer loyalty was 12 percentage points higher and the average wallet share was 14 percentage points higher. Clearly, properties want customers who are motivated by “Friendliness / Service of Staff” not “Affordability.” To make sense of how big an impact wallet share can have, if a typical facility was to grow their wallet share by 14 percentage points (the average difference between facilities ranking in the top half and bottom half of importance on “Friendliness /Service of Staff”) that would translate to capturing an additional 4.53 rounds per customer. Multiply 4.53 rounds by say 3,000 customers and that would translate to an extra 13,590 rounds.

Now, you may be thinking “Sure I would love to grow rounds,” but first I need to stop the bleeding. The best way to stop the bleeding is to grow your wallet share and steal rounds from your competition.

My Take: Based on NGF Research, it sure looks to me that your facility will do a lot better if you’re attracting service seekers not price shoppers.

To learn more secrets from the Voice of Customer Guru, visit http://www.ngf.org/vocguru.

Credits

Originally posted by BenFowler on 29 Sep 2009.
All contributors: BenFowler, LynnwoodBrown, MarleneStone, MichaelBrezin,
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