I don’t play golf but if I did?

By: John

It seemed that after you pay for a membership, or even pay and play, you get very little added value apart from the golf. In short communication between a golf club and its members or customers is not that great.
So why spend a lot of money on advertising to get them to come in the first place only to ignore them after they have paid.

Don’t get me wrong this is not just a golf thing for me. It never ceases to amaze me that when I go to a new restaurant and get good service and great food, all I get is the bill. Why does no one say “would you like us to send you offers for special menus or special evenings that we have”? At that moment I am a satisfied customer, would I come back again? I might, but it would be more likely if they bothered to remind me they existed in three months time. They spent a fortune on advertising to get through the door, provide great service and just let me walk out the door, madness.

I digress. As a non-player the lack of communication between the club and customers / members surprised me as I thought it was a “club”. Information was pinned to the notice board so members had to be there to see it or put on a website that members rarely visited. This got me thinking what do members actually expect from a golf club, if anything at all?

Over the next few months I had many conversations with friends that play and they all said the same thing a lack of communication was a problem. “They take the money and that’s the last we hear from them” was a common response. It also became clear that there was a lot of information they actually needed to have a far better golf experience.

I stress once again that I don’t play golf but putting tee times on a board outside a golf club when a player lives twenty miles away is of no use to anyone. Knowing what the weather is like before a member gets there would be handy so they could take the right clothes. What are the traffic conditions like? One friend told me it could take between twenty minutes and one and a half hours to get to the club if there were road works and how was he supposed to know before he left home? Trolley restrictions, course conditions, things that seem important, even to me. You could always phone the Golf Pro but does he not have other things to be doing?

After about eight months of just talking to people my golfing friend mentioned our conversations to the club manager, he was interested enough to want to find out more so we ran a survey. Guess what everything we had been talking about seemed to be true.

This is not an issue just for my friends club it seems to be everywhere. The golf scene in the UK is a changing one, so I am told, I am not certain about other parts of the world. New members are difficult to find which means working even harder to keep the ones that a club already has.

The old saying “the best form of advertising is word of mouth” is still true today so you would think that creating a better environment for existing members would be a good idea as they would spread the word for free.

As a result of all this we have designed an online communications solution for this club which I am very proud to say is going down a storm with members. Will other clubs be interested? I have no idea but I would like to think at some point they might be.

It’s been an interesting learning curve and I still don’t play golf.

Article Source: http://www.bettergolfarticles.com

www.clubmessenger.co.uk

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