I believe every coworking space owner is dreaming to see all their members in T-shirts saying “Thank God it’s Monday” one day. According to Talkwalker, 53.8% of people hate Mondays. This mostly happens because on Mondays employees have to get back to the tedious offices after a fun weekend and start to perform their routine tasks.
But coworking spaces differ a lot from traditional offices. That’s why you have great chances to change people’s attitudes toward the workspace and make them love getting back to work even on Monday.
To create an ideal workplace, some coworking centers, such as Blenderworkspace, NYC, grant members a five-star hotel experience rather than a depressive office mood. Modern coworking spaces are about hospitality and customer focus. If you agree with the statement, let’s discuss the topic in-depth and figure out why being client-centric is so important for your business success and how can you build a business truly committed to the customer.
What Is Customer Focus
Customer focus is a mindset, philosophy, and strategy of the coworking space brand. It puts customers at the center of strategic decision-making. I mean, member-centric coworking spaces think about how their decisions impact their customers first of all. They are surely concerned about their profit but don’t put it above all. They adhere to the long-term strategy that develops members’ trust and loyalty to the brand.
Member-focused coworking spaces invest in studying their customers and addressing their needs. They gather member feedback and incorporate it into workspace design, technology equipment, product composition, in a word, delivering outstanding member experience.
Why Is Member Focus Fundamental for Coworking Business Success
It could be a long recap but let’s just cut to the chase.
Investing in member happiness has the potential to double coworking space revenue within 36 months.
The statement grounds on multiple researches performed by such customer experience gurus as Temkin Group.
84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.
This additional revenue will come straight from members’ wallets because 86% of them are willing to pay more for a great experience.
According to PWC research, the more expensive is the item, the more customers are willing to pay. They don’t mind paying 13-18% extra simply by receiving a great customer experience.
Besides, 49% of buyers make impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized experience.
And the most weighty argument in favor of customer experience is that according to a Walker study, customer experience has already overtaken price and product as the key brand differentiator.
Summarizing everything said above, a coworking space business would invest in member experience:
- To improve cross-selling and up-selling.
- To improve member satisfaction and retention.
- To increase bottom-line revenue.
Now, when we know what is member focus and why it is critical for your business, let’s see how to turn your workspace into a customer-centric hub.
5 Tips to Improve Member Focus at Your Coworking Space
Unfortunately, it’s not enough just to declare yourself a member-focused space. Building and maintaining a customer-centric policy should become a part of your daily rituals.
1. Collect Members’ Feedback
According to Gartner, the best point to start building a customer-focused workspace is to decide on how you are going to gather and analyze members’ feedback.
For instance, you can use:
- surveys,
- instant in-app feedback,
- web forms,
- follow-ups with churned clients, and more.
Whatever tools you apply, make sure to read through members’ comments, suggestions, and opinions. Make these valuable insights available to the entire team. This way, you will figure out customers’ expectations and invest in the right things to meet them.
2. Measure Members Happiness
A customer-centric coworking space measures not only metrics that are directly related to immediate profit, such as member acquisition, occupancy rate, revenue per member, and others. Your goal is not to sign up a customer that will churn in a month but build long-term relationships with your members and convert them into brand advocates.
That’s why I highly recommend paying attention to:
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT), which can be calculated with the following formula:
(Number of satisfied customers/ Number of survey responses) x 100 = % of satisfied customers - Net Promoter Score (NPS), which identifies the likelihood of a member to recommend your coworking space. You can calculate NPS with this formula:
Total % of promoters – total % of detractors = net promoter score - Lifetime Value (LTV), which is an estimate of the average revenue that a member will generate throughout their contract. Can be calculated like this:
LTV = ARPU (average monthly recurring revenue per member) × Customer Lifetime or LTV = ARPU / Member Churn - Retention Rate, which is the percentage of members a coworking space retains over a given period of time. Use this formula to calculate it:
[(E-N)/S] x 100 = CRR, where S is the number of existing customers at the start of the time period, E is the number of total customers at the end of the time period, and N is the number of new customers added within the time period.
If you include the above metrics in the list of your KPI, you will make customer focus an essential part of business performance.
3. Consistent Omnichannel Service & Communication
Coworking is about hospitality and communication. Flexible workspaces interact with their customers across all possible channels—website, blog, online forms, live chat, social media, etc.
This is really great as long as communication, level of service, and member experience stay consistent both online and offline.
Look at The Hive or IOS OFFICES with their global passes. Their members probably have the feeling that their favorite workplace travels together with them. No need to look for a decent place to work in a foreign country. Members just use their apps to book a desk or a room, come to the workspace, and get to work worry-free enjoying the exact level of comfort and amenities they are used to.
The above-mentioned shared workspace brands can boast incredible popularity and high income because they invest in the happiness of their members.
4. Support Like God
No matter how big is your coworking network, it is still vital to listen to your members. People like it when their opinion matters and if workspace administrators are too busy with making money, they will just abandon you for a competitor.
I understand that it’s really challenging to stay connected to members when you open new locations and scale your business. But nobody speaks about direct contacts or Whats App chats.
You can replace the outdated support technology with a modern system available right inside members’ apps. This is the quickest and the simplest way for customers to create a query and get assistance. The same is true for workspace managers. Having all support tickets as well as member info and correspondence history in one place will help them process those queries efficiently and remove all bottlenecks before they become problems and cause members frustration.
Additionally, support chat is the best source of unfiltered, candid feedback from members all of us value so much.
5. Prioritize Mobile & Self-service Member Experience
This point is not to convince you that mobile experience is critical for members. We all know it is and if your website is still not optimized for mobile browsing, it can seriously harm your brand image. To be more accurate, you will disappoint 66% of users.
That’s why 84% of customer-centric companies are now focusing on the mobile customer experience. The excellent mobile experience is especially important when members are looking for support as 90% of them expect to resolve their queries through smartphones, which takes us to the next key point of this section, a self-service platform for just everything including support.
Modern coworking spaces must ensure that their members can easily discover and get all their services in a few taps without contacting the manager directly. These days 91% of customers are more comfortable with self-service interfaces than people. That’s why the best advice here is to fully automate workflows at your coworking space, starting from opening doors with a smartphone to Wi-Fi joining, desk and room booking, and so on.
Such automation will be appreciated not only by members but managers as well. Since members use mobile apps to purchase coworking space services, communicate with peers, and join events, administrators have time for really important tasks that are impossible to automate, such as developing business growth strategies, crafting new membership plans, inventing new marketing tricks, etc.
Final Thoughts
I am sure that when you just started up your coworking business, you knew every customer by name, you were aware of their pains and goals, and tried really hard to offer products that would address those pains and help to reach goals.
As your coworking space grows, it becomes more difficult to keep as close to your members as at the beginning of your business path. But please keep in mind that unhappy members rarely complain, they just leave and join communities of more customer-centric workspaces.
The top reason customers switch brands is because they feel unappreciated.
Only 1 of 26 members will let you know about the problem. Though, according to Esteban Kolsky, an unhappy customer will share their poor experience with 15 or even more prospects, while a happy customer will share positive feedback with 6+ people only.
Your goal is to study your members, become their advocate, the first person that gets their positive and negative feedback, and acts on it. This will help you personalize every interaction with your members, foresee their new requirements, offer the best solutions, and win over their loyalty to your brand.
