Customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction with no-frills fitness centers in Bangkok

In today’s world, people are growing more and more concerned with their health. The recognition of this growing concern can be seen in the rapid development of products and services related to the health care industry. Organic foods, beauty services and wellness centers are a few examples of the services experiencing a quick growth, and these and more aim at answering the consumer’s call to better maintain one’s health with options and convenience. Specific to fitness centers, whose revenue has steadily risen by 10-20% per year, a new branch of such centers has quickly spread around the Bangkok Metropolitan Region, namely, no-frills fitness centers (Chapman, 2015). Yet, as customers have more choices in amenities and styles of fitness, business owners are forced to quickly adapt to accommodate and capture their share of the market in a rapidly changing sector of the health care industry. In doing so, business owners may require consumer insight, as a means of identifying which facilities, amenities and services are necessary to develop business. Recognizing the necessity of such insight, this research identified the factors that most affect customer satisfaction of no-frills fitness centers both at the level of individual customer segment types (e.g. female customers vs. male customers) and overall. This was done by reviewing secondary analyses about the topic and collecting information to be used in making an in-depth interview. A quantitative survey was then constructed from the results of the in-depth interview together with the insight gained from the literature review. Both the in-depth interview responses and the responses of the quantitative survey served as the primary data sources for this project. The survey was distributed to over 200 male and female respondents, whose qualifications match those of the target demographic of this study. A statistical analysis was carried out on the information obtained from the quantitative survey making use of the SPSS software.The results of this analysis indicated that location accessibility, variety of exercise classes, and quality of machines exhibit the greatest effect on overall customer satisfaction. When the data are grouped by gender, greater emphasis on trainer knowledge and staff service were seen in male responses, while female respondents placed emphasis on restroom cleanliness and changing rooms. It was found that factors such as quality of machines, and variety of machines are important to customers, but exhibit poor performance as indicated by an Importance-Performance Matrix. To address such problems, a clear call and burden is placed on the management in order to better appeal to their target demographic. Conversely, the management can consider eliminating some factors such as changing rooms and lockers as they have marginal effects on the overall satisfaction of the customer.