Why the Customer Experience Conversation Keeps Failing in Club Boardrooms

There's a reason the words "customer experience" have started to land flat in boardrooms across the hospitality industry.

It's not that CEOs and boards don't care about their members. In my experience, the vast majority do. It's that the customer experience conversation has consistently failed to show up in a language the boardroom speaks.

Rick Denton has spoken with customer experience leaders across more than 100 countries. When I asked him on the podcast this week whether customer experience is dying, his answer reframed the question entirely. What's dying, he said, is the branding of customer experience — because those of us in the CX world have done a poor job of tying our work to tangible commercial outcomes. Organisations have become fatigued with the concept not because they don't value their members, but because the investment never came with a number attached to it.

I've watched the same pattern play out in clubs for three decades. And I think it's time we talked about why — and what it actually takes to change it.

The feedback loop that goes nowhere

Most clubs have a feedback system. A satisfaction survey. A complaints process. A suggestion box in the foyer that gets emptied occasionally. The infrastructure for listening to members exists in some form in almost every venue I work with.

And yet when I ask club managers what changed in their venue as a direct result of member feedback in the last 90 days, the silence is telling.

Collecting feedback and acting on feedback are two completely different organisational capabilities. Most clubs have invested in the first and almost none have deliberately built the second.

Here's what the listen-and-act gap looks like in practice. A member raises an issue — at the bar, in a survey response, in a formal complaint. It gets logged, it gets reported, it might even make it into a management meeting agenda. And then the financial year rolls on, the same issues surface in the next round of feedback, and the cycle repeats.

Nobody in that process had bad intentions. The problem is structural. There is no clear path from a piece of member feedback to a specific change in team behaviour on the floor. And without that path, the feedback system is producing data that nobody knows how to act on at a human level.

Rick put it simply in our conversation. He said companies need to listen not just to their customers but to the employees who are closest to those customers. Both. Because your frontline team is observing things in every shift that your satisfaction survey will never capture. The question is whether your organisation has built a structure that allows that intelligence to travel upward — and whether anything changes when it does.

In most clubs, that loop is broken at the middle management layer. Frontline staff notice things and mention them. Those observations make it as far as a supervisor, sometimes as far as a department manager, and then they stop. By the time anything reaches a decision-making level, the moment has passed.

Why the boardroom keeps saying no

The second dimension of this problem plays out at the top of the organisation rather than the bottom.

When the customer experience conversation reaches the board table, it typically arrives dressed as a cultural initiative. We need to improve our service culture. We need to invest in our people. We need to be more member-centric.

These are true statements. But they're not board arguments. Boards make decisions based on commercial outcomes, risk management, and return on investment. A cultural initiative with no number attached to it will lose to a capital expenditure proposal every time — not because the board doesn't value member experience, but because the capital proposal came with a financial case and the training proposal didn't.

This is the fundamental failure of the customer experience conversation in clubs. The people making the case for investment are speaking the language of culture. The people approving or rejecting it are speaking the language of commercial outcomes. And nobody’s built the bridge between them.

The bridge is the number. The monthly cost of under-trained teams across member churn, staff turnover, and complaint management. When that figure sits alongside the cost of a training investment, the conversation changes immediately. Because the board isn't being asked to spend money on culture anymore. They're being asked to spend less money than the problem is already costing them.

What it actually takes to change the conversation

Reframing the customer experience conversation in your club requires two things happening at the same time.

The first is building the commercial case. Calculating your monthly service liability — what poor service standards are costing your venue in concrete financial terms — and presenting that figure at the board table alongside the cost of the solution. Next week's article and my Real Cost of Poor Service Calculation Guide will walk through exactly how to do that.

The second is fixing the listen-and-act loop at a team level. Which means giving your middle management layer the skills to receive feedback — from members and from frontline staff — and translate it into specific, observable behaviour change on the floor. An actual change that someone can point to and say: that happened because we listened.

These two things reinforce each other. When the board can see that training investment produces a measurable reduction in complaint volume or an improvement in repeat visitation, the next training conversation is easier. And when the frontline team can see that their observations actually change something, the culture of listening and acting starts to build on itself.

Neither happens quickly, but both are entirely within reach of any club that decides they matter.

The clubs I see consistently winning on member experience aren't the ones with the most sophisticated feedback platforms or the biggest training budgets. They're the ones where the loop between listening and acting is intact at every level of the organisation — and where someone has taken the time to put a number on what it costs when it isn't.

That number is where next week's conversation starts. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it.

If you want to understand what poor service standards are currently costing your club before you make the next training investment, the Real Cost of Poor Service Calculation Guide is a practical starting point. It walks through the three figures that make up your monthly service liability and gives you the framework to take that number to your board. Reach out to [email protected] and I’ll send you a copy.

Or to find out more about our Customer Service Excellence Workshops and Frontline Training Programs visit https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms

And don’t forget to catch the full conversation with Rick Denton here: https://youtu.be/kaEewa1rhBI