Why Does Poor Service Keep Winning in Clubs? 

TRANSCRIPT: Why Does Poor Service Keep Winning in Clubs? 
The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast

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MICHELLE: Why poor service keeps winning in clubs — and what it actually takes to change it.

Welcome to this week's episode of the Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast, where I start by asking you a question.

If I asked you right now what poor customer service cost your club last financial year — not roughly, not a feeling, but an actual figure — could you answer me? Well, most can't. And it's the primary reason training budgets get cut, deferred, and deprioritised year after year. Nobody has built the number, so fixing the problem stays optional.

Before we get into it, if you're listening to this and you already know your club needs support — whether that's getting an independent, objective picture of what your members are actually experiencing on the floor, or bringing in structured skills training for your frontline team — I want to make it easy for you to take the next step.

We run mystery shopping programs through our proprietary software. Over 25 years, lots of experience. I love data, but I love having qualitative research as well. They're specifically designed for registered clubs and hospitality venues — pubs, restaurants, cafes — and they provide you a true insight of what's happening in your organisation. And then there's our frontline workshops. They are built to give your team the practical skills to make every member interaction count. Links to both are in the show notes, so book a discovery call and we'll work out together what makes sense for your venue.

Now, back to my question.

If you've been listening along through the month of June, you already heard me talk with Brian about what technology can and genuinely cannot fix about your club's service status. You'll have heard Carlos Castillo unpack why guests leave happy and still don't come back. And you'll have heard Rick Denton make the point that the branding of customer experience is dying — not because businesses don't care about their customers, but because the CX world has consistently failed to tie its work to tangible commercial outcomes.

Three conversations, and underneath all of them the same question: why does poor service keep winning?

Not in the obvious ways. Not the venues that are genuinely indifferent to their members. I'm talking about clubs that care. The ones with good people, good intentions, solid facilities, and a genuine desire to do right by their members and guests. And yet the service standards drift, the training doesn't stick, the board keeps deferring the investment, and the same issues appear in member feedback round after round.

That's what I want to talk about today. Not the calculation — if you want the step-by-step framework for building your service liability number, this week's tutorial on YouTube walks through that in detail and the guide is linked in the show notes. What I want to explore here is the deeper question: why does this keep happening, and what does it actually take to change it?

I've been in this industry for quite a while now — over 30 years. I've mystery shopped hundreds of venues, I've created over 10,000 questions specifically for each individual venue, and I've trained staff and coached managers and sat in more boardrooms than I can count. And the pattern I see playing out in clubs that struggle with service consistency is rarely about bad people or bad intentions. It's about a structural misunderstanding of what service excellence actually requires.

Most clubs treat service training as an event. Something that happens at induction, or when a complaint spike triggers a response. So when the board asks what's being done about the member feedback, a program gets launched, a workshop gets delivered, people feel good for about six weeks — if that — and then the floor reverts to what it was before. Because nothing in the surrounding structure changed. The training was real and the intention was genuine, but the environment it landed in wasn't designed to hold it.

Think about what a frontline team member goes back to after service training day. A supervisor who may not have been trained in the same standards. A rostering system that prioritises numbers over consistency. A management culture where the focus is on getting through the shift, not on the quality of every member interaction within it. A recognition system that notices when something goes wrong but rarely notices when something goes right.

You can deliver the best training in the world into that environment and watch it evaporate within a few weeks. Because the culture around it didn't support what the training was trying to build.

This is the conversation I think clubs need to be having at board level, and almost never do. We talk about training investment as if the training itself is the complete solution. It isn't. It's the starting point. The return on that investment depends entirely on what surrounds it.

Does your middle management layer have the skills to reinforce the behaviours the frontline has been trained in? Are they modelling the correct behaviours as well? Because if the supervisor, team leader, or duty manager on the floor the week after the training program isn't modelling those same standards, isn't recognising the team members who are applying what they learned, isn't having the same conversations about service quality that the training introduced — then the investment starts leaking immediately.

Rick Denton made a point in our conversation this month about the importance of listening to employees — truly listening. They are the closest to our customers. Not just surveying members for a tick and flick on a piece of paper or on your iPad. Genuinely hearing what frontline staff are observing and experiencing, and building a structure that allows that intelligence to travel upward and actually change something.

In most clubs, that loop is broken. Frontline staff notice things, they mention them, those observations make it as far as a shift supervisor and sometimes as far as a department manager — and then they stop. By the time anything reaches the decision-making level, the details have been lost or the moment has passed because something else has taken over. This is a clear culture problem, and it starts at the top.

Carlos Castillo talked about the revolving door — members who have had a great experience and still don't return, because nothing happened after they left to give them a reason to come back. I've been thinking about that in the context of staff as well as members. Because the same revolving door exists for the frontline team in clubs.

Good people join. They bring the energy and that genuine care for the member experience — which is exactly what we're wanting. Then they hit a culture that doesn't reinforce or recognise what they're doing well. They've been promised something in the interview, and when they get on the floor it doesn't match. And gradually they disengage, or they leave. And you know better than me — they don't even tell you when they're leaving. You're lucky if you get a text. And the club starts the cycle again.

The cost of that cycle is significant. If you want the specific numbers, the guide in the show notes walks you through my calculation. But the cost isn't just financial. Every time a genuinely service-oriented team member leaves a venue, they take with them the relationships they built with the regulars, the institutional knowledge they developed, and the standard they've been holding. I've even spoken to members and guests who have gone to other venues because they knew that staff member had moved there — and they just really enjoyed their service. Now that's something, isn't it.

What replaces them is someone new who needs time to find their feet in a culture that may not be showing them clearly what good looks like.

Brian Vujnovic talked about the tension between technology investment and human skill. And there's a version of that tension playing out in the service conversation too. Clubs invest in systems — feedback platforms, member management tools, satisfaction surveys designed to surface service issues. And those tools have genuine value, don't get me wrong. But the data they produce is only useful if the organisation has the culture and the capability to act on it. Not just a great document, top drawer, shut.

I've seen clubs with sophisticated feedback systems and persistent service problems sitting right alongside each other. The data was there, the insights were being generated, but nobody knew what to do with them at a team level. Nobody had been trained to turn an insight into a behaviour change on the floor. I've been reading data for over 30 years with my own research program, and it's about bringing it alive. The system was working, but the culture wasn't ready for what the system was telling it.

So what does it actually take to change this?

It takes three things, operating together rather than independently.

It takes leadership at every level that understands service excellence as a commercial priority. That means CEOs and GMs who can articulate the cost of poor service in financial terms — not just as a reputation risk, but as a revenue and retention issue with actual numbers behind it. And it means middle managers who have been developed to the point where they can translate that priority into daily team behaviour.

It takes a recognition culture that captures people doing things right — consistently, on the floor, in the moment, visibly. The Macy's PA system story that came up in my conversation with Rick this month was a great example. A manager took 30 seconds to publicly acknowledge a team member for excellent service. It cost absolutely nothing. But it changed the energy in that building. And it's still something I talk about years later. Your club has an equivalent of that PA system. The question is whether anyone is using it.

And it takes training that is reinforced rather than delivered and forgotten. Which means the investment in frontline training needs to be matched by an investment in the management layer that surrounds it. Middle managers who model the standards. Supervisors who recognise and correct service behaviour in real time. A culture where the conversation about member experience happens every day — not just when something goes wrong.

None of this is complicated in concept. In practice, it requires sustained commitment from the top of the organisation. And that commitment is harder to maintain when the cost of inaction is invisible.

Which brings me back to where we started. The reason poor service keeps winning in clubs is not that nobody cares — that's certainly not it. It's that the cost of doing nothing is never on the page alongside the cost of doing something. The service liability sits in the accounts under different labels — turnover costs, complaint resolution time, declining member retention — and nobody has added it up and put it on a single line.

When you build that number, the conversation changes. Not because the board suddenly cares more, but because the argument is finally in a language the board has always spoken.

If you haven't run that calculation yet, the guide and the tutorial are both linked in the show notes — so start there.

If this series has been useful across June, I'd genuinely love it if you'd share it with someone in the industry who needs to hear it. And if you haven't already subscribed, now is a good time. I'm back next month with a whole new topic and guests I think you're going to find genuinely valuable.

To find out more about our mystery shopping programs, our frontline workshops, or to book a discovery call, everything is linked in the show notes below.

Until then, take care — and enjoy this colder weather. Bye.

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