How Customer Feedback Helps Shape Product Development at Zen Planner

Customer Feedback is an essential component of Product Development at Zen Planner. Feedback from our customers helps guide us, and ensure we’re constantly updating and implementing features that bring greater benefit to the community of fitness businesses we seek to make wildly successful. But don’t just take our word for it – below we will highlight some of the recent product updates and changes that were, in part, directly linked to customer feedback!

Why We Value Customer Feedback

Feedback from fitness business owners, staff and members allows us to see past our blind spots, track customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships. Although our Product Team has an incredibly deep understanding of both our business needs and our customer needs, they need to learn directly from our customer base when we are planning for future development, and when we’ve released new features. Our team will bring in gym owners and staff members to hear directly from them during initial design periods to ensure we’re on the right track. Further, our team will call customers to gather information, share prototypes and fully understand their needs as a business owner. This allows us to take actionable steps to incorporate customer input and ideas into the final design of our features. With every bit of feedback, we examine it from qualitative and quantitative viewpoints. The closer it aligns with our business vision, the better it can help support our product decisions. We value all feedback, but some will be more likely to be actionable based on our roadmap.

After a new feature is released, we are in a constant state of listening, learning and adapting to additional needs and ideas as they are shared with us. For our team, the intention is not to release a new feature and forget about it, but rather to learn from customer feedback, and make additional changes to increase satisfaction and engagement with new product additions. This process increases customer satisfaction, which is one of our Product team’s primary goals.

What We Do With Customer Feedback:

That’s all well and good, but if we don’t share specifics, it might all be just a bunch of words. So, without further ado, here are some specific examples of how customer feedback has helped contribute to a better product for all of those we serve.

• Easier Passwords for Members and Staff

1. • One of the biggest pain points for gym members has historically been the difficulty of updating their passwords to get logged in to the Member App. As we received more direct feedback from gym members, we knew we had to take action to reduce this pain. Our Product Development team, as well as our Customer Success team, worked together to brainstorm viable solutions. Through research, planning and execution, we have now released updates to drastically decrease the complexity requirements for member passwords and removed the expiration requirement entirely from member passwords. This means as a gym member, I just need 8 characters, and no more of those pesky and needless “special” requirements that don’t actually mean more security. In addition, we’ve added a password strength meter to help coach members towards setting better passwords that are more secure. We hope these updates make password life easier for all of the gym members that we serve!
   • For staff, who have stricter password requirements based on our commitment to PCI Compliance, we’ve implemented a real-time validation feature when resetting a password (screenshot here), as well as the ability to Show or Hide one’s password when it’s entered. These changes should help ease some of the pain associated with the password reset process in particular, and improve the log-in experience for staff members and business owners.

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• Increase Inclusion in Fitness through “Not Specified” as a Gender Option

1. • To learn more about this important update, which allows Zen Planner to better serve our entire fitness community, please refer to our announcement blog.

• Hide Inactive Memberships, Discounts, Pay Rates and (coming soon!) Classes

1. • Many customers have given feedback that their list of membership options just kept growing and growing throughout the years due to holiday specials, or different pricing on memberships. As the list grew, it became more difficult to see and select the correct membership when a new member joined their facility. Through closely tracking customer feedback, our Product team was able to take action on a need and has implemented numerous updates to allow our customers to hide inactive memberships. Beyond this, they’ve expanded the functionality to allow for the hiding of inactive discounts, inactive pay rates, and will soon release the ability to hide inactive classes as well!

• Automatic Reallocation when Upgrading Memberships

1. • Whenever a member switches from one membership to another, it has historically taken extra work to switch their payments around (if needed). From customer feedback, as well as our own experience as gym members of facilities using Zen Planner, we realized this could work better. One of our developers, Gregg, took it upon himself to improve this functionality through some wizardry and math, and we’ve now released an update where the system will allow you to automatically reallocate the correct percentage of the previously paid amount towards the new membership. We hope this update makes the life of staff members and business owners easier, and improves the experience when changing memberships. To learn more about how this works, check out our updated help article (thanks to Jess on our Onboarding team) found here.

How To Send Us Your Feedback

Our team has gone through many iterations of how to best gather customer feedback, and through learning what works and what doesn’t, streamlined the process. The best way to send us feedback is via the Feedback Widget, which is found within Studio (Laptop/Desktop), Staff App (mobile, tablet, or laptop/desktop) or Member App (mobile).

• To access the Feedback Widget in Studio, click Tools on the top right, and then click Feedback. Screenshot found here.
• To access the Feedback Widget on Staff App (mobile or tablet), tap into the “More” button on the bottom right, and then tap Feedback. Screenshot found here.
• To access the Feedback Widget on Front Desk, click into Feedback on the top right. Screenshot found here.
• To access the Feedback Widget on Member App (mobile), tap into the Z menu on the top left and then tap Feedback. Screenshot found here.

Anything you write in the Feedback Widget is sent via email to Zen Planner’s entire Technology team. Simultaneously, an email ticket is generated and sent to our Support Team, just in case your Feedback has questions we can help with, and so we can acknowledge the receipt of your valuable feedback. Additionally, we categorize every ticket received to ensure we’re tracking and addressing the reasons customers reach out for support. Since we’ve started closely tracking our customer’s feedback, we’ve received over 2,500 unique staff Feedback requests and over 4,000 unique member Feedback requests. We’d love for you to be a part of it, as well, and help us continue our vision of making the world a healthier and happier place!

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