We Hear You: How Zen Planner Maps a Course to What You Want

Whether you’ve used Zen Planner for a few months or a few years, you will notice that we regularly introduce new features.

One month, we may announce an integration with a new partner, such as Optum, which brings a new stream of revenue to your gym through participation in their fitness network. Another month, we may release a new software feature, like the ability for members to purchase events in the Member App.

Our community often asks us:

• How do we come up with ideas for new features?
• How do we decide which feature ideas to prioritize at any given time?

You might be surprised to learn that our product roadmap, as our feature development plan is known, is the result of a thorough, thoughtful, and data-driven process.

Ready for a glimpse behind the scenes at how we engage with you to figure out what’s next for Zen Planner? Want to hear how your feedback can be heard?

Read on!

Come check out the Zen Planner Community Forum

Our Zen Planner team loves to talk to users to continually improve — and that includes owners, front desk staff, and members. If you are part of the Zen Planner community, we want to know what’s on your mind.

Recently, we were excited to release the Zen Planner Community Forum. This is a new space where you have all our past releases at your fingertips –  from enhancements to major feature updates to bug fixes. We add to the Community Forum every other week.

Want to know what is next? The Community Forum is the place to find our upcoming large initiatives. These are upgrades and new feature sets that we want you to know — and hopefully get excited — about.

The Forum’s other main section is called “Considering.” Here, we are showing a list of the top feature requests that we’ve heard from you. You can vote on features that would positively affect your businesses the most. While we can’t always prioritize top vote getters, we strongly consider all for development to deliver the highest value possible.

In-app customer and member requests

No one knows your business better than you and your staff. You have great ideas for features and submit them to us as requests through the Zen Planner in-app feedback widget. Our product team looks at the weekly report of all these customer requests and categorizes the data, taking qualitative feedback and trying to make it more of a quantitative data set.

Members also submit — they are engaging with the software personally, and their user experience can affect how they feel about your business. In some cases, the suggestions relate to refinements of existing features, e.g., making the self-service aspects of the software more intuitive.

On average, we analyze several hundred of these each month. Requests from customers tend to be about business functionality. For example, we recently added the option to automatically turn on autopay. There is now a setting in the membership template for customers to choose if they want to opt in to automatic payments immediately after purchase.

We talk with Zen Planner users one-on-one, too!

We often find that the best way to gauge your reaction to potential features is simply to ask what you think. We conduct a number of structured interviews each month with the Zen Planner community. These sessions give us a chance to get in depth with you and gain an understanding of your concerns and desires for the software you use to run your business.

When we part ways, we want to know why

Like all software companies, even as we onboard new customers, a few existing customers will decide to leave. This is a valuable learning opportunity. We want to know why and how we could have helped more.

We proactively talk to all customers who choose to leave Zen Planner. Our goal is always to keep our ears open, even if the news isn’t good. That’s how we improve.

NPS data

Our dedicated focus on continual improvement includes routinely collecting Net Promoter Score (NPS) data from users to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. By tracking NPS over time, we can identify trends in perceptions of the product that help us make roadmap decisions.

In certain cases, we will reach out to a customer based on their NPS score and comments. We interview them to gain insights into what motivated them to rate us the way they did. Or, we probe into the details of their feedback to see what we can learn.

Stakeholder interviews

Then, as Linda Richman would say on Saturday Night Live, we “talk amongst ourselves.” Zen Planner employs many former fitness industry owners and operators, leading to a variety of opinions about what needs to come next on the roadmap.

We get input from our onboarding and sales teams, as they have the freshest exposure to your engagement with our software. We interview selected people in the company and get their input on different ideas that may make their way onto the roadmap. We also conduct a monthly feedback session with a group of internal team members to gauge their opinions on possible features.

Putting it all together

All of this listening really shapes our planning. The process culminates in a monthly roadmap review. We walk our team through our findings and suggested roadmap. Every department at Zen Planner, including marketing, sales, and customer success participates by providing input from their area of expertise.

We ask:

• Are these the right things?
• If not, why? What else is missing?

We strive to be data-driven throughout the roadmap process, which comes to resemble an endless circle. New feature ideas from customer interviews and user requests feed into the Community Forum, which informs the stakeholder interview and on and on.

For each iteration, our goal is to turn our active listening into great new features and user experiences. It’s impossible to please everyone, and indeed, we always have more feature ideas than we can develop.  Our approach is designed, however, to bring the best ideas to the forefront.

Kelli Sweeting

I’m Coach Kelli, a devoted CrossFit gym owner with 15 years of experience managing my facility, along with owning yoga studios and wellness centers. Beyond the fitness world, I have a passion for cooking, cherish moments with my children and family, and find joy in spending time outside. Having experienced the highs and lows, I’m dedicated to leveraging my expertise to help you grow and succeed on your fitness journey.