Research On Quality Of Fitness Club Service And Member Satisfaction Relations Based On Symbiosis Theory

Nowadays, with the fast development of fitness clubs, there also comes a lot of uneven development. This is due to the clubs’settings and control of service quality, as well as the unbalance between the fitness awareness and the experience of members. Therefore, we intend to take a practical evaluation of the service quality and the members" satisfaction, which turns out to be the common interest among the workers of fitness clubs.Based on the perspective of symbiosis theory, combined with the characteristics of the fitness industry, we are going to make a research on the relations between the service quality of fitness clubs and the members’satisfaction. We propose here three dimensions to evaluate the service quality of fitness clubs-"the quality of interaction", "the quality of the physical environment" and "the quality of results", and we select three dimensions to evaluate the members" satisfaction-"the satisfaction of courses ", "the satisfaction of fitness facility " and "the satisfaction of coaches". We take the members of fitness clubs in Shanghai as the object of the survey and select ten fitness clubs including 200 members as sample data. Thanks to the questionnaires, interviews and mathematical statistics, we draw the following conclusions:1. The membership structure of fitness clubs:the gender, the ratio between men and women in Shanghai’s fitness club is 2:3; the age, mainly the youth, the members from 18 to 35 years old account for 68.3% of the entire membership; the education, the undergraduates from universities and colleges reach the ratio of 74.4%, while the students from middle school or below reach 9.8%; the income, annual income between 50-100 thousand accounts for 40.9%. annual income less than 50 thousand and between 100-150 thousand account for 20.7%> 22.6%, more than 210 thousand only 6.7%; the working area, most of the members are employees accounting for 42.1%, secondly the workers of institutions and the freelancers 31.1%,18.3%, with only a few students and retirees.2. The characteristics of fitness club membership:in the case of handling fitness club membership card is substantially evenly, mostly the annual card, accounting for 22.0%, at the same time mostly single store card, accounting for 34.1%; the exercise time mostly concentrates over two years or between half a year and one year, the ratio is respectively, 21.3% and 55.5%, the period between one and two years accounts for only 6.7%, which is taken as a bottleneck of exercise. Most members take exercise 3-4 times, accounting for 53.0%,1-2 times and over 5 times accounting for 26.8% and 19.5%. Members take exercise for 1-2 hours, accounting for 62.8%. Members take exercise in order to improve the health, shape and physical stamina, and the proportion is 72.6%,56.2%, and 39.6%. When choosing a fitness club,74.4% of the members would consider the convenience of transportation, and 54.9% the reasonable price. In the appliances and equipment, quality service, popular atmosphere, and coach level, the ratio is 20%-40%.3. The characteristics of the service quality of fitness clubs:the service quality of fitness clubs scores between 3.43-4.04, in which the interaction scores between 3.66-3.88, indicating the strong consistency in the internal assessment of interaction quality. The environmental quality and the result quality score between 3.58-4.04 and 3.58-4.01, the large range indicating that the environmental quality and the result quality differ from different fitness club service.4. The characteristics of members’ satisfaction:the members’ satisfaction scores between 3.38-3.89, in which the course satisfaction scores between 3.38-3.71, the facility satisfaction scores between 3.39-3.73, the coaches’satisfaction scores between 3.66-3.89. The small interval indicates that the consistent level of the members’satisfaction in Shanghai’s fitness clubs.5. The characteristics of the quality service in fitness clubs and the members’satisfaction: moderate positive correlation among the interaction quality, the environmental quality and the result quality in the service quality; moderate positive correlation among the three dimensions of service quality and the members’satisfaction; highly positive correlation among the environmental quality and the course satisfaction.6. The symbiotic phenomenon between the fitness clubs and the membership:the high score of overall service quality in Shanghai’s fitness clubs indicates the high-quality service to the members from the fitness clubs; the members’ satisfaction also gets high scores indicating the high recognition of the members to the clubs. Based on that, the members establish gradually fitness routines and the clubs improve their service quality, thus increasingmembers’ exercise benefits as well as the clubs’ income. As two symbiotic units, fitness clubs and members stay in a reciprocal symbiotic mode, and in structural stability.