CWA Blog Archive-Adjusting To The New Reality How To Communicate With Your Customers

Adjusting To The New Reality How To Communicate With Your Customers

Pdf Summary

This is Part I of a series on communicating with customers about the new realities of running a gym during coronavirus. It sets the context: over the preceding months, gym owners were bombarded with big questions, from navigating payroll assistance and small business loans to keeping customers safe, and now, as North American restrictions loosened, they faced another: how to communicate with members about reopening. The article frames this through crisis communication expert Adele Cehrs, who identifies the moment as a textbook business crisis, defining a crisis as any moment where your business needs to clarify a misperception. In this case, misperceptions run both directions, a member worried the gym won't be clean enough to keep them safe, or a member believing that because they pay dues, they can do whatever they want. Cehrs explains that in crisis communication, you walk back those misperceptions. The article's featured guidance is to communicate early and often. According to Cehrs, the amount of communication needed to reassure members that it's safe to return is directly related to how frequently and clearly you engage them. The throughline is that reopening a gym during the pandemic constitutes a genuine business crisis requiring deliberate crisis communication to correct member misperceptions and rebuild confidence. Because members held conflicting, often mistaken beliefs, some fearing the gym wouldn't be clean enough, others feeling entitled to ignore new rules, operators had to actively clarify and correct these misperceptions rather than assume members understood the new reality. Crisis communication expert Adele Cehrs frames the task precisely: a crisis is a moment needing misperception-clarification, and reopening demands exactly that. Her core prescription, communicate early and often, holds that reassuring members enough to return safely requires proactive, frequent communication proportional to their concerns. For operators, the article reframes reopening communication not as routine messaging but as crisis management, equipping them to approach it with the seriousness and strategy it demands, correcting both safety fears and entitlement misconceptions through abundant, early, ongoing communication that rebuilds the trust and clarity members needed to return confidently to a changed gym environment.

Asset Caption

Part I of a customer-communication series frames pandemic reopening as a textbook business crisis. Expert Adele Cehrs defines crisis as needing to clarify a misperception, whether members fear the gym isn't clean enough or feel entitled to ignore rules, and prescribes communicating early and often to correct those misperceptions and rebuild confidence for a safe return.