011 min
Why member experience is decided at renewal
Picture someone who pays for a full year at a gym in January. They go often in the first weeks, and by May they have stopped going. Every visit goes well. The staff are friendly, the machines work, and the showers are clean. In December a renewal notice arrives, and they ask one question: did I get my money's worth? The honest answer is no, so they do not renew.
No single visit went wrong. What failed was the year as a whole. A survey at the front desk in February would have scored well, and it would have said nothing about December. The gym measured each visit, but the member judged the year.
Member experience is the name for designing that whole period rather than each visit. It covers what happens before someone joins, the first weeks, the months of use or non-use, and the moment of renewal. The same pattern appears in credit unions, professional associations, warehouse clubs and streaming subscriptions. In each one, a person pays to belong, and later decides whether to keep paying.
023 min
How member experience works
The gym member's year shows what makes a membership different from a purchase. Three things change.
- The member pays first and gets the value later. A shop sale is finished at the till. A membership fee buys a promise, and the member has to collect on it over months.
- There is a second decision. Each renewal is a new choice to buy, made from memory of the whole period. People do not average every visit. They give more weight to the strongest moments and the last ones, which is the peak-end rule.
- The relationship carries identity. People say "I am a member" about a club, but not about a shop. That word brings an expectation of being known and treated as part of a group.
Kerry Bodine, a customer experience researcher and author, defines member experience as "members' thoughts, emotions, and perceptions about their interactions with an organization." The definition puts the experience in the member's head, not in the organization's list of services. Two members can get the same benefits and have different experiences.
A 2022 article in Associations Now splits what members need into three layers, which it calls hands, head and heart:
| Layer | What the member needs | Gym example |
|---|---|---|
| Functional (hands) | To get something done: learn, train, network, borrow | Working equipment and opening hours that fit their week |
| Cognitive (head) | To find and understand it without effort | A class timetable they can read in seconds |
| Emotional (heart) | To feel safe, welcome and part of a group | Staff who know their name |
Each layer depends on the one below it. Friendly staff do not make up for a broken booking system. A working booking system does not make anyone feel they belong.
Payment timing and member use
When a member paid changes how much they use what they paid for. John Gourville, a pricing researcher at Harvard Business School, described this in health clubs that bill once a year. Members visit often in the first month or two, while they still remember paying, and then go less and less as that memory fades. The pull of the sunk cost, the wish to get value from money already spent, weakens with time. Gourville argued that a member billed every month feels the cost all year, keeps going, and is more likely to renew.
When members own the organization
Some members are also owners. In a credit union, a not-for-profit cooperative bank, the members own the institution and elect its volunteer board. Profits go back to them as lower fees and better rates. For these organizations, member experience is part of the reason they exist, not only a way to protect revenue. A credit union that treats members only as people to sell to works against its own structure.
031 min
Where the idea of member experience comes from
The idea of designing that whole relationship has no single inventor. Member experience is practitioner convention, and it grew out of the wider field of customer experience.
The starting point most writers name is a 1998 Harvard Business Review article by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, Welcome to the Experience Economy. They argued that as services became ordinary and easy to copy, companies would look for the next step up in value, and that step was the experience. A company could stage an experience and, in time, charge for it directly. Membership organizations already did a version of this. A gym or a club charges for access over a period, not for one item.
In the 2000s, customer experience became a job title and a research field. Analysts at the research firm Forrester, among them Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning, worked on defining and measuring it. Credit unions and professional associations then borrowed the vocabulary. They swapped "customer" for "member" because their people are not only buyers. A member may vote, volunteer, attend events or own a share. By the late 2010s, some credit unions had front-line staff with the job title of member experience representative.
The term still has no formal standard. In one organization, the member experience program is a customer service training course. In another, it is a redesign of every step from joining to leaving.
043 min
How member experience shows up in real organizations
Organizations that take member experience seriously follow the member's path through a set of stages. Each stage has its own typical failure.
| Stage | What good looks like | Typical failure |
|---|---|---|
| Joining | A short form, clear prices, one payment step | A long application that asks for details nobody uses |
| First weeks | The member uses one main benefit soon after joining | A welcome email and then silence |
| Ongoing use | Events, learning, a community, quick help when needed | Benefits the member never hears about |
| Renewal | A reminder with a summary of what the member used | An automatic charge with no context |
| Leaving | An easy exit and a later invitation to return | A cancellation process built to wear people down |
The first weeks carry the most weight. A new member who soon reaches their first real use, their aha moment, has a reason to stay. That is why many associations run a separate program for a member's first year. A member who has used nothing by the first renewal has nothing to set against the fee. Members also compare each step with the best apps and shops they use elsewhere. A renewal form that asks for a printed signature feels slow next to a one-tap checkout.
Clearview Federal Credit Union
Clearview Federal Credit Union, based in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, made member experience a company-wide program in 2017. It began with a three-day executive planning session on the subject. Staff then sent in ideas for removing friction from member interactions. Clearview split the work into four areas: member, employee, digital and community. Together these covered more than 50 points where a member meets the credit union.
Job titles changed too. Tellers became member experience representatives, and collections staff became member resolution specialists. Some changes were small and easy to see. Employees walk members to the door and hold an umbrella over them when it rains. Branch staff serve coffee instead of pointing members to a machine. To measure the program, Clearview added surveys for Net Promoter Score and a member effort score. Net Promoter Score asks how likely a member is to recommend the organization. An effort score asks how easy it was to get something done.
Costco: renewal as the headline number
For a warehouse club, renewal is the business. Costco charges an annual fee for the right to shop in its stores, and it reports its renewal rate to investors every quarter. At the end of its 2024 fiscal year, Costco reported a renewal rate of 92.9% in the United States and Canada. A rate that high means almost every member who joined a year earlier decided the fee was worth paying again.
Members who joined on a discount
The same report showed where renewal comes from. In fiscal 2023, Costco ran a short online promotion that brought in more than 200,000 new members. When that group came up for renewal in 2024, they renewed at a lower rate than other members and pulled the overall rate down. Costco's finance chief said this is typical for digital promotions. A member who joined for a deal judges the deal. A member who joined for the store judges the store. An offer that changes who joins also changes the renewal rate a year later.
052 min
When a better member experience does not pay off
Not every improvement to the member experience is worth what it costs. Netflix learned this in its DVD-by-mail years, in a test that Gibson Biddle, its former vice president of product, described at a 2021 product conference.
Members kept asking to get new releases sooner. Most waited weeks for a new film at the top of their list. Netflix gave a test group of 10,000 members a perfect version: any new release they asked for went in the mail the next day. In the test group, 4.45% cancelled, against 4.5% in the control group. Across about a million members, that would keep 5,000 members, worth about $1 million to the company. Buying enough discs to offer the service to everyone would have cost $5 million. Netflix did not roll it out.
The test changed one thing and measured whether people stayed, which is the result that counts for a membership. Members liked the faster service. It was still not worth its cost. Guides on member experience often quote surveys in which most buyers say they would pay more for a better experience. The Netflix test shows the other side: the organization pays for the better experience too, and it has to check that the members it keeps cover the bill.
A larger study points the same way. In 2010, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman of the Corporate Executive Board reported research on more than 75,000 people who contacted service centers or used self-service. Going far beyond what customers expected made little difference to their loyalty. What people wanted was a quick, simple fix for their problem. Making things easy kept people. Extra effort to impress them mostly did not.
For member experience, this sets the order of work. First remove the effort: the repeat calls, the long forms, the switch from one channel to another. Spend on special moments after that, and test them the way Netflix did.
062 min
Why renewal rates can mislead about member experience
Even the renewal rate, the number Costco reports, can mislead about member experience. A high rate looks like proof that members are well served. Sometimes it shows only that they have not yet cancelled. The clearest evidence comes from gyms, the same setting as the member who stopped going in May.
Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier studied 7,752 members of three US health clubs over three years. They published the results in the American Economic Review in 2006, under the title Paying Not to Go to the Gym. Their findings show three ways a membership's numbers can hide what members actually do.
Paying for visits that never happen
Members who chose a flat monthly fee of over $70 went to the gym 4.3 times a month on average. That works out to more than $17 per visit. A 10-visit pass would have cost them $10 per visit. When they joined, these members expected to go far more often than they did.
Renewals that come from not cancelling
Members on monthly contracts kept paying for 2.31 full months on average after their last visit, a total of $187. Cancelling took a letter or one short trip to the club. For those months, the membership was active in the records while the member experience had already ended.
Why monthly members stay longer
Members on monthly contracts were 17 percent more likely to still be enrolled after one year than members who signed up for a full year. That is surprising, because monthly members pay more for the right to leave at any time. The authors' explanation is overconfidence: people expect to go more, and to cancel sooner, than they actually do. Together with Gourville's point about payment timing, it means the payment schedule is part of the member experience, not only a finance decision.
The lesson for practice is to measure use, not only renewal. A renewal from a member who has stopped using the service is a cancellation that has not happened yet.
072 min
Designing a member experience
So member experience work starts with the member's path and the member's use, not with a list of perks. Say a credit union, a gym or an association wants to keep more of its members. These moves come up again and again where it is done well:
Map the path from first contact to renewal.
Draw each step a member goes through, the channel it happens in, and where people get stuck. Journey mapping is the usual tool. Talk to members who left as well as those who stayed.
Get every new member to one real use early.
Pick the benefit most members value and build the first weeks around reaching it.
Remove effort before adding extras.
Let members update their details, book and pay on their own. Keep member data in one system, so staff do not ask for the same details twice. Answer questions quickly, in the channel the member chose.
Make the value visible before renewal.
Send a short summary of what each member used. The gym member who stopped in May would have seen in March that they had not visited for weeks. Where you can, spread payments over the year so cost and use stay close together.
Personalize with care.
Group members by stage, role or interest, and send each group what it needs. Use only data members expect you to use, and tell them what you collect.
Give staff specific behaviors.
A rule to be friendly cannot be trained. A rule to use the member's name and walk them to the door can. Check that every channel gives the same answer to the same question.
Measure use and effort, not only satisfaction.
Track how often members use their benefits, how easy key tasks are, how many new members come through referrals, and Net Promoter Score. To learn which benefits matter most, use a forced-choice survey such as MaxDiff, which makes members pick between benefits instead of rating each one high.
Plan for leaving.
Make cancelling easy and ask why. Invite lapsed members back when something they asked for has changed.
Community and recognition belong on this list where belonging is the point. Events, mentoring, volunteer roles and thanks to long-standing members give people a reason to stay that a discount cannot give. They work only after the basics work.
081 min
How to spot member experience going wrong
Member experience problems show up in the records long before the renewal date. Signs to check:
- Use drops sharply after the second or third month, while payments continue.
- Many renewals are automatic charges on members with no recent activity.
- Support tickets ask how to cancel, or how to find a benefit the organization already offers.
- New members do not come back after their first event or first visit.
- Members who joined through a discount renew at a much lower rate than others.
- Members repeat the same details to staff in several channels, because the systems do not share them.
- Survey scores are high, but renewal is flat or falling.
092 min
Member experience vs. customer experience and user experience
Member experience overlaps with two older terms. What separates them is the length and kind of relationship.
| Customer experience (CX) | User experience (UX) | Member experience (MX) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope | Every interaction with a company | Use of one product or interface | Every interaction with an organization the person has joined |
| Relationship | One purchase, or many separate ones | Whatever the product needs | An ongoing, paid relationship that comes with belonging |
| Main decision | Buy again or not | Finish the task or not | Renew or not |
| Often measured by | Satisfaction, effort, Net Promoter Score | Task success, time, errors | Use of benefits, renewal, Net Promoter Score |
User experience design is the narrowest of the three. A gym's member experience includes its app, but also the front desk, the renewal letter and the other people in the class. Customer experience is the closest neighbour. The working difference is the second decision. A customer who has a bad visit to a shop can simply not come back. A member has already paid, and must decide later whether to pay again. That is why member experience pays so much attention to use over time.
The letters MX are also used for "multiexperience", a technology term for serving people across many devices and channels. That is a different idea.
?4 questions
Questions people ask
Does member experience apply to free memberships?
Who is responsible for member experience in an organization?
Is a loyalty program the same as a membership?
§9 sources
Sources for member experience
Kristen Wright, "Member Experience: What It Is, and Why It's Vital to Associations," Associations Now, April 2022 (quotes Kerry Bodine's definition).
John Gourville, interviewed by Manda Mahoney, "Use the Psychology of Pricing to Keep Customers Returning," Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, September 2002.
US National Credit Union Administration, "About Credit Unions," MyCreditUnion.gov.
B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, "Welcome to the Experience Economy," Harvard Business Review, July–August 1998 (HBR Store page with the abstract).
Show all 9 sourcesShow fewer sources
James Major, "Next-Level Member Experience Right Here, Right Now," CreditUnions.com, March 2019.
Costco Wholesale, fourth quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call, September 26, 2024, transcript on MarketBeat.
Melissa Suzuno, "Gibson Biddle shares customer-centric product strategy lessons from Netflix," Productboard, 2021 (a summary of Biddle's talk).
Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman, "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers," Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010 (HBR Store page with the abstract).
Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier, "Paying Not to Go to the Gym," American Economic Review 96(3), 2006, author copy.
