Stensballegaard Golf Club monitors return to success through satisfaction tracking

Stensballegaard Golf Club recently saw a decline in their member satisfaction scores, which led them to bring on new forces in the team, learn from their slips, and make changes based on member feedback. Now, the Danish club has set an ambitious goal of restoring their scores to their starting point in 2016.

In the seventh largest city in Denmark, you'll find a golf club with award-winning architecture. The roughly 900 members and 5,000 yearly visitors at Stensballegaard Golf Club [Stensballegaard Golfklub] can boast about having played at the golf resort that won the 2010 Development of the Year Award by Golf Inc. Magazine, with the famous architecture firm von Hagge, Smelek and Baril being the mastermind behind the club design.

In 2004, the application for establishing a golf club amidst picturesque nature was submitted, resulting in Stensballegaard Golf Club becoming a popular links-style golf club in Denmark. Source: Stensballegaard Golf Club

Holger Westman, General Manager at Stensballegaard Golf Club. Source: Stensballegaard Golf Club

The course is drained using a catch basin, which collects rainwater in the surrounding three lakes, with the water then being reused to irrigate both the greens and tees. Source: Stensballegaard Golf Club

Through its architects, the club is in the family of other renowned courses that have hosted several PGA Championships, such as Doral Golf and Country Club. Source: Stensballegaard Golf Club

 

The club can also parade with being an early bird when it comes to utilizing member and guest feedback, being an active user of the Players 1st solution since it became available for Danish golf clubs in 2016. The commercial golfing venue, which has 27 holes and a 9-hole par 3 course, has used various survey templates to track satisfaction scores at the club for quite some time now.

 

This feedback-based performance tracking actually played a part in the golf manager at Stensballegaard Golf Club, Holger Westman, noticing a grim decline in the club's overall member satisfaction score. Recognizing that a cut in this score signals the need for change, Westman took action to turn things around.

Monitoring changes might be as important as making changes

From 2020 to 2022, the Net Promoter Score at Stensballegaard Golf Club took a big hit for the first time since the club began surveying its members.

Figure 1: The development of the Net Promoter Score at Stensballegaard Golf Club from 2016-2022. Source: Players 1st

 

A glance into the Players 1st dashboard confirmed what Westman feared at the time. The similarity between the dip in scores for the overall satisfaction at the club and the satisfaction with the course was clear. Something was off.

 

As the member feedback about the course was mostly negative, the club decided to bring some fresh perspective to their greenkeeper team while diving into the feedback to see exactly where to brush up.

On top of that, the club decided to let the greenkeepers do their magic on the golfing grounds instead of giving in to the temptation of asking them to do other tasks at the clubhouse in peak season – a call which actually also can lead to increased job satisfaction of greenkeepers.

After the turnaround and tweaking of working methods, the development is plain as day, with scores in various areas within the dashboard having gone up. In short, the data has proven the change successful – at least for now.

Figure 2: The development of the Net Promoter Score at Stensballegaard Golf Club from 2020-2023. Source: Players 1st

Figure 2: The development of the satisfaction score for the course at Stensballegaard Golf Club from 2020-2023. Source: Players 1st

Figure 2: The development of the satisfaction score for fairways at Stensballegaard Golf Club from 2020-2023. Source: Players 1st

Figure 2: The development of the satisfaction score for maintenance at Stensballegaard Golf Club from 2020-2023. Source: Players 1st

 

Improving one area can boost or sink other area scores

The excitement is clearly high with a big shift at Stensballegaard Golf Club. But this does not mean they are sleeping on how the club performs in other parts. Because when something new is put into action at a golf club, it will nearly always impact other areas either directly or indirectly – a relationship called the chain of touchpoints.

For this reason, the club keeps an eye on the scores generated from the more than 90 questions they ask in their member survey.

The club sees this ongoing process as a natural step in pushing the club to the next level.

For example, the club spent resources to fix their 115 bunkers since the members asked for it. Similarly, feedback indicated that golfers found it difficult to find the right path on the 140-acre course, prompting the club to purchase a bunch of brand-new next-tee signs and place them in strategic areas. Both are minor adjustments made to improve the experience.

Even though the club has been working on the bunkers and guiding on the course, these scores also went down before the larger changes, with the scores for the distance markers still waiting for a boost. This shows how scores are affected by other areas as well.

Figure 3: The development graphs of different touchpoints at Stensballegaard Golf Club. Source: Players 1st

 

Learning the process of tracking development is worth the time

With the desire to track the impact of the new perspectives in the team and ongoing improvements, there are no signs that Stensballegaard Golf Club will cease surveying its members anytime soon.

But, he sometimes recalls his first days of using feedback and is aware that it can be tough to start learning how to utilize feedback in between the daily, and often time-consuming, operations as a golf club manager. In this situation, he suggests making feedback a club priority and a mission everyone can follow.

Now, as a long-term user of Players 1st, Holger Westman knows how to leverage feedback. For this reason, he is confident that the new and ongoing actions at the club will bring it back to its baseline of an overall member satisfaction score of 60 – a journey that will be monitored closely through feedback.