The following article is based on the 2026 Fitness Business Client Experience Workshop. Learn more about that event here.
As a PT, the thing you sell is Personal Training. That’s your product. But it’s more than just a session. It’s even more than the results the training gives your client. The thing that keeps people coming back and the thing that makes people tell their friends, is the experience they get. The experience makes them feel a certain way, and gives them a story to tell.
That experience, from the moment your client steps out of their car, to the moment they step back into their car an hour later, needs to be intentionally designed. Every touch point needs to be mapped to create a remarkable experience. An experience that people will ‘remark about’.
We call this the ‘service experience’. It’s every single touch point that your client experiences during the course of a PT session. It can also include what happens shortly before and after the session, such as a reminder text, a personalised message or a follow-up email.
In his book, ‘Customer Magic: The Macquarie Way’ (2023), the author, Joseph A. Michelli, simplifies the reason for the power of client experience as a growth strategy – covering both the increase in client value, and the strategy of ‘experience marketing’.
‘The economic flywheel that drives cash generation is this: happy clients come back for more and refer their friends. Businesses (in our case, Personal Trainers) that benefit from this flywheel don’t have to buy growth. They earn it. Earning growth provides the only economically sustainable formula.’
I’d like to walk you through the step-by-step process that I’ve designed for Gobsmack Consulting, which we use to help businesses design this service experience. Specifically for you as a personal trainer, this is the exact process you should follow to make your PT sessions truly jaw-dropping. This is also a sneak peak of one of the exercises you can expect to in the 2026 Fitness Business Client Experience Workshop which I’ll be hosting in conjunction with my experience design consultancy, ‘Gobsmack Consulting’, on Friday 16th October, 2026.
Today, just like at the workshop, we’ll be creating unignorably remarkable experiences for your clients. Experiences that make them feel something and form emotional connections with you and your brand. Experiences that give them stories they won’t shut up about.
Let’s see what we’re working with here – let’s define our starting-point.
This is where we define what the PT session currently looks like.
We want to start by listing each of the touch points of your current PT session experience. A touch point is a single moment of contact between a client and your business that forms the smallest measurable unit of client experience. An interaction always involves the client, but the interaction doesn’t need to be with you personally. It could also be with a reminder text, your gym environment, reception staff, equipment, music or your training app.
Let’s walk through a pretty standard service experience for a PT session.
Jess parks in the gym car park a few minutes before her personal training session. She gets out of her car, walks toward the entrance and scans her access tag as she enters. A staff member at reception gives her a quick hello before returning to what they were doing.
Jess places her bag near the gym floor and waits for her trainer to finish with their previous client. At the scheduled start time, the trainer walks over and says, “Hey Jess, how are you going?” Jess says she is doing well but mentions that her legs are still a little sore from her last session.
The trainer asks whether she has any injuries or anything else they need to know about, then briefly explains what they will be working on that day. Jess begins with five minutes on the exercise bike while the trainer prepares the equipment.
Once the warm-up is finished, the trainer takes Jess through her first exercise. They explain how many repetitions she needs to complete and remind her of the basic technique. Jess performs the set while the trainer watches, offering a few corrections and some general encouragement. When she finishes, the trainer records the result and tells her how long to rest.
Jess repeats the exercise for the planned number of sets before moving on to the next one. This process continues throughout the session. The trainer selects the exercises, adjusts the weights when necessary and occasionally asks Jess how each movement feels. Jess completes a mixture of strength exercises and a short conditioning activity to finish.
At the end of the session, the trainer tells Jess she is done and gives her a brief summary of how she performed. They remind her of her next appointment and say goodbye.
Jess collects her bag, walks out of the gym and returns through the car park. She gets back into her car and leaves.
Pretty standard right, and there’s nothing wrong with that session at all – but there’s room for improvement.
NOW DO THIS: On a blank sheet of paper, make a list of every single touch point your PT experience currently has. This should be a step-by-step walk through. Think about this not only as being the moment your client steps out of their car before a session to the moment they step back in their car at the end, but also consider any pre- and post-session touch points, like a session reminder text or a next day follow-up email.
Next we need to use this list to create an experience map of the current PT session experience.
It’s time to meet the main output of the ‘Experience Designer’, the Experience Map.
Experience mapping is the exercise of designing the journey a client will go through during an individual PT session. It gives a visual representation of the client journey.
To get this picture of your current PT experience, we’ll be using a very simple experience map. This will get more complex as we progress through this exercise.
The basic layout of the map includes a vertical ‘y axis’ and a horizontal ‘x axis’.
On the y axis are the numbers one to ten. These numbers represent how good each touch point of an experience was. The higher the number, the better the experience.
The x axis is a chronological timeline for each individual touch point of an experience.
In this way, we can visually track how good or bad each touch point is as we progress through a service experience. That experience-mapping exercise is one of the first things we’ll work through at the Perth Fitness Business Client Experience Workshop, because seeing the entire session laid out makes the hidden gaps much easier to spot.
During the 2026 Fitness Business Client Experience Workshop, you’ll be guided through this process on your own massive wall chart.
NOW DO THIS: Begin by listing each of the touch points of your current PT session experience on the x axis.
Now it’s time to rate each touch point.
To do this, we’ve created the ‘Experience Rating Scale’. It defines what constitutes a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 out of 10.
Each description defines the client effort required, how the touch point made the client feel, how it compared with their expectations, how likely a client is to tell a story about that experience, and what that story will be.
Before you rate the touch points of your current PT session, a few things to keep in mind.
Remarkably positive and remarkably negative PT experiences create strong stories and a high likelihood of those stories being shared. Neutral plateaus of experience create absolutely no word of mouth. Think about Jess’s session: it was perfectly adequate, but there was nothing remarkable enough to retell.
The likelihood that someone will retell a terrible 1 or 2/10 experience is 100%. As is the likelihood that a story will be told about a jaw dropping 9 or 10/10 experience. But outside these extremes, people just don’t talk about their experiences.
More often than not, people often rate themselves too highly. A 5/10 is a perfectly adequate experience. Nothing negative happened, the client got exactly what they wanted, and the session met with their expectations.
9s and 10s are astoundingly rare for businesses who have not intentionally devoted considerable time and resources to experience design. Even businesses who have prioritised client experience may only achieve one or two of these a year. Usually, a 7 would be the absolute highest score we’d expect from most PTs, and even those are not common. When completing this exercise for the first time, we expect to see scores ranging from 3 to 6.
NOW DO THIS: Rate each of the touch points you’ve written on your experience map. You’ll do this by drawing a horizontal line above each touch point that corresponds to the score you’re assigning that touch point. Then, join each horizontal line to the lines before and after it to create a step chart.
We now have a visual representation of your client’s levels of experience throughout the PT session.
Our next step is design your upgraded PT session experience.
Now we’ve established where your PT session experience is currently sitting, we can get to work on improving it.
We’ll be working with pits, plateaus and peaks. We’ll begin with pits.
We will be turning low touch points into plateaus, or, in some rare cases, into peak moments.
A ‘pit’ is the name we give to the low points in a client’s PT journey, where things feel frustrating, confusing, boring or stressful, and the experience falls below expectations. They sit in the 1-4 out of 10 range and destroy trust quickly. They have an outsized negative impact on loyalty and word of mouth if these pits are not actively ‘filled’ or recovered.
There are three ways we can uncover the pits in your PT sessions: listing the low rated touch points in your current PT session experience; identifying what we call ‘points of pain’; and identifying ‘expected pits’ by ‘reverse benchmarking your industry’. We’re going to unpack each of these strategies.
NOW DO THIS: Make a list of any touch point in your experience map that you rated a 1-4 out of 10. This list contains the current pits of your experience.
Next, we’re going to identify your clients’ ‘points of pain’.
In her 2019 book, ‘Transform client Experience’, Isabella Villani defines these as ‘interactions where clients become angry, frustrated or confused’.
These touch points in the client service experience create emotional ‘pits’ that damage trust and loyalty unless they are anticipated and intentionally improved or transformed into positive moments.
NOW DO THIS: Make a list of potential ‘points of pain’ in your PT session experience.
Now we’ve got a list of potential points of pain, we’re going to complete a ‘reverse benchmarking’ exercise to identify expected pits. There are certain experiences or touch points that clients expect to be negative, boring or painful.
Let’s define the standard term ‘benchmarking’. This is where we identify industry leaders in various fields as a way to draw inspiration from how they provide experiences. ‘Reverse benchmarking’ is the opposite. It’s where we study the worst or most painful parts of your industry’s typical client journey (or even a similar industry) and redesign them into positive or delightful experiences, turning expected pits into surprise peaks.
In ‘Talk Triggers’ (2018), Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin propose that it’s the difference between expectation and reality that determines whether an experience will be talked about. The bigger the difference between the expected score on the Experience Rating Scale and the rating of the actual experience you can upgrade them to, the more remarkable they will be. We call this the ‘expectation gap’.
Certain industries have experiences that are so stereotypically common to that industry that they become an expectation. Think pushy used car salespeople, long wait times when you call a client support line, huge queues at a theme park, tradies or repair people not turning up during the promised time window, physically painful dentist visits, your family doctor running behind, and surprise extra costs when you take your car to a mechanic.
You know, all those things people like to complain about – the things that make clients tell negative stories about a business. Things that are negative, boring or painful. Imagine the difference in the stories people would tell if the person who sold them their car had their best interests at heart. If client support didn’t put you on hold. If there was no line to go on a roller coaster. If the guy who was painting your house turned up at 9am on the dot as promised. If your dental appointment actually felt pleasant. If your GP noticed you were there early and started your consultation early. Or if your car service turned out to be cheaper than expected.
Personal training has its own expected pits. Many clients expect the trainer to start late, deliver a repetitive workout, look at their phone between sets, push them until they feel sick, make them feel self-conscious, use complicated exercise language, or finish the session without explaining whether they are progressing. These experiences have become so common that some clients accept them as simply being what personal training is like.
Imagine the difference in the story Jess would tell if her trainer was waiting for her, remembered exactly how she felt after the last session, explained every exercise in plain language, made her feel completely safe and celebrated the progress she had made. That difference between the low experience she expected and the experience she actually received is the expectation gap.
NOW DO THIS: Your turn. Look at personal training, gyms and other fitness services. Undertake some reverse benchmarking and make a list of all those experiences that clients expect to be a one to four out of ten.
So now, we’ve outlined three ways to identify pits; low rated touch points in your current service experience; ‘points of pain’; and ‘expected pits’. It’s common and acceptable for there to be some overlap. What’s important is that we now have a list of actual and potential pits that we can address.
Let’s look at an example of the pits a personal trainer may identify.
Once the trainer has made their list of pits, including low rated touch points in the current PT session, points of pain and expected pits, their chronological list might read:
- Difficulty finding parking
- No acknowledgement on arrival
- Unclear place to wait
- Trainer running late
- Rushed or distracted greeting
- Trainer forgetting previous conversations
- No meaningful readiness check
- Pain or soreness being dismissed
- Confusing exercise instructions
- Exercises poorly matched to goals
- Feeling exposed or embarrassed
- Trainer checking their phone
- Equipment not prepared
- Unexpected pain during an exercise
- Feeling pushed beyond a safe limit
- No explanation of progress
- Abrupt end to the session
- No clear next step
For Jess, the most painful of these may be an exercise causing unexpected pain or discomfort; feeling judged for her fitness level, body, habits or progress; her trainer dismissing an injury concern; or the trainer appearing rushed, distracted or unprepared. This is another area we’ll work through at the Perth Fitness Business Client Experience Workshop: looking at the session through the client’s eyes, rather than assuming the moments that bother us are the same moments that bother them.
Now we’ve identified pits, it’s time to do something about them, and turn the pits into plateaus.
We’re looking to turn every touch point that might be a 1-4 out of 10, up to a 5-8 out of 10. This will turn every pit into a plateau. In some cases, we may even be able to create some of those rare peaks.
And it’s ok for not everything to be a peak. It’s not always about making experiences good, it’s often also about simply making sure experiences ‘aren’t bad’. It’s so important for client loyalty to simply make it easier for clients to get what they want.
In ‘Never Lose a client Again’ (2018), Joey Coleman emphasises how important it is to ‘anticipate when your client may have negative emotions, and address them before they ask for help or even experience them.’
It’s time to begin the redesign of your PT session experience.
NOW DO THIS: We’re going to begin by writing down each one of the pits we’ve just identified from your service experience. These include your current low rated touch points, points of pain, and the expected pits you identified from reverse benchmarking.
You’ll remember that PT experiences should make your clients feel a certain emotion and give them a story to tell.
Next, we’ll be defining those emotions (what we call an ‘intended feeling’) and writing the story we want them to tell (the ‘intended story’).
Intended feelings are the emotions you want a client to feel as a result of a specific touch point or PT experience. Intended stories are the stories you want a client to tell as a result of a specific touch point or PT experience.
By first defining the feelings and stories, we can work our way backwards to then design the experience.
We’ll begin with the intended feelings.
Negative experiences might make a client feel angry, bored, frustrated, confused, or a range of other emotions that will cause them to form a negative relationship with your brand.
Using Jess’s PT session as an example, a trainer running late can leave her feeling unimportant, irritated and stuck. Confusing exercise instructions can make her feel embarrassed, overwhelmed and out of control. An injury concern being dismissed can leave her feeling unsafe, unheard and anxious.
This is what we want to avoid, so let’s flip those emotions.
Starting on time will create certainty, respect and reassurance. Simple and human exercise explanations will leave Jess confident, informed and capable. Taking pain and injury concerns seriously will have her feeling safe, understood and cared for.
NOW DO THIS: So this is your next step, for each of the current pits of your service experience, write the three intended feelings you’d like them to experience once you’ve ‘filled the pit’. It’s fine if they’re one word each.
Next, what’s the intended story you want clients to tell?
Let’s continue with the three PT touch points we designed the intended emotions for.
For ‘starting on time’, the intended story is, ‘My trainer was ready and waiting for me, and we started exactly when we were supposed to. It made me feel like my time genuinely mattered.’
For ‘easy-to-understand exercise instructions’, the intended story is, ‘They explained the exercise so clearly that I knew exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it.’
And for ‘taking pain seriously’, the intended story is, ‘The moment I mentioned discomfort, they stopped, listened and changed the exercise. I felt completely safe in their hands.’
What are the intended stories for the pits you’re looking to improve? Get specific here. Imagine your client rushes out of your service experience bursting to tell anyone who’ll listen about their remarkable experience. In one sentence, what do they say? At the 2026 Perth Fitness Business Client Experience Workshop, we’ll use this intended feeling and intended story exercise to give every redesign decision a clear emotional target.
NOW DO THIS: Write this intended story for each touch point. So now we’ve got touch points, intended emotions, and the intended story.
The final step to ‘fill the pits’ is to go back to the original touch points and redesign them so that the pit is now (at least) a plateau. Remember, these are made up of low rated touch points in your current service experience, points of pain, and expected pits.
As an example of this, let’s go back to the pits in Jess’s standard PT session and look at the original pit, and what it looks like now that pit has been filled.
- Difficulty finding parking → Clear parking instructions and a photo of the best entrance are sent before the first session.
- No acknowledgement on arrival → Jess is greeted by name within the first few seconds of entering.
- Unclear place to wait → A clearly identified and comfortable client waiting area is explained in advance.
- Trainer running late → The trainer finishes the previous appointment on time and is ready before Jess arrives. If delayed, they send an immediate update.
- Rushed greeting → The trainer pauses, smiles, makes eye contact and gives Jess their full attention.
- Trainer forgetting previous conversations → The trainer reviews Jess’s notes before the session and refers naturally to what she shared last time.
- No meaningful readiness check → The trainer asks specific questions about sleep, stress, soreness, confidence and anything that may affect today’s session.
- Pain or soreness being dismissed → The trainer stops, explores the concern and adapts the plan before continuing.
- Confusing exercise instructions → The trainer explains the exercise in plain language, demonstrates it and checks that Jess understands.
- Exercises poorly matched to goals → Every exercise has a clear connection to Jess’s goals and current ability.
- Feeling exposed or embarrassed → The trainer chooses an appropriate area, normalises learning and protects Jess’s dignity.
- Trainer checking their phone → The trainer uses a device only for programming or recording results and explains what they are doing.
- Equipment not prepared → Equipment is selected, cleaned and ready before Jess needs it.
- Unexpected pain during an exercise → The trainer establishes a clear pain-reporting system and responds immediately.
- Feeling pushed beyond a safe limit → Intensity is agreed with Jess and adjusted using clear feedback.
- No explanation of progress → The trainer shows Jess what improved and connects it to her broader goal.
- Abrupt end to the session → The final few minutes are protected for a summary, acknowledgement and next steps.
- No clear next step → Jess leaves knowing what to do before the next session and when she will train again.
Before you complete this exercise for your PT business, it’s worth revisiting the 1-10 Experience Rating Scale to make sure your new experiences are at least a 5, 6, 7 or 8 out of 10.
NOW DO THIS: Where you wrote your initial ‘pits’, write what that touch point will look like now it’s a plateau (or above). Then, cross out the pit, leaving only the new, updated touch point of your PT session experience.
We’ve now filled all your current pits, your points of pain, and the expected pits you identified through reverse benchmarking.
So what’s the next thing to upgrade? It’s time to address the plateaus. We’ll start by identifying the plateaus that need improving.
In most service experiences, there are a series of mundane but necessary touch points that must happen for a service to be provided and for a client’s expectations to be met. These things are not detractors from an experience, but they definitely wouldn’t be considered peak moments.
Will Guidara writes extensively about these plateaus of experience in ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’ (2022). Guidara calls them the ‘forgettable middle’. Necessary, but definitely not memorable.
He tells us, ‘The smallest enhancements to the most overlooked touch points in a guest experience can have the greatest impact on the experience as a whole, because it is you saying very clearly to the people you serve. ‘We are willing to care about things that no one has ever paused for long enough to consider.’
Guidara encourages us to ‘take ordinary transactions and elevate them to extraordinary experiences’.
Chip and Dan Heath (in ‘The Power of Moments’) say that ‘once people have come up with their ‘mundane’ ‘have to do’ journey, the aim should be to ‘break the script’.’
And in Joey Coleman’s, ‘Never Lose a client Again’, the author encourages business owners to ‘make the ‘required’, ‘remarkable’.’
So in following the advice of Guidara, the Heath brothers and Coleman, let’s ‘take ordinary transactions and elevate them to extraordinary experiences’, ‘break the script’ and ‘make the ‘required’, ‘remarkable’.’
Let’s turn some plateaus into peaks. We’ll do this in two ways – looking at your current PT session experience, then identifying ‘moments that matter’.
The first step is to go back to your current service experience map. We’ve already dealt with the pits, so now we want to look at everything that’s been rated 5, 6, 7 or 8.
Let’s look at a few examples of what some of the necessary ‘forgettable middle’ might look like in a standard PT session.
- A client scans their access tag and walks into the gym.
- The client places their bag in a storage area.
- The trainer asks a standard, ‘How are you feeling today?’
- The client completes five minutes on a bike or treadmill.
- The trainer explains the number of sets and repetitions.
- The trainer records the completed weights in an app.
- The client rests between sets while the trainer prepares the next exercise.
- The trainer confirms the next booking at the end.
These touch points are all necessary and perfectly functional. Nothing is wrong with them. But in their standard form, they are unlikely to make a client feel anything or give them a story worth telling.
Once you’ve identified everything rated 5-8, we need to consider ‘moments that matter’.
Moments that matter are touch points that are disproportionally important to the client and have a stronger-than-normal impact on the overall client experience.
Not all touch points are created equal, and not all touch points are equally important to your client. We’re looking for which plateaus to focus our energy on to have a disproportionate impact.
So ask yourself here, ‘what is important to my client’?
Let’s add a few examples of ‘moments that matter’ for a personal training client:
- The greeting when the client first sees their trainer.
- The moment the trainer asks how the client is feeling.
- The explanation of what the session will involve and why.
- The first challenging exercise.
- The moment the client feels unsure, exposed or incapable.
- The trainer’s response when the client reports pain or discomfort.
- The moment a client realises they have improved.
- The final summary of the session.
- The goodbye and transition back into the rest of their day.
Make a list of all the plateaus in your current PT session experience. Paying particular attention to the ‘moments that matter’.
We’ve now got our list of plateaus that need improving. Let’s improve them.
NOW DO THIS: As we did with the pits, we’re now going to write down each of our plateau touch points.
We now need to identify the intended feelings and stories.
Let’s continue with the personal training example and look at the intended feelings and intended story for some of the ‘moments that matter’.
The greeting when the client sees their trainer: Intended feelings: Welcomed, important, energised. Intended story: ‘The moment I walked in, my trainer was genuinely excited to see me. I immediately felt like this hour mattered.’
The explanation of the session: Intended feelings: Informed, confident, purposeful. Intended story: ‘They explained exactly what we were doing and how it connected to my goals, so every exercise felt purposeful.’
The response to a difficult or uncomfortable exercise: Intended feelings: Safe, supported, capable. Intended story: ‘They noticed I was unsure before I even had to say anything, and adjusted the exercise without making me feel like I had failed.’
The moment the client realises they have improved: Intended feelings: Proud, surprised, motivated. Intended story: ‘They showed me how much stronger I had become, and I honestly had no idea I had made that much progress.’
The final summary: Intended feelings: Accomplished, clear, encouraged. Intended story: ‘I left knowing exactly what I had achieved and what we were building towards next.’
NOW DO THIS: Again, as we did for our pits, the next step is to write the three things you want your clients to feel once you’ve improved that touch point (the intended feeling). Then, write the ‘intended story’ you want your clients to tell.
Complete this for all the plateaus, playing particularly close attention to those ‘moments that matter’.
Now that we know how we want people to feel, and the stories that we want them to tell, we can get to the fun bit – designing remarkable experiences.
And to do this, we need to ‘ideate’. The process of ‘ideation’ involves generating as many creative, unfiltered ideas as possible without judgement. If you can give yourself permission to ‘think divergently’ and ‘think outside the box’, you’ll come up with more ideas. And while the majority of these ideas won’t make the cut, the sheer volume will ensure you strike gold.
As we’re going through this process, it’s worth remembering some of the qualities of remarkable experiences. Chip Heath and Dan Heath do a great job of laying out some of these criteria in ‘The Power of Moments’ (2017). They say touch points should be ‘memorable and meaningful’, they should ‘rise above the everyday’, help us ‘realise something new about ourselves or the world’, and should ‘strengthen our bonds with others’.
We’re going to complete two exercises; benchmarking and the Ten Star Thought Experiment. These two exercises will help us come up with remarkable experiences. They will also both form a major part of October’s Fitness Business Client Experience Workshop, where you’ll be completing these exercises in a collaborative environment with other fitness business owners.
The Fitness Client Experience Workshop is an intensive 12 hour one-day Perth event.
This is not a general business seminar or even a marketing event. We’ll be focussing on one thing, and one thing only – building a remarkable client experience.
The workshop is fully facilitated by myself and my team.
Over one jam-packed day, you’ll work side by side with me, his team, and your fellow business owners with guided exercises, group discussion, and hands-on experience design work.
You’ll leave with a mapped client journey, a clearer client experience strategy, and practical ideas you can implement inside your business.
Learn more and secure your tickets at gobsmack.com.au/fitness.
Benchmarking is when we identify industry leaders in various fields as a way to draw inspiration from how they provide experiences. The ‘various fields’ is important. We’re not looking to simply catch up with our competition by copying what they do. Rather, we want to look outside our own industry. In ‘Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough’ (2007), the authors Jonathan M. Tisch and Karl Weber tell us ‘don’t compare your experience with that of other businesses in your industry – compare it with the industries most famous for amazing experiences.’
Ron Kaufman, the author of ‘Uplifting Service’ (2012), talks about the need to look at the different classes of touch points in your business, and then hunt down global leaders who are ‘number one’ in each particular field. Kaufman tells us to ‘look for ideas outside your industry’ and asks, ‘who creates an experience that makes their clients feel the way you want your clients to feel?’.
Maybe if you welcome your clients into a physical space, you could benchmark Ritz-Carlton and examine how they welcome their guests. If your business has online ordering or a digital check-out process, benchmark Amazon. If you offer a trial of your service, look at how Tesla offers test drives of their vehicle. Setting up a device or using a product for the first time can be made better by examining Apple’s unboxing and iPhone setup process. Lego might give you inspiration for how to create instructions that even kids can understand. Amazon Prime could be your inspiration for delivery speed.
As part of the story people will tell about your touch point, who will they compare you to for each of your touch points?
When talking about how welcome your business makes them feel they should say, ‘that’s so Ritz-Carlton’. If an ordering process is easy, they should say, ‘that’s so Amazon’. If they’re talking about an easy product set-up, ‘that’s so Apple’. If your staff are incredible at remembering names, ‘that’s so Starbucks’. If you provide a fully immersive experience, ‘that’s so Disney’. If your service is super convenient, ‘that’s so Uber’.
Who do you want your touch points to be compared to? Benchmark these ‘experience-leaders’ and apply what they do to your own industry in surprising ways.
What would this look like for a personal trainer? Three touch points in the forgettable middle might be a client storing their belongings, learning a new exercise and using shared gym equipment. What happens when we benchmark?
Disney creates immersive experiences. What if, instead of an untidy corner or generic pigeonhole for clients to leave their belongings, there was a clearly designed ‘base camp’ where everything has a place and the client sees a short message that shifts them from the outside world into training mode? The lighting, music and language would signal that the session has begun. That’s ‘so Disney’.
Learning a new exercise can be complicated – so can a Lego Millennium Falcon. So how about whenever a new movement is taught, the client receives a simple step-by-step movement card, complete with clear illustrations and no technical jargon? The exercise could be broken into stages that allow the client to visibly progress. That’s ‘so Lego’.
Using sweaty shared equipment isn’t the greatest experience. What would Ritz-Carlton do? The equipment would be visibly cleaned and prepared before the client arrives. Small items such as bands or mats could be presented neatly, with a simple sign showing they have been sanitised. That’s ‘so Ritz-Carlton’.
NOW DO THIS: So the task now is to do some research. Go through each of your plateaus and brainstorm ways to redesign the touch point based on your benchmarking. We’ll be using this information to update your experience map once we’ve gone through one more exercise – the ‘Ten Star Thought Experiment’.
The Ten Star Thought Experiment is inspired by Brian Chesky, Co-Founder of Airbnb, who often talks about the thought experiment he ran when designing the Airbnb client experience.
When people rate their Airbnb stay, five stars basically just means nothing bad happened. It’s a pretty low bar. And this fits in with our definition of what constitutes a 5/10 experience: ‘A perfectly adequate, low client effort service, not an experience, leaving people feeling neutral, indifferent and unsurprised. Meets expectations, common, and a classic plateau.’
If you were rating an Airbnb stay or an Uber ride, you’d probably rate it a ‘5’ if (as Chesky puts it), ‘nothing bad happened’. But you definitely wouldn’t tell your friends about it. A ‘5’ on our ‘Experience Rating Scale’ means that 0% of clients will retell any story.
So the Airbnb Co-Founder challenged himself to design a six star experience, then seven, then eight, then nine and finally a ten star experience. It gets completely unrealistic, but it’s a useful exercise.
The point here isn’t to create a ten star experience. The point is to use the (often impossible) ten star experience as inspiration.
In ‘Outside In’ (2001), Lou Carbone and James H. Gilmore say ‘it’s easier to make a profound idea reasonable than it is to make a reasonable idea profound.’ You might get lucky and land on an absolutely astounding ten star idea that you can implement. But even if you don’t, you’ll be scaling up a plateau to something much more impactful and memorable.
What could the Ten Star Thought Experiment look like for the PT touch point of celebrating a client’s progress?
A six star version might be that the trainer notices the improvement, explains exactly what has changed and gives the client genuine, specific praise.
A seven star experience could be that the trainer has prepared a simple progress card showing the client’s previous result beside today’s achievement, then takes a quick photo for the client to keep.
An eight star experience might look like a personalised ‘milestone moment’. The client’s favourite song starts playing, a small sign with their achievement is revealed and the people nearby pause to celebrate.
A nine star experience could be that the entire gym transforms for the moment. Lights shift, a countdown appears on a screen, friends and family join by video, and a professional photographer captures the achievement.
A ten star experience might be that the client completes the achievement in a stadium filled with cheering supporters while their name and progress story appear across the giant screen, before a helicopter arrives to take them to a celebration overlooking the city.
Now most of this isn’t realistic, but that’s not the point. The point is to spark some creative thinking to inspire ideas that are realistic.
NOW DO THIS: For each of your plateau touch points, ask yourself what it would look like if it was six star. Once that’s done, what would it look like if it was seven? Then eight, nine and ten. It’s important not to go straight to ten and skip the other steps. They’re important to help ‘ramp up’ the ‘remarkability’ of each touch point.
Now that we’ve employed the process of ideation (divergent thinking to come up with many potential ideas), completed some benchmarking on our plateaus, and run them through the Ten Star Thought Experiment, it’s time to update your plateau sticky notes.
NOW DO THIS: For each of the plateaus you’ve identified, on the bottom half of the sticky note with the initial ‘plateau’, write what that touch point will look like now it’s been upgraded. Then, cross out the initial touch point, leaving only the new, improved touch point of your service experience.
So far we’ve identified pits and filled them, turning them into plateaus. We’ve also levelled up our plateaus, maybe even creating a few peaks along the way.
Now it’s time to go all out. It’s time to design the peaks.
Peak experiences are the emotionally charged high points in a client journey, where reality rises well above expectations and people feel delighted, surprised, or deeply moved. They are the rare 9–10 out of 10 moments that create stories, drive loyalty, and are most likely to be shared and remembered.
It’s important to emphasise here – touch points that rate 9-10 out of 10 are extremely rare. It won’t be easy to create these… but that’s what we’ll aim to do.
A good way to think about peaks is to ask whether they’d pass the ‘snap test’. The snap test is a measure of remarkability. If a moment is so unbelievably surprising or special that clients instinctively pull out their phones to take a photo, it passes the test. You should constantly be asking yourself… ‘Does this pass the snap test?’.
When we discussed plateaus, we covered the concept of ‘Moments that Matter’. These were the touch points that are disproportionally important to the client and have a stronger-than-normal impact on the overall client experience.
There’s a similar concept when designing peaks, where certain events are ripe for disproportionately impactful moments.
There are seven moments in the service experience that you should prioritise when designing peak moments. These are the six times it’s most important for peaks to occur in a PT service experience.
We’ll begin by writing down each of these following important peaks as headings:
- Before the official start of the PT session.
- After the official end of the PT session.
- The first touch point in the PT session.
- The last touch point in the PT session
And finally, write down headings for any milestones and transitions. Milestones are any times in the service experience that mark the client’s progress through that experience. Transitions are any ‘change points’. For the dining experience at a restaurant for example, a milestone might be receiving their first drink or the arrival of their main meal, while transitions might be moving from the waiting area to being seated at the table, or moving from a main course to dessert.
NOW DO THIS: To finalise the addition of your new peak touch points, add the intended feelings and intended story. Describe how you want people to feel when you create that touch point and the story you want people to tell about the touch point you’ll create.
Next, let’s create some peak experiences for your clients in the service experience. It’s time to blow some minds.
As we go through this process, it’s important to remember three of the exercises we can use to increase creativity: ideation (coming up with as many crazy ideas as possible), benchmarking (copying ideas from leaders in other industries) and the Ten Star Thought Experiment (asking what a 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 star experience would look like).
We’ll begin before the official start of the PT session. This is what we call the ‘scene one’.
For most businesses (even those focussed on client experience), they’ll start the experience from the beginning of the actual service experience. For a piano teacher, this is the start of the lesson. For a mortgage broker it’s welcoming the client to their office. For a plumber, it’s knocking on the client’s front door.
But what if the experience began before these touch points?
In ‘The Extinction of Experience’ (2024), Christine Rosen talks about how Disneyland calls the queuing areas for rides, ‘scene ones’. While many people might think that the service experience doesn’t begin until a guest buckles into the ride, Disney knows that first impressions matter.
Let’s apply this to personal training.
The day before Jess’s session, her trainer could send a short voice message using her name, reminding her what she achieved last time and giving her a small clue about what she will be working towards tomorrow.
On the morning of the session, Jess could receive a message confirming the exact time, where to meet, what to bring and whether there is anything she would like the trainer to know before she arrives.
Ten minutes before the session, her trainer could have her preferred warm-up ready, her favourite training song queued and the equipment laid out in the order it will be used.
NOW DO THIS: It’s time for you to design the ‘scene one’ for your PT session experience using ideation, benchmarking and the Ten Star Thought Experiment. Under the heading ‘Before the official start of the PT session’ describe what you’ll do before the service experience even officially begins.
Let’s jump from scene one to the ‘post credits scene’. Again, this isn’t just the end of the service experience – this is beyond the end, after it’s all finished.
Most businesses stop serving their clients once the final bill has been paid. They consider that the end of the transaction. But doing that sends a message to the client that that’s all they are to the business… a transaction.
In ‘The Airbnb Way’ (2019), Joseph A. Michelli tells us that ‘every touch point should be an interaction, not a transaction’.
In continuing the theme that our purpose should be to make someone feel a certain way, and tell a certain story, we’re missing an opportunity if we don’t offer remarkable aftercare.
An hour after Jess’s session, she could receive a brief video message from her trainer highlighting one thing she did particularly well and reminding her of the progress she is making.
Later that day, the trainer could send a single personalised recovery recommendation based on the session – not a generic information sheet, but something selected specifically for Jess.
The next morning, Jess could receive a photo, clip or simple progress graphic from the session with the message, ‘This is the moment you proved you’re stronger than you thought.’
NOW DO THIS: What’s the ‘post-credit scene’ for your PT session experience? Use ideation, benchmarking and the Ten Star Thought Experiment. Describe what you’ll do beyond the point the service experience has officially ended.
We’ve already created a peak moment for the ‘scene one’ (before the official start of the PT session). Now it’s time to kick off the ‘official’ experience with a bang.
First impressions matter, and the first point of contact for the service experience will set the tone and the standard for the entire experience.
For a day spa, this might be opening the door and checking in at reception. For a marketing agency, it might be a client logging into a video call. For a tutor, it’s the student arriving at the lesson. For a specialist medical appointment, it might be finding somewhere to park.
These experiences are all important parts of the journey. But there’s nothing remarkable about them. So we need to make them remarkable.
We need to ‘ideate’, generating as many creative, unfiltered ideas as possible. Most ideas will be terrible, but by reducing the pressure to come up with good ideas, we’re increasing the chance of hitting gold.
Now let’s apply this thinking to personal training. For a personal trainer, the first touch point might be the client stepping out of their car, walking through the gym entrance or first seeing their trainer.
Let’s ideate for the first touch point of Jess’s PT session. Instead of simply walking in and waiting for her trainer, the first touch point could be:
- Her trainer is waiting near the entrance and greets her by name.
- Her favourite training song begins as she enters the gym floor.
- A small board welcomes her and shows the session’s theme or goal.
- She receives a chilled towel on a hot day or a warm towel on a cold morning.
- The trainer has already set up a personalised ‘starting station’ with her water, program and first piece of equipment.
- The trainer refers to something important from the previous session before asking any standard questions.
NOW DO THIS: What will your first touch point be? Again, use ideation, benchmarking and the Ten Star Thought Experiment. Write the first touch point under your ‘first touch point in the PT session’ heading.
Let’s jump from the beginning to the end – the final touch point of the service experience.
This is one of the most important touch points of all, because of something called the ‘peak end rule’.
If every touch point in your business is an 8 out of 10, it makes sense that the entire service experience is also rated as 8 out of 10. But what if there are five touch points rated 6, and then the final one rated 9? The average is 6.5, but as Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman found, ‘the end often dominates the story, and the story is what we remember.’ So even though the average of 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6 and 9 is 6.5 – the actual memory of the service experience might just be 9.
The peak end rule is the psychological principle that people judge an experience largely by how they felt at its most intense moment (the peak) and at its final moment (the end), rather than by the average of every part. For client journeys, this means designing standout peaks and strong endings.
We’ve already been addressing the ‘peaks’, now it’s time to design the strong ending.
For most service experiences, the final touch point is incredibly ordinary, even though it is one of the most important moments in the entire journey.
For most PT sessions, the ending is just ordinary. The trainer might simply say, ‘Good work, see you next week,’ check the next booking and turn towards the next client. Jess collects her bag, walks out of the gym and gets back into her car.
This ending is functional, but there’s nothing remarkable about it. So we need to make it remarkable.
What could this look like for the final touch point of a PT session?
- The trainer gives the client one specific piece of praise that could only apply to them.
- The client is shown a simple visual of what they achieved during the session.
- The trainer protects the final two minutes for a calm debrief instead of allowing the next appointment to rush the ending.
- The client chooses one word to describe how they feel, and the trainer records it as part of their progress story.
- The trainer walks the client to the exit while discussing one thing to look forward to in the next session.
- The client receives a small milestone card, photo or token when the session marks meaningful progress.
- As the client leaves, their phone receives a short message: ‘Today you moved one step closer to…’, followed by their personal goal.
NOW DO THIS: It’s time to design your own ‘peak ending’ using ideation, benchmarking and the Ten Star Thought Experiment. Write the final touch point under the’ last touch point in the PT session’ heading.
Finally, let’s move to milestones and transitions.
Milestones are meaningful points of progress in a client’s service experience that mark progress, achievement or growth. Transitions are the moments at the change-points of a service experience.
While both may be more common in a longer term lifetime experience, both milestones and transitions may have a place in some service experiences.
In ‘The Power of Moments’ (2017), Chip Heath and Dan Heath tell us ‘moments that capture our achievements, recognition, or courage… make us feel proud of who we are and what we’ve accomplished.’
To better understand these touch points, let’s look at some personal training examples.
A client’s milestone might be achieving a new personal best, completing an exercise they once believed was impossible, training consistently for ten sessions, moving without pain, or realising their clothes fit differently.
A transition could be moving from the warm-up into the main session, from learning a movement to being challenged by it, from the high-intensity portion of training into a relaxing cool-down, or from the final exercise into the session debrief.
These are common touch points, but they’re not necessarily remarkable. Again, we can use the processes of ideation, benchmarking and the Ten Star Thought Experiment to turn these menial moments into peak experiences.
A new personal best could trigger a carefully chosen celebration: the client’s favourite song, a personalised achievement card, a photo beside a milestone board or a message sent to someone important to them with their permission.
The transition from high-intensity exercise to a low-intensity cool-down could be signified by a change in lighting, a shift to slower instrumental music, a fresh towel and a deliberate change in the trainer’s pace and tone.
The move from the last exercise into the debrief could happen at a dedicated reflection area where the client sees what they completed, identifies a win and hears exactly how the session moved them towards their goal.
NOW DO THIS: For each of the key milestones and transitions in your PT session experience (with ‘milestone’ or ‘transition’ written at the top), create a peak touch point and add them to your service experience.
Now we’ve built peak moments around the six key touch points (before and after the service experience, the first and last touch point of an experience, and any milestones and transitions), you have a blueprint for any other peak moments you wish to create to add to your service experience.
NOW DO THIS: Add in any new peak touch points on sticky notes, along with the intended feelings and intended story.
A remarkable PT session comes from mapping every touch point, filling the pits, improving the plateaus and designing a small number of peaks. A good workout and strong results still matter, but clients remember how the session made them feel and the story it gave them to tell. Every moment should be intentional. If you can do this, your PT session will be unignorably good, keeping your clients for life, and creating an automatic marketing loop that people just can’t stop talking about.
