Chad Seymour, the 2012 Northern Ohio PGA Section Golf Professional of the Year, is the PGA head golf professional at Westfield Group Country Club in Westfield Center, Ohio.
Chad Seymour on the importance of communicating your daily range conditions to members through social networking:
We all know that members do not like surprises when they arrive at the club. Unless they are getting something for free, everyone likes to arrive at the club knowing what to expect. We use a combination of range mats and grass for our practice tee. Most of our members prefer to hit off grass and in the past, they have been upset when arriving at the club to find only the mats in use. Communication is very important to my staff, and last year we began using Twitter to tweet the range conditions each morning. We never had a system in place prior (course conditions were not updated on the website) to notify the members of our conditions. They would have to call the golf shop to find out if we were using mats or if we were hitting from the grass. Eliminating that one extra step that a member would have to make has been very important as we challenge ourselves each year to improve communication. An informed member is a very satisfied member at Westfield.
Chad Seymour on the business impact of communicating your daily range conditions to members through social networking:
Showing your members daily that you can effectively communicate with them sets the tone for a great relationship for all aspects of your golf operation. In 2011, we only had approximately 65 members who were following our daily tweets. As word spread and the members were happy with receiving these notifications, that number has grown by 25 percent in 2012. We have included more information in our tweets such as upcoming events, special sales in the golf shop and any other additional information we want to get out to our membership. Our range plan is built into our monthly membership dues, which is a tremendous revenue generator for our department. If we want to continue to keep the membership happy with this service, our range program must run smoothly each day.
