Every morning, Dave Long, CEO of workout studio chain Orangetheory Fitness, wakes up to a bevy of customer comments and questions through Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. He could probably divert them to someone else in his chain of command. But he takes them up personally. “I respond to every single inquiry that comes in,” Long told Fortune in a recent interview.
It takes him about 30 minutes, he said. Many of the inquiries are simple—just directing people to the various customer service reps they may need. “But often, the inquiries are these amazing, authentic heartwarming stories that I want to respond to and acknowledge,” Long explained. “It’s an amazing thing. A lot of times we pass those on, and share those as part of the wins.”
Long cofounded Orangetheory, headquartered in Boca Raton, Fla., in 2010. The brand now boasts over 1,500 studios across 25 countries where devotees attach heart rate monitors and grind out interval workouts that combine running, rowing, and strength training.
Addressing emails is a page straight out of the playbook of other successful CEOs who have made a point of personally handling customers on a regular basis. In 2018, Jeff Bezos, then-CEO of Amazon, said he personally read any customer complaint emails sent his way—even if he didn’t respond to them. Often, he explained, he forwarded their messages to other executives, adding a single question mark. The exec receiving that email was expected to “drop everything, research the situation, and write a well-crafted response.”
“I still have an email address customers can write to,” Bezos said. “I see most of those emails. I see them, and I forward them to the executives in charge of the area with a question mark. It’s shorthand [for] ‘Can you look into this? Why is this happening?’”
Bezos said he used his public email address, jeff@amazon.com, to stay close to the company’s sprawling customer base and gain on-the-ground insights. “We talk about…customer obsession, as opposed to competitor obsession,” he said. “No matter how far you get in front of competitors, you are still behind your customers. They are always pulling you along.”
Some leaders—like the very online Elon Musk—don’t even need a formal email to get in touch. When a Tesla owner tweeted at Musk in 2016 (before Musk took over the site) to complain about the lack of Supercharger spots in San Mateo, Calif., the CEO personally responded and validated his anger. “You’re right, this is becoming an issue,” Musk wrote. “Supercharger spots are meant for charging, not parking. Will take action.” A year later, he responded to another Twitter complaint about a “pushy” Tesla salesman.
Good for business
Direct CEO-customer engagement can also be good business. “If the CEO takes the lead in being ‘the face of’ interactions with customers, it could decrease the design and production costs of marketing programs, and especially complaint handling and service recovery programs,” wrote G. Tomas M. Hult in the Harvard Business Review last year. “Customers appreciate personalized engagements from leaders…[and] having the CEO at the front…can save costs and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty at the same time.”
Customer satisfaction can be particularly valuable in the gym business. Adopting any fitness regimen can be transformative, and that’s certainly been the case for many OTF diehards. As the man at the top, Long likes to know about it.
“We get an incredible amount of life-changing stories, which makes us feel fortunate to be doing this,” he said. “We have one member just getting involved with Orangetheory, and the brand just completely changed his life.”
That member, Long said, embarked on a quest to visit an Orangetheory studio in all 50 states—and succeeded: “I think he’s now visited over 350 unique studios, and dozens of studios in Canada as well. And I’m sensing he’s gonna end up going more international in the near future.” The driving force is his love for the OTF community, meeting new people, and traveling. “I think it’s just fuel for him,” Long noted. “He loves to get out and do it, and he has the flexibility to do it.”
Hearing about that customer’s journey has been heartening for Long, a fitness junkie himself, and reinforces why he loves hearing from people directly. (Perhaps it’s less exciting when they simply have a billing issue.)
