I Now Know the Value of Social Media
This will be a long post. Just a heads up.
Back when Twitter first launched I didn’t really understand its purpose. The value of firing 140 character blurbs into the ether was, admittedly, lost on me. Despite this, I signed up, tweeted a few random lines about who knows what, and moved on with my life, largely forgetting I even had an account. As the medium picked up steam, I began to pay it more attention, slowly beginning to appreciate the sense of community it provides. After my recent experience with Bally Total Fitness, I pray that Twitter forgives me for all the terrible things I’ve said about it in the past. I’m a true believer now.
First, a little background on our relationship with Bally. Nearly three years ago, my then girlfriend Lindsay and I went out in search of a gym that was reasonable and had locations near both of our respective apartments. After a little googling (I refuse to capitalize the verb form), we settled on Bally and went in to sign up. We were assisted by a very foul individual who was rather pushy and short with us. His answers to our questions were unnecessarily brief and he seemed a bit irritated that we actually had the audacity to voice concerns. It appeared he was just interested in getting the commission that came to him once we signed on the dotted line. (Pro Tip – This is called foreshadowing.) Because we got a bad vibe from him, we specifically asked, “So, let’s say for some reason we want to cancel, what do we do? Is there a fee or something?” To which he replied, and I’m paraphrasing here, but I’d argue very accurately, “There’s a $50 cancellation fee. You just tell us you want to cancel and there’s a $50 fee.” This seemed reasonable enough, so we signed the contract and went about our lives.
Fast forward to the here and now. My now wife Lindsay and I (awwww), are preparing to enter the Peace Corps in less than a month. We have a lot of stuff on our plates that we need to get squared away before we can leave with any semblance of peace of mind. One of the big things is, as you may have figured out by now, canceling our Bally membership. Since signing our contract on that fateful day three years ago, we came to discover that doing this was often an incredibly difficult undertaking, to say the very least. Armed with this knowledge, we made sure to talk with the employees of our local gym to find out what we needed to do to make the cancellation process as smooth and simple as possible. We were told that copies of our email correspondence with the Peace Corps placement office would not suffice and that we would need to get a letter from the Peace Corps on official Peace Corps letterhead, stating the date that we would be leaving the country, the location to which we were headed, and the duration of our time there. Fair enough. We were also advised that drafting our own letter reiterating all of this information and including our membership numbers would help speed the process along. For good measure, we even threw in photocopies of our Bally Membership cards. I packed all of the above materials into an envelope marked it “ATTN: CANCELLATIONS DEPARTMENT “and overnighted it to their PO Box in Washington, D.C.
I know that things often take a while to process, so I gave them about a week before I called the customer service number that I pulled from one of the complaint blogs I linked to earlier. This number is for an office located in California. I was told that the system hadn’t been updated to reflect their receipt of my envelope and that I should call back in two days. I asked if there was any way I could be transferred to someone in the DC office and was told that that was simply impossible. Apparently, the two offices only communicate via their database system, so there was no way I could contact anyone that would actually be responsible for reviewing our request. Convenient.
As instructed, I called two days later and was told that, indeed, our letters had been received, reviewed, and rejected. Wait, what? Yep. The representative that handled my last phone call snidely told me that our letters stating that we had “accepted some invitation or something” weren’t going to cut it. I tried to explain that the letter was official certification of our joining the Peace Corps drafted specifically for us to use in this situation. He told me that I could send in a copy of our one-way ticket to Suriname and that would be accepted. At this point I was starting to get pretty heated but tried to calmly explain to him that we would likely be given our tickets at the airport, merely hours before we board the plane to a developing nation in South America. His response was that I should fax it to them once I get there. Cue Hulking out.
It was at this point that I began to feel a peculiar mix of frustration, anger, disappointment, and the very unique desire to potentially cause another human being bodily harm. I had followed their rules exactly as they’d laid them out to me and I’d utilized, as far as I could tell, all the established channels. The system wasn’t working for me. This is customer service in today’s America. After wandering around my office, relating my story to a few of my friends, I felt myself growing somewhat resigned to the fact that we weren’t going to get out of our contract. I wasn’t really sure what to do next. Then, I remembered a couple of instances where people had taken their story to the internet and actually gotten some traction. In particular, I remembered how director Kevin Smith recently waged a Twitter-war on Southwest Airlines for their treatment of overweight customers and how Canadian band Sons of Maxwell took United to task over the mishandling of some very expensive guitars. I was a man inspired.
I just started tweeting my thoughts, attempting to package my rage into 140-character potshots.
It was at this point that I realized that if I wasn’t including Bally’s Twitter account in my tweets, I might as well have been standing in my bathroom and shouting into the toilet. I had to take it to their front door.
My friend Emily soon responded and gave me some wonderful advice.
Which I of course followed.
Now here’s where it gets fun. It was at this point that I got the attention of someone at Bally. That’s right, someone suddenly gave a damn.
The Bally rep monitoring their Twitter account asked that I send them an email detailing our request (READ: Please stop tweeting). The text of my email is provided, in full, below:
To Whom It May Concern:
I’m writing because my wife and I are currently in the process of preparing for 27 months of service with the Peace Corps. We are scheduled to begin training in Suriname on May 6th. As part of this process, we are working on tying down any loose ends, including canceling our Bally Total Fitness memberships. We spoke with people at our local gym about what we needed to do to be released from the contract and we were told that a letter from the Peace Corps on official letterhead stating our dates our departure date, destination, and duration of our stay would be sufficient. We sent the original hard copies of the attached letters.
Now the cancellation department is claiming that we need to send a copy of our one way ticket to Suriname in order to have our membership cancelled. The fun part is that we won’t be given our one-way ticket until we are at the airport a few hours prior to departure. So our options are to find a fax machine at the airport and send it from there (of course there would be no way for us to confirm that it was in the right hands) or to fax it from the Peace Corps office in Suriname and hope that they stick to their word and cancel our membership upon receipt (sounds failsafe right?). Of course, once we’re in-country, we won’t exactly have the time or flexibility to be able to call repeatedly and check on the status of our cancellation, which is something we’ve had to do here.
The reason I called the cancellation process “purposefully arcane” is because you have a cancellation department located in Washington, DC and a customer service department located in Norwalk, CA. According to the multiple representatives I’ve spoken with here in CA, there is no two-way communication between these two offices. DC decides whether or not cancellation requests are up to snuff and they post their decision on a database. According to the Bally reps I’ve talked to, that’s the end of the line. There is no way to contact the DC office and ask to speak with someone regarding your specific situation.
This seems like a flawed system if customer service is the end goal. Of course, if the end goal is to make it difficult on the customer, then the system is likely operating at or near 100% efficiency. Most people likely get frustrated, complain to their friends and family, and either pay out the full total or pay some smaller (but still unacceptable) settlement fee. If it weren’t for the fact that we are leaving to serve in the Peace Corps, my wife and I would have no problem finishing out our contract and would likely continue as customers, albeit month-to-month (I will never sign a contract of this nature ever again). But, after the experience we’ve had of late, I’m on the verge of feeling like it’s better to warn as many as possible that they should steer clear of your establishments.
Hopefully, we can get this peacefully resolved in a timely manner and I appreciate your reaching out to me to help. The ball is in your court. I look forward to hearing back from you.
Sincerely,
Ryan Dapremont
In the meantime, just for good measure (and completely without my prompting), a few of my friends threw their support behind my cause.
I got a very polite and very timely response from the Customer Relations representative at Bally (no, seriously) and he informed me that he would talk to the Membership Services team on my behalf and get back to me within 24-48 hours. At this point, I honestly wasn’t too hopeful and was fully gearing up to begin carpet tweeting as soon as I received the inevitable rejection email.
Then, something magical happened. I awoke the next morning with another very polite email from the same representative informing me that our membership was being cancelled and that I should expect a letter confirming this within a few weeks. That was of course awesome news and a huge victory, but what stood out to me most was the last line of the email. It said, “Again I apologize for the inconvenience and I want to sincerely thank you for serving our country.”
Wow. Under the cold, bureaucratic shell of this huge company, there actually beats a human heart. It’s sad that I had to circumvent the system in order to get my voice heard and my problem addressed, but I’m happy with how my final interaction played out. I dealt with a real person one-on-one, and he was polite, respectful, and appreciative of what Lindsay and I are setting out to do in the Peace Corps. To Bally’s credit, this rep told me that they are currently in the process of overhauling their Member Services department and it’s my understanding that they no longer offer longterm contracts (at least as the default). So kudos to them for that, we’ll see how it goes.
It would be easy to check this off my to-do list and move on to the next big thing I need to get done before we leave, but I really thought this story needed to be told. I don’t intend for you to take away from this the understanding that Bally is evil and that you should never do business with them, though I see how anyone could end up feeling that way. I want this to be a lesson to corporations dealing with customers, naive consumers signing contracts without having them vetted by a legal professional, social media bashers, and people who feel that there’s just nothing they can do about a given situation. Sometimes you just have to approach the situation from a different angle. If all else fails, tweet about it. You might not end up getting anywhere, but at least you get to vent in a witty fashion. If you made it this far, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed it. With that, I’ll leave it to my friend Claire to close out this ridiculously long blog post.
