LA Fitness what not to do in the twitter age

This is another great example of how Social Media is making sure that companies are exposed which dont understand that people are individuals and therefore deserves individual treatment.

You're absolutely right John. The days are over where a company can treat their clients like %^&* and act without any compassion at all. LA Fitness deserves all the bad publicity they can possible get. They say that any publicity is better than no publicity. I think not in this case.

This went straight into my Buffer. Godspeed to HB and her family in 2012.

LA Fitness is truly an underground mob boiler organization with nothing but sale. sale, sale actions. The clubs are health hazzard and they don't know when to stop and listen to the customers.

I am a fitness professional as well as IT professional. I have done major BI analytics on club performance, prospect, member, retention and customer service for >$Bn organizations. It's easy to see how the senior management chooses to look the other way and continue to pound on sale and promote poor customer service.

Well here is the answer - yaay for Twitter and the power of the people.

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I too had a similar nightmare. I did all the paperwork properly and LA fitness continued to wrongfully take out of my bank account automatically. My only response was to close the account which cost me some fees. As far as i am concerned they owe me that money!

LA Fitness isn't the only one. 24 Hour Fitness requests that patrons wipe down equipment after use. The cleaner they provide in the gym has a warning on it that states you are not to use it unless you have reviewed the Material Safety Data Sheets. When you go to the front desk and ask for the Material Safety Data Sheet they claim they can't show it to you. No need to go into details about the look on their face when you ask for the material safety data sheet.... -image of a dog hearing a high pitch whistle.

Really makes you feel like you should have taken the day off from working out that day.

I will say that the same club did install a great fingerprint scanning system that verifies your membership on arrival. Much better than the membership cards that some used to counterfeit in the past. A great example of how managing content can be a competitive advantage. Now if I can get them to scan the MSDS sheets and make them available digitally on the kiosks located at the gym, we would be good.

I think it's more about the company than about twitter I had lots of problems with LA fitness when I tried to leave when I was pregnant after I'd given a month written notice and done everything properly they still threatened me with courts and bailiffs

There are ways and means of protecting themselves from these issues, for example, for a very small percentage of the monthly fee LA Fitness could provide their members with JobSafe protection whereby if a member loses their job during their membership, their fees would be paid by a third party - that way LA Fitness receive their money and the member can continue their membership at no personal cost. PR Issues averted! www.jobsafe.me.

If an organisation has consistently rotten customer service at its core, no amount of social media savvy is going to solve that, unfortunately.

Perhaps the real problem here is a business model that requires people to sign up for two years of gym membership because they happen to feel fat on 2nd January.