Confessions of a brit abroad

This email chain has been bouncing between me and my gym Splash over the last few weeks, and culminated in some bizarrely stalkerish phone calls today from Marc, followed by a run-in at the gym.  When he couldn’t solve my issue he resorted to blocking my access to the club, trying to force me to have a further conversation with him about it…. I think he’s forgetting who the customer is in this relationship!

Hopefully Theo (the owner) will have more sense.

From: Glen Smeaton-McCarty <glen@smeaton-mccarty.eu>
Date: 23 augustus 2010 21:42:52 GMT+02:00
To: “theo@splashhealthclubs.nl” <theo@splashhealthclubs.nl>
Subject: Fwd: Wifi and facilities

Hi Theo

Is this considered good customer care in your organization?  Your staff holding memberships hostage to ‘talk’?  When I arrived this evening the membership was in fact blocked, and Marc was extremely hostile and refused to let the receptionist contact you, although she thought it was the right thing to do.  Overall he has acted like an upset child – taking the complaint very personally.

Marc refused to let me in the club, however the receptionist did let me through – she clearly has better sense and understands how important customer loyalty is in the current economic climate.

I’m very disappointed with the current direction of the club, and Marc doesn’t seem able to handle a serious complaint from a long standing and loyal customer.  As you know many customers simply leave without giving you the benefit of insights which may help you to understand which areas need to be a focus for retention.  Complaints like mine are an ideal way to not only hold onto one member, but to understand what we like and dislike in a club – an opportunity that Marc seems to have missed completely.

I have asked the receptionist (who was very good, incidentally) to give you my details, as I would like to discuss the matter with you directly, but here is my phone number too: 06xxxxxxxx.

Regards

Glen

Ps – I’m typing this in the club while I work out, but am unable to send as once again the wifi is offline.

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: Marc Haasjes <marc@splashhealthclubs.nl>
Date: 23 augustus 2010 19:01:35 GMT+02:00
To: Glen Smeaton-McCarty <glen@smeaton-mccarty.eu>
Subject: RE: Wifi and facilities

Hello Glen,

I blocked your membership, it’s not possible for you to come in until you and me have a talk. I think it’s very rude to hang up the phone like that.

Regards,

Marc Haasjes
Manager Splash Healthclubs
________________________________________
Van: Glen Smeaton-McCarty [glen@smeaton-mccarty.eu]
Verzonden: maandag 23 augustus 2010 18:23
Aan: Marc Haasjes
Onderwerp: Re: Wifi and facilities

Hi Mark

I have been waiting anxiously for the improvements you mention, but other than one of the soap dispensers being removed I don’t see any improvement at all over the last few weeks.  I’d also like to point out that the internet is still not working – every single day I have to speak to reception, and most days they haven’t any idea how to solve the issue.

So far passing my comments on to you doesn’t seem to have been effective.  Could you please put me in touch with the owner, as a last attempt to salvage something before I have no other option but to leave Splash after 8 years to find somewhere that not only provides hygienic and adequate facilities, but also takes customer complaints seriously, and I will likely take other customers with me as the social network is strong (and previously mentioned the only thing currently holding me there).

Regards
Glen

On 6 Aug 2010, at 13:52, Marc Haasjes wrote:

Hello Glen,

Thanks for your input. I will take this with me and take action on several points. After this weekend I have a meeting with the cleaning company, so these things should be solved on a short term.

Thnaks again and if you have any feedback, please let me know.

Kind Regards / Met vriendelijke groet,

Marc Haasjes

Manager Splash Healthclubs

________________________________________

Van: Glen Smeaton-McCarty [glen@smeaton-mccarty.eu]

Verzonden: donderdag 5 augustus 2010 18:59

Aan: Marc Haasjes

Onderwerp: Re: Wifi and facilities

Hi Marc

Many thanks for getting back to me – it’s good to know that someone is actually listening.

I’m pleased to hear that soap dispensers and lockers are being fixed, but they have been a problem for quite a long time, so although it’s good news it’s quite late coming.  The showers are pretty grotty – in particular the floors are not cleaned often.  The on/off switches also frequently malfunction, which I think is because the infra-red eye isn’t cleaned, so it can’t see when a hand is being waved in front of it.  The showers run intermittently hot and cold without apparent reason – the number of people in the shower doesn’t seem to be the key, and a shower which is nice and warm can turn cold very quickly.

I’m glad that you mention classes as a reason to stay, as it’s another issue at the moment – where Splash used to have a wide range of many types of classes, and scattered them throughout the week, they’ve been gradually reduced so that pretty much the only classes happening during evenings are Spinning, Body Pump (of various types), kick boxing and Yoga – what happened to all of the other classes you used to run?

I’d also like to point out that the personal trainers are not particularly professional, and in some cases downright rude to customers that they aren’t training at that moment – they seem to forget that the gym is open to everyone, and not their own personal training facility.  Inga in particular has a habit of taking over an entire section of the gym and becomes difficult to handle when ‘her’ area is used by someone else.

The only benefit that is holding me at the moment is ‘nice members’ – I’ve been at Splash for a long time, and so know many of the other customers.  The rest of the benefits are easily found in almost every other gym in Amsterdam, and in some cases actually aren’t found at Splash (e.g. in the last 8 years I have never once had a free training session – at one per month that amounts to 96 sessions).

I’ve eaten in the reception only a couple of times, but every time the food has been lacking in taste and small portioned.  For a health club I would have expected a larger menu of high protein and low fat/sodium meals.  Since your key selling point at the moment is the other members it would seem a relatively good way to keep us happy (and at a low cost) would be to focus on the social aspects of the venue – provide good food in a nice environment and we’d be happy to spend time there…

I’m sure you are keen to maintain your customer base – as you know gaining new customers is much more expensive than retaining your current customer base, and so I’d be happy to  provide further feedback if it will help you to meet your organizational goals and enhance my gym experience.

Kind regards

Glen

On 5 Aug 2010, at 18:27, Marc Haasjes wrote:

Hello Glen,

Thanks for your e-mail and feedback.

A few things you mention I can explain. Soapdispensers will be replaced this week and lockers will be fixed after the holidays (the company is now closed because of the holidays).

Johnny is the owner of the Shop and he decides when teh shop is open. You can ask him if he can be open for a longer time. The other things like cold water and poor food are new for me. What do you mean with poor food? About the showers, I will check it out.

Dirty showers is an other thing I’m very sorry for that. Can you tell me when this happend or is it in your opinion all the time? With some more details I can take the right actions.

Why should you continue your membershiop with Splash?

- Unique location

- Best classes & teachers of Amsterdam

- A lot of classes on the roster

- Opening hours

- Good equipment

- Nice members

- Every month a free training with one of our fitnesstrainers

- Very good personal trainers

An coming soon, wifi that works again….

I hope you will stay a memebr for a long time.

Kind regards / Met vriendelijke groet,

Marc Haasjes

Manager Splash Healthclubs

________________________________________

Van: theo@hosting03.exonet.nl [theo@hosting03.exonet.nl] namens Glen Smeaton-McCart [glen@smeaton-mccarty.eu]

Verzonden: woensdag 4 augustus 2010 15:08

Aan: Marc Haasjes

Onderwerp: Wifi and facilities

From: Glen Smeaton-McCarty <glen@smeaton-mccarty.eu>

Subject: Wifi and facilities

Vestiging: Splash Health Club Leidseplein

Message Body:

Dit bericht is verstuurd via het contactformulier op de website van Splash Healthclubs. Neem contact op met deze (potentiele) klant!

Het telefoonnummer van de klant is: 0655525850

Het emailadres van de klant is: glen@smeaton-mccarty.eu

De klant heeft dit bericht achtergelaten:

I have been a member at your club for more than 7 years, and would like to register my growing dissatisfaction with the facilities.  It seems that there is little re-investment in facilities, and the services which are on offer are deteriorating (broken lockers, dirty showers, no soap in dispensers, irregularly cold water in showers, poor quality food in reception, limited store opening hours, to name but a few).  In particular the Wifi has been offline every day for the last 2 weeks.  Sometimes when I speak to the staff at the reception desk they can restart the service, whereas other times they tell me they can’t do anything, but will ‘ write it in their book’ – not that this seems to be read by anyone, as the next day the situation is exactly the same.

I look forward to your response, and in particular why you feel I should continue to pay you €69 per month when there are many other gyms in Amsterdam offering similar or better services at a similar or lower cost.

Regards

Glen Smeaton-McCarty

OK, so I have to admit that I brought it on myself…  I lobbied for the trip to the US so that Patrick and I could go over and pick up some more of his belongings, and it totally backfired on me.  The day after we arranged the flights he got his job offer, and that screwed up the plans, as he had to work during the time we were away.  The week before the trip wasn’t great, but I got through it by trying not to think about how much I was going to miss him…  The 10 days I’ve been away, however….

The visit started poorly, as we’d arranged a flight changing in Boston for a cheaper price, and as it was ‘no changes and no cancellations’ we were not only unable to get his flight price back, but I had an 8 hour flight to Boston, followed by a 4 hour wait and then a further 1 hour flight to JFK.

Boston airport was OK, but I really didn’t enjoy such a long trip.

Once in NYC I quickly went through the shopping tasks that Patrick had left with me, including picking up a Mac Mini for him.  I also went to his storage space to rummage through his old stuff and bring back essential items like warm winter clothing and IT accessories he needs.  There were some lovely old pictures of him when he was younger too, but I left those for next time – I really want him to go through them and show me them with stories attached.  From the couple I leafed through he was an adorable kid though.

The weekend was relatively uneventful, partly due to the timezone shift shutting me off around 10pm, and also because I wasn’t really ready to ‘enjoy’ the gayer aspects of NYC.  I was asleep in the hotel before 11pm both nights.  The hotel itself wasn’t great – it was a Radisson, which I would usually think was good, but the room was in desperate need of refurbishment, and the doormen in NYC use whistles to attract cabs for their customers, so those regular and insistent whistles combined with honking horns woke me up regularly.

On the Sunday I took a car over to New Jersey, and met up with Latisha who had just arrived from Europe.  Latisha is a colleague with a mad shoe/shopping addiction, so we immediately went shopping to the Short Hills Mall.  The place is full of designer shops, so we were both happy, and I stocked up on Abercrombie and Fitch gear again.

Gary Zebrowski – the new Transformation Manager was in attendance, and proved himself to be totally out of his depth.  He has no idea of the size of mess he’s getting himself into with this client – he’s been sold this role as though it’s a senior project manager, and that it can be run with a set of complex mpp files…  he’s starting to realise that this isn’t the case at all and it’s much more complicated than he thought.

The workshop with the customer was, as always, boring and full of discussions that they should have had before we arrived.  What could have been done in 2 days took the entire week and we still didn’t get everything done.  Gary also dropped a bollock on the Wednesday by mentioning that he didn’t yet have a replacement for me… this wouldn’t have been such a big problem if someone (Marek!) had told them customer that I was leaving the account.  Jason went barmy about it, and raised an escalation.  Tinus has already assigned me to another account for January 1st, though, so it’s too late.

By the Friday I was so bored that I couldn’t wait to get out of there.  We booked the car early (2pm) so that we could get over to NYC before the rush hour traffic.

Latisha and I were relieved to be done, and went out on the Friday evening – first a manicure, then dinner at Vynl in Chelsea.  The cute waiter was there again, and he paid a lot of attention to us.  I’m not sure if it was because he thought I was cute, or that he liked Latisha’s false eyelashes… either way it was nice

Unfortunately that’s where the weekend started to go wrong.  It was bitterly cold, so staying out wasn’t really an option, so I was back at the hotel by 10pm, bored and having had no hubby for a week decided to go online and find some fun.  The rest of the night decended into chaos (you’ll have to read my other blog for details), and the next day I was wracked with guilt.  I called Patrick who assured me that it was totally OK, and was only sorry that I hadn’t had a better time.  He’s amazing – truly the best man I’ve ever known.

On the Saturday – the day before I was due to fly home – true to form the weather turned, and we got snow.  Not just a couple of centimeters like in Europe, but 12 inches in under 24 hours.  This caused problems for the airport and so most of the domestic flights are cancelled.  I’m currently sitting at the airport (I got here very early ‘just in case’, but now have a 4 hour wait until my flight leaves.  There are people everywhere sitting on the floors… fortunately I have a Silver Elite membership so didn’t have to queue to check in or drop my bags, but finding somewhere comfortable to wait has been a struggle.  Now that I found a seat the fire alarm has mistakenly gone off – they’ve stopped the sound, but there is a blindingly bright light flashing right in front of me, so I’ll have a migraine pretty soon.

The flight’s still showing as ‘on time’, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see….

I’m in the throws of a dilemma…  do I love coming to the USA, or hate it?

On one hand it’s total paranoia central – getting through airport security is ridiculous;  scanned, x-rayed, shoes taken off, belt off (maybe naked scanning is next? ), laptop out of bag, no more than 100ml of liquids (or 3 oz in the US itself, which confuses the hell out of me), and the liquids need to be in bottles labeled less than 100ml, and in a ziplock bag…  all that to get on a plane, and I have to believe that true terrorists are better organised than that – surely if you need more than 100ml of liquid for whatever they use it for they’d just get several people to meet up and put all of their 100ml’s together??

On the other hand I love being in the airports here – I have a Peppermint Chocolate Mocha from Starbucks in my hands, there’s free wifi and and a plug socket beneath my seat.  The customer service is amazing, and prices are really cheap for everything…

The big downside of this trip is that my darling Patrick isn’t with me.  He had to work, so I’m on the visit alone, and that really sucks just 10 days after we got married.  I’ll have to recover myself by shopping with every spare minute

About 3 weeks ago Patrick and I went to the local ING bank branch to open a joint account.  We’re both individual account holders there, so expected it to be quite simple to just open a second account with both names.  We knew we’d have to submit another application, though, so went well prepared with passports, address confirmations, financial information etc.

The clerk used our existing account information to gather the data he needed, and copied our documents, attaching it all together and asked us to sign the application and the example signatures.  He then told us it would take around 2-3 days for the application to be worked and the account set up.

A week later we returned to the branch as we had heard nothing from the head office.  The second clerk we spoke to told us that he couldn’t find any record in the system of an application, but that wasn’t unusual as it could take a week or 10 days for the account to be opened.  Although we were unhappy with the initial advice being incorrect we left and agreed to wait a few more days.

After 2 weeks had passed we again returned to the branch and spoke again to the second clerk, who looked again in the computer system and informed us that there had been a problem as our documents had been lost!  We immediately asked to speak to the supervisor and were told we had to come back (again) later in the day when she (Miss Beck) would be available.  We were not amused at this point – what had happened to our documents?  Security of information clearly isn’t foremost in ING’s minds.

We returned at 6pm that day to see Miss Beck, who informed us that our documents had been lost by the head office, but not to worry as they were definitely lost somewhere secure (post apparently can only go to the head office, and not into the hands of potentially identity stealing criminals) and that she had copies kept locally which she would have resent by fax immediately.  This raised other issues in my mind – why were they keeping copies?  If the originals were ‘lost’ could they be used by someone to steal our identity and open up an account in our names?  She didn’t have answers to any of these.

Yesterday (now 3 weeks later) we received a letter with our original application documents in the post from the head office informing us that your original clerk had put the wrong address on the form!  Not only was this strange for us to see (as the letter came to the correct address, so they could clearly find the details), but shows that the originals weren’t lost at all.  In addition we also received in the package an internal ING letter from the branch to the head office explaining that there had been an error on their part and they had never sent our original forms (dated the day we went in to complain to Miss Beck)!!!  She had lied to us!!!

We returned to the bank branch furious, and Miss Beck apologised profusely and offered speedy service and a callback from her manager the next day (today).  At the appointed time he didn’t call, so off we went to the branch again.  When we arrived Miss Beck was on the phone to him, so we reviewed the situation (again!).  The account has now been set up, but still not really a satisfactory answer on why this has been such an issue… lots of apologies but not much action.

My advice;  Stay clear of ING as a personal bank. It’s not worth the trouble.

Now available here

Feel free to comment and/or add star ratings – there are so many that I’m struggling to work out which are the good and bad ones!

Why do apple provide crappy earphones? It’s driving me barmy listening to the tinny noise of other people’s music on the tram.  The earphones provided are really cheap and don’t fit into ear canals properly, so there’s a lot of bleed-over of noise that everyone else doesn’t want to hear.

Worse still are the young people (usually Maroccans or black guys) who play their phone music without earphones at all – like I want to hear the shit they’re listening to!!

The thing that drives me totally crazy, though, are people who tap their feet or nails in time to their own music – it’s like some sort of weird biological metronome counting down the beats.

Is it wrong to feel that these people deserve beheading?