Choochoo
Long Beach,#2UPDATE EX-employee responds
Tue, July 24, 2007
I'm an ex-employee of LA Fitness (billing/soft collections dept) and quit because my conscience really couldn't take it anymore. I stumbled upon this site in search of the corporate phone number to place on my resume and started reading the reports and felt bad. So here's how the LA Fitness (shady ethics) billing functions- Yes- members really should read contracts before they sign it. But I often heard members saying that they walked into the gym and told people at the front desk that they wanted to cancel their membership and that it was done. All membership NEEDS to be cancelled through a written request and sent into us. Only problem is that we found that on some cancellation forms, they had our old address still printed and they sent it there and not to the new location in Irvine, therefore, we never recieved it. And we would only accept the fact that they sent it if they certified the mail, if not, they would have to resend it to the new billing address further delaying their cancellation. And from what I remember, members get billed on two dates (either the 1st or the 15th- ??? it's been a while so i forgot, sorry). If you were to send in your cancellation letter after your billing date, it wouldn't take it effect until your next billing came around. After your billing date, the system thinks you paid for the month already. The cancellation, in which they state that it takes 30 days for it to process through, charges you another month. People often think this is their last month payment that they have already paid for in the beginning. But IT ISN'T. Their last month kicks in after the 30 day processing cycle is over. This is how some customers get a final bill when they think they have paid for everything already. Billing gets really shady here. Everyone wonders why they feel like they have talked to so many people. And the simple reason is that they do. What people don't realize is that we get commission off clearing your membership by getting new credit card information. So when you're behind on a monthly payment, you get flagged and people from the gym you are going to gets alerted and the people working at the corporate office gets alerted, and you become an easy commission to them. Because the more simpler case is that they lost a credit card number and a new number was issued- so by clearing your membership with a new credit card, you provide them $10 in commission. That same new credit card number for 2 or 3 members on your account, $20-$30 dollars in commission. Get the idea? So that's why you have people from your gym and corporate calling you to get the new credit card information. So here is where it gets shady. The computer system will only give a payback to La Fitness workers with a new credit card number. Sometimes a credit card gets a new expiration date with the same card number but we're told to try and get a new card number in order to get a payout. And corporate will do their hardest to get a new number even going out to say that we can switch back to the old card after a month. But some workers at corporate, like me, who didn't really care much for the additional commission, would just type in the new expiration date and clear the member. Sometimes, and I saw this quite a few times while working there, since we input the credit card numbers manually, we'll type in the wrong numbers by accident. So let's say you did provide a new credit card number but we typed in a 4 instead of a 5. You'll get a call once again next month stating that your number didn't go through and if there is possibly another creditcard you can put on file. Remember... stick to your guns... if you're POSITIVE it's a good card, don't let them hassle you. Just provide the number w/ expiration date. And if they continue to hassle you, just say you'll do it at the gym when you go in. And make sure you get the number read back to you. And you feel like you never get the same person week after week? Easy explanation for that too- clubs are rotated each week. So lets say, I work on 10 clubs this week that covers east and west coast, next week, I'll get another batch of clubs, and my old ones will rotate to my co-workers, & vice versa. New names/phone numbers come in every two weeks. Often times, members think that by cancelling their credit cards, LA Fitness will stop billing them. This is incredibly wrong and this goes back to reading your contract. Members billing will just begin to accrue, so much sometimes that after a while, they just get sent to collections. On our computer system, we also take notes about members and their problem. Our job is to clean up the easiest job with the greatest payout and least problems. So when we look up a members account and have notes stating that this member is angry, that this member said she cancelled... we'll avoid calling the member completely and by doing that, their membership dues accumulates into the thousands sometimes. OH ALSO! Another thing LA Fitness is famous for is their outrageous NSF fees. When I was working their, my supervisor loved hammering into my head that we don't bill them, we send the bills out to a financial institution and they bill them. The biggest mistake people do is setting up their gym membership directly to their bank/credit union accounts. So for fairness to LA Fitness, they send out the billings to their "financial institution" and it leaves their hands. From there, the financial institution takes it upon themselves to run the billing through whether it be once, twice or three times before they decide to return it back to LA Fitness. Thats where members get hit with 2 or 3 NSF fees from their bank and on top of that, NSF's fees from LA Fitness. Hope everything I wrote here is helpful!!!