(Mis)Adventures in Customer Service

As a person who has done a LOT of races (my road race count is over 60, plus about 10 OCRs), I have a pretty good sense of how things work. I don't usually have a lot of questions or complaints. If there is a dreadnought roving photographer (see previous entry), I know better than to complain or ask where the hell the pictures are. I understand the concept of "no refunds" and such.

That said, there are some times when one needs to complain. Or at least, needs to ask clarifying questions. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. In these situations, it is important for race directors or their peons to remember the Golden Rule of customer service. No, it's not "the customer is always right," because that is a load of horse crap. It's "do not ignore your customer." Nothing chaps my 'nads more than being totally ignored by the powers that be when I ask what should be a very basic question.

Here are a few examples of recent customer-service-adjacent interactions that I have had with race staff, from "great" to "WTF."

GREAT Customer Service: The Abominable Snow Race

I was a bit nervous about this one because they had to change the location and date of the race after registration started. Then I became even more nervous when they switched from a two-day event (I'd signed up for both races) to a one-day event. But shortly after I went all "whaaaaat is going on here" on Facebook, the race director messaged me his personal phone number and asked me to call him. We had a lovely conversation, all my questions and concerns were answered to my satisfaction, and I gained critical understanding of what had caused all these crazy circumstances to pop up in the first place.

Lesson learned: most customers will "get it" if given a chance. Promptly and honestly addressing issues goes a long way.

HIT-OR-MISS Customer Service: Spartan Race

Generally there are few issues that come up with Spartan events. They are a big company and have this shit down, for the most part. But Spartan is (in)famously bad at dealing with weather. They tend to not provide good updates for racers, who are stuck in their cars in the parking lot with little to no cell service to even read event Tweets (if Spartan can be bothered to post them). In the immediate aftermath of Spartan Minnesota's afternoon cancellation, I was pretty annoyed and sent them messages on Facebook (their seemingly-preferred method of communication) which were basically responded to with "we DID update you, you are wrong, suck it." I wrote back after a week and tried to remain calm and specific with "my demands," which were essentially to have another shot at finishing a Spartan Sprint (I gave a specific race that I wanted to do, also). Their response was a surprising but welcome "of course! Here's a code!"

Lesson learned: there are often teams of customer-service agents and you might get a bad one on your initial inquiry. Try again until someone reasonable answers. And remain calm. No need to write F-bombs to these folks who probably don't get paid NEARLY enough.

TERRIBLE Customer Service: Terrain Race

Terrain Race has famously bad customer service, so I wasn't expecting much. I honestly wasn't planning to complain at all about the fairly minor issues I had with Terrain Race. But then I noticed a lot of people were pissed that there were no results or pictures posted from their events. And I noticed that there hadn't been a photographer at the Oshkosh race that I did, or if there was I didn't see him/her. So it became a matter of principle for me to message them and ask "was there a photographer there? I understand if the pics take a while to upload, but just be straight with me, was there even a photographer?" I have now asked this question of Terrain Race on FIVE separate occasions over the last several weeks. I got a response once, at around attempt #3, of "we will look into it." Every other communication I've had with the race has been ignored.

Lesson learned: DON'T DO TERRAIN RACES EVER AGAIN. Photos are a relatively minor thing to complain about, and I was just asking if they had a photographer THERE, I wasn't even demanding that they post the pics immediately or complaining that there weren't pictures of me. If a race cannot answer a very basic question, keep them off your schedule.

And because it must be said, the overall lesson learned is that good customer service will get a race return customers and great word-of-mouth. Bad customer service will kill a brand. Put your money where the good race directors are, folks!