Customer Support by Dummies

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Today's DotD nominee is a little different: normally, we find some greedy freelancer who makes a mess our of facts just to pick up a few pennies but today, however, we're going to talk about a company. That company is NordicTrack, a subsidiary of ICON Health & Fitness, Inc., of Logan, Utah. The following is an example of the sort of customer support that, unfortunately, has become the "standard" of our day.

Staffers at AN headquarters wanted an elliptical machine in the gym for bad-weather days, so HR picked up a NordicTrack Elite 13.1 (model 24055) at Sears. Including taxes and delivery, the total cost was in the range of $1450 – a not inconsiderable sum, we think. Unfortunately, the machine's resistance was set too high; which seems to be a fairly common complaint. Perhaps it gets out of whack during shipping... who knows? The manual that came with the machine said nothing about an adjustment, but there was a vaguely worded "white paper" on the NordicTrack website which, unfortunately, did not give instructions.

So the head maintenance guy, Ed, went to NordicTrack.com, where he found a "contact us" link. Ed submitted a support request detailing the problem; which was basically that the resistance needed to be recalibrated. Thirty-six hours later, a "customer support" rep emailed him the following:

"There is way to adjust it, you will need to remove the side shields. You will need to adjust the eddy mech cable. Does the console show the change?" That's it: 23 words, none of which could possibly be construed to be helpful. No images. No link to a YouTube video, not even a suggestion for how to remove these "side shields." A request for more details went unanswered. After HR registered the machine, ICON sent them an invitation to join the "Residential Customer Community" at iconfitnessforce.com/Residential. If you can fumble your way through that website, you'll find someone else at ICON who says to "..try shortening the resistance cable... To shorten the cable remove the side shields and access the resistance mech flywheel. You will find a barrel nut on the resistance cable..."

There's that "mech" business again! Presumably it's a shortened form of "mechanism," but wait a minute: which is it? the eddy mech? or the resistance mech? or are they the same thing? And how does someone without prior knowledge identify this thing?

That's crummy customer support. Using in-house slang to supposedly assist people with problems, giving two-sentence replies that contain no instructions? This is in an environment where eHow freelancers tell people which direction to turn a screw to tighten it, but ICON customer support can't even produce a picture or some sort of detailed instructions? Feh.

Consider yourself warned, people: if you buy something from this company – their products include NordicTrack, Weider, Weslo, Pro-Form, FreeMotion, iFit, Gold's Gym, Altra... – you will be the Dumbass of the Day.

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