Bad experience with a GC employee

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Space Monkey
space monkey
Joined
Oct 24, 2017
Messages
67
I was close to signing up for coaching with one of the GC coaches. I'm a big fan of the site and I only ask questions on here because I want to understand the material better. Anyway, as soon as I started questioning about the payment procedure, this coach was not happy. I was ready to pay and be coached but it was important that I stay safe online. Although I trust GC and its staff, nobody can be sure with the internet. I am not naming names because they don't deserve that, but this coach took umbrage at my questions and handled them in an unprofessional manner. Now the coach has cut off communication.

I haven't made any payment so no harm has been done, but I'm sorry to say that I wasn't very happy with the service that I received. It's fine if a coach thinks that I might not be a good fit for coaching; it's important for the student and the coach to both be a good match. But please understand that when we ask about payment, we are just trying to stay safe online. We customers are happy to pay for good content but we want to be sure of the price and payment method. Most GC users earn plenty of money and do not want that ruined by any kind of phishing or scamming, whether intentional or not by GC. So, please keep this in mind in future. I'm still a fan of the free content on here; I come by every month to read a few free articles. But now I am thinking of hiring a local dating coach in my city. I might get a less experienced coach compared to the ones on GC but at least I'll be able to negotiate a cash payment and be sure about the price and safety of the payment. That was all I was looking for from GC and when I sought good customer service, I did not get it. Thanks for everything you do, GC people. I hope that you can just improve on this one thing.
 

Hue

Tribal Elder
Tribal Elder
Joined
Sep 21, 2016
Messages
1,453
That's too bad. I've only had coaching with Hector so I can only speak on my experiences with that.

I can say that you're 100% safe in your payment and that mine went through as it was charged and there was no funny business about it. Coaching sessions have been huge in my success - I feel invigorated and ready to fuck bitches / approach like a mad man the moment the sessions are over usually. Or, they've guided me in new directions that I have to start thinking in for long term goals - which is a slower but more rewarding process.

But yo, I'm just some dude on GC's forum, so there's no reason to take my word for it.

Best of luck in finding something that works for you!


Hue
 

Chase

Chieftan
Staff member
tribal-elder
Joined
Oct 9, 2012
Messages
5,480
SI-

My apologies; sounds like that coach did not handle your questions well.

Would you mind sharing what specifically your questions were here that set the coach off? I'm trying to imagine "how do I know my payment information will be safe?" type questions and a coach getting angry about that and it's not connecting, so I probably don't have a grasp of what your actual questions were.

If you can, please send a quick note to Joan in customer support as well (info@girlschase.com) with the coach and the questions/incident so she can forward those to me. I'd like to talk to the coach and have your side and get his side to figure out all of it why that went the way it did.

The customer service is one of the biggest things we focus on trying to make amazing. So getting the "bad customer service" remark is one of the last things I want to hear.

(even if you were, say, insisting on paying cash or something, which we aren't going to do, whoever you spoke with should've at least been able to say "Hey man, I totally understand; we do not accept cash, but if you change your mind at some point let me know" and/or should've been able to tell you about the encryption and payment protection we have in place to secure payments made with us)

Chase
 

Chase

Chieftan
Staff member
tribal-elder
Joined
Oct 9, 2012
Messages
5,480
SI-

I just spoke with the coach.

Also reviewed the chat log for your conversation with him.

He could've been more diplomatic in how he handled ending that. Though he wasn't terrible, and clearly was trying to still be nice.

However, it's pretty clear you were in the wrong there.

A few examples:

1.) You monopolized hours of his time, for free, over instant message and even over phone, before even getting to coaching. That's partly his fault; he should not be letting guys do that (he's too nice), and I've talked to him about that before. But that was also you not respecting another person's boundaries. I've done a lot of coaching for a million different things and I can't think of a single time I monopolized unpaid time from a coach like that. That might just be low social awareness on your part (maybe you're just not aware that other people are busier than you and it's not socially appropriate to suck up hours of someone's time 1-on-1 for free who normally gets paid for 1-on-1 time), but still -- not what you should do

2.) Meanwhile you were telling him to wait for you to complete a project you were working on (while continuing to get more time from him). Again, that's probably just low social awareness. But it reads a lot like dangling the carrot so you can get more free stuff

3.) And then when it was time to pay for coaching you shifted over into a bunch of odd conjectures about how Girls Chase must be struggling for money (we're definitely not) due to us only having 10 people on the team (in fact it's somewhere north of 30 right now; no idea where you got "Chase said 10" -- something I wrote in 2014 or something?) and "shamelessly" promoting an affiliate product over email (which is standard practice in the dating advice niche, and one we actually do far less than pretty much anybody else, AND I only ever promote products I have actually sat all the way through and reviewed myself and think will be good for the list, and I say exactly who I think it'll be good for in the promotion... again, something few other guys do. Imagine talking about McDonald's "shamelessly" promoting Disney movies because they have a Big Hero 6 happy meal or whatever it is)

I don't know what the whole "Internet is a dangerous place and I don't know about spending money online with you guys" thing is about. Whether that is some kind of "hackers are going to steal all my information!" paranoia... which they're not; we have 256 bit security on the site, a cloud proxy firewall, DDOS protection, brute force monitoring and protection, very tight password controls on everything that touches the backend, and our own in-house information systems security expert, plus a bunch of other security tech items I'm not going to go into. Or whether you meant you had some sort of general mistrust about the people / the organization, which is what it sounds more like to me.

Personally, from what I can see, it looks like the coach made the right call.

There's a concept in business called "firing problem customers." There's a good article about this here.

I have always, always, always subscribed to this line of thinking. 97% of customers you can indeed satisfy. But there's another 3% that require orders of magnitude more work, investment, and hand-wringing to get happy, and even then they usually aren't -- for folks like these, it's always best just to say "Hey, we're not the right place for you. Sorry it doesn't work between us, but I'm sure you will find somewhere else you connect with better."

You seem like you're confused by his actions. But really -- in what way was he going to "convince" you to pay for coaching after you just spent a bunch of time talking about how you believe (based on a bunch of stuff you seemingly pulled out of thin air or else wildly misinterpreted) we're a tiny failing business shamelessly promoting other products and who knows, the Internet's a dangerous place, anything can happen? What's he supposed to do about that? Open up our books to you? Give you a tour of the Girls Chase security apparatus? Link you to our terms and conditions? I don't know what you can realistically do to change someone's mind if he's thinking that way about your organization. Even in my tire salesman days, when I dealt with customers like that, I'd give them a quick short speech about why we were trustworthy, and if they were still skeptical I'd just let them go. You've got to know when you've done everything you can to try to sell a guy and just cut your losses with him.

The best thing to do with a disconnect like that: you tell the guy you understand, politely show him the door, wish him well, and clear your time to speak with the other 97% of potential customers who have less extreme objections to you instead.

==

So yeah. I mean... criticizing the customer service, after you got hours of free coaching and emotional support, and then the coach couldn't address a wall of insurmountable last minute objections to paying for coaching and decided it just wasn't a fit, him and you / GC and you -- again, the perception there is way off.

From what I can see, you got PHENOMENAL customer service, and your coach went far and above anything he should've done with you, and what I'd ever ask him to do.

Maybe you'll get service somewhere else you're happier with. I hope so. Maybe there's another company you'll discover you trust more, because it speaks to whatever thing in you or whatnot. I hope so -- I hope you find a company you gel with.

But your coach looks like he did a pretty bang-up job from what I can see, all things considered.

==

Note for anyone else: I am only posting this response publicly because SI made it a public dispute.

Otherwise I would not ever go into anything between the coach and student.

I have not discussed any of SI's specific issues / things he needed coaching with / anything else like that.

I just wanted to clarify the dispute here. And let both SI and anyone else watching this thread know that I investigated, and what I found.

Chase
 

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Space Monkey
space monkey
Joined
Oct 24, 2017
Messages
67
Hi Chase,

I want to say that I'm sorry to you and the coach. I was not happy with how the coach cut off all communication and made this post. My annoyance was with how I was about to arrange the payment method on my end and was cut off in all communication out of nowhere. I didn't like that. But you're right. This coach already helped me a lot. He didn't seem to me to be busy at all and I continually told him that he does not need to give me any advice for free. But he did not give me quite a lot of information for free, some of which has already helped me. I would have liked for the coach and myself to overcome my difficulties and be successful together, but I guess that he decided that enough was enough. It was just a sore point for me that it happened over the payment method. It really was about safety and security of payment for me. Even as a customer, I may well have taken up more of this coach's resources than other customers, because of the difficulties that I seem to be having.

Thanks for checking up on this, Chase. You do seem to care about customer service. I'm not going to comment on the number of employees or the products that you promote. I simply don't know so should not comment.
 

Space

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
Joined
Aug 15, 2018
Messages
563
Chase said:
You monopolized hours of his time, for free, over instant message and even over phone, before even getting to coaching. That's partly his fault; he should not be letting guys do that (he's too nice), and I've talked to him about that before. But that was also you not respecting another person's boundaries.
I wanted to address this because I've found it fascinating back then, now I have a few minutes. Boundaries, yes. That's the right word. But the thing is with boundaries is that the person has to set up his own boundaries. Like he hasn't read the articles written about boundaries here. Whether business, personal life, or dating. OK, I've learned Mark Manson's version but I've learned the lesson. That said, the coach had to learn this lesson, and he paid fair price for it: a little bit of his time. As I see it a fair exchange of value took place, nothing to see here.

It seems I may have some new information about the payment situation to you. I can understand SI's point of view. You have readers/customers? from like 90 countries? In not all of these countries are credit card companies are so friendly to the customer that you just call up your bank, say it was a fraud and ask for a refund. If you are in general a good customer of the bank you get a refund. In the US. But it's not that simple in most places. From where I'm coming from many people prefer to pay online by PayPal for example. PayPal has stronger buyer protection for more people around the globe than banks and credit cards do. Of course, if you are a seller it's trickier to sell a product about dating advice if your payment processor is PayPal because of their policies. All in all it's tricky to set up a payment solution that works well across 90 countries for both buyers and the seller. You just simply won't be able to adequately cover everyone. Different regions have different flavors in this sphere so to speak.
 
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