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You’ve recently bought a treadmill for your home, office, etc., and the big day arrives when it’s delivered.
You unbox it and work with a relative or friend to assemble it. Or, maybe you’ve hired a technician to come in to set it up.
Then, one of the most deflating things imaginable happens. You discover that the treadmill is broken, or not working properly.
Maybe the rear roller end cap or motor cover was cracked during shipping. Or, the belt is slipping and you don’t know how to fix it. Maybe a problem occurs a week or month after setting it up.
What now?
Better hope you purchased the treadmill from a company that has good customer service after the sale has been made!
One of the most common mistakes in fitness equipment, or many other types of products, is that people have no clue what type of customer service the company has that they spent their hard-earned money with.
Big Guy Treadmill Review spent $20,000 to compile one of the most extensive and unique treadmill reviews ever done. Our review team tested 11 of the top brands in the industry based on Google and Amazon popularity to determine the best for overall rating. We based our rankings on specific areas such as quality of customer service, overall quality and design, comfort, performance, safety, buying experience, assembly and warranty as well as many others.
Big Guy Treadmill Review’s seven-person review team learned that there isn’t much data out there on customer service for companies that sell treadmills.
In talking to Arizona-based At Home Fitness customers and their affiliate companies, as well as fitness bloggers, we realized that customer service is one of the most overlooked, under-researched parts of the industry.
We realized it would be really important and interesting to find out how the top companies rank for customer service.
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Customer Service before buying a treadmill
Buying a treadmill is a significant investment for most people.
If you’re going to spend an average of anywhere between $1,000-$4,000 for a treadmill for your home gym, office, condo association, school, commercial gym, etc., it’s important the machine performs well for a long time.
And, that someone is there for you if there’s a problem or question.
In a nutshell, you need to get it right.
Before buying a treadmill, people research things like review sites, online articles and maybe talk to friends or trainers they know. They might look at things like Amazon comments and online reviews of performance, comfort and design, price and stability.
But what about customer service?!
We decided to call the companies we’re reviewing and put them to the test. How would they respond to our two hypothetical problems:
- What if we need a service tech to come to our house? Will someone come out?
- We just had their company’s treadmill delivered and the end cap is cracked. Can they send a new one?
Companies were ranked on time needed to talk to a live customer service representative, ability for CSR to answer basic questions, overall attitude of CSR, how the company handles mailing parts and-or onsite repair, ease and timeliness of setting up a service call.
The overall customer service rankings were as follows:
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For the simple issue of the damaged rear roller end cap, it’s amazing how differently each of the companies, and even Amazon, is equipped to handle the problem.
3G Cardio’s customer service was by far the best. They told us they could ship out the end cap by the next day.
One of our researcher’s got to talking to the 3G Cardio CSR about customer service and he told us that he’d recently had a call from a customer who bought their treadmill through Amazon.
The customer’s end cap was damaged and Amazon told him to return the entire treadmill and that they would send a new one. An end cap is only about a $5 part, which is held in place with two Phillips screws.
The guy laughed and told Amazon’s rep, “Do you realize this is a 400-pound treadmill, which took a great deal of work to set up upstairs in my house? I can’t easily get that back down my stairs. I can’t get it back into a box. That would literally be impossible.”
Fortunately, the guy read his 3G Cardio owner’s manual, realized they listed a customer service phone number and got right through to a person who helped him with the only logical solution: mail the $5 end cap for free.
The worst company by far to deal with is OMA, which is also a popular Amazon company but it’s based in China. You can’t talk to a customer service rep and can only email with them. Amazon is basically your point of contact for OMA.
Good luck getting the $5 end cap, or any other replacement part.
3G Cardio, Bowflex and Peloton were by far the best companies for dealing with service questions.
Most of the other customer service representatives reached couldn’t help with technical questions and forwarded them to a different technical support number, which took days or weeks to respond. Customer Service before buying a treadmill is critical.
Our advice: anytime you are planning to buy something expensive, pick up the phone and call the company and see if they answer their phone or respond quickly to a message you leave.
If they don’t answer the phone when you’re trying to buy something, they’re certainly not going to answer the phone when you’re trying to get service.
In the world of treadmills, if you’re going to have a problem hen 80 percent of all service calls happen out of the box, or within the first couple of days or weeks. That’s why most companies offer a one-year labor warranty. (NOTE: OMA does not have a labor warranty. You’re on your own if there’s a problem).
It’s very important to have a good warranty because shipping problems and damage happen more than ever.
