LUKE MARSDEN: Oh to be able to complain to a human being!

Communication is so often an electronic process these days

Gone are the days of talking to the manager in a physical shop (anyone remember those?).

These days you can’t even speak to a real life human on the phone (again, remember those?) .

It’s all bots controlled by bots in other countries.

As I documented a few weeks ago in this column, I’ve begun a “gym journey” at Fitness First Wigan and I obviously wanted to fit the stereotype of a gym-goer with “all the gear and no idea” so I decided to make a few purchases from now billion dollar gym clothing brand, Gym Shark.

You may have heard of Gym Shark as a lot of the influencers on Instagram wear their stuff, in fact from a rough body count at the gym so do a lot of Wiganers.

I’m not here to push a discount code on you like most people on Instagram (I wish I had one!) but my new gym joggers didn’t last two weeks and not through overly excessive use, I may add.

Gym Shark proudly claims on its website that it has no call centre.

Customer service is a robot on on a help section on the website.

I didn’t get anywhere with that so I tweeted them. Three days later a nameless agent asks me to send them pics of the joggers,

I explain the ripped problem and to their credit they have sent me a new pair and even encouraged me to “up-cycle” my old ones. I just got my mum to stitch them back up!

The irony of this tale is that on the rare occasions you finally get some good customer service you can’t ask for the manager to feedback praise.

Instead you’re left with tweeting it out to the world. I don’t like the joggers enough to do that...

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