Customer Reviews

This year, the editors at Treadmill Doctor decided to create a ranking system of manufacturer's customer service departments. We have our own opinions of the customer service departments of the various manufacturers. These opinions are the results of our interactions with these departments, the feedback we receive from customers that are interacting with them, neutral third party reviews of manufacturer customer service like Amazon.com reviews, and the policies that these customer service departments operate under of which we are aware.

With the information that we have listed we feel confident that we can form an accurate opinion of what quality of customer service manufacturers deliver to their customers based on multiple factors like, responsiveness, troubleshooting quality, repair delivery, customer wait times for both phone calls and repair visits, and how empowered the customer service agents are to address customer problems and actually fix them. These factors give customers an idea of what type of experience they may encounter if they have a problem with a piece of fitness equipment that they might buy from any particular manufacturer. We also incorporate these opinions in our treadmill and elliptical product reviews that we produce each year .

That being stated, we also wanted to incorporate information that is more rigorous than our standard opinions that we form of manufacturers customer service quality each year. To be more rigorous than our current opinions, it requires information that can be objectively quantified since our own opinions are the result of anecdotal information and subjective opinion for the most part. To bring in more rigorous information we turned to publicly available information from the Better Business Bureau (BBB).

We first looked up the Better Business Bureau (BBB) location for each of the manufacturers that we included in our study. Some of these manufacturers use legal names that differ from their trade or public names so we wanted to make sure that we included all of the actual data for each manufacturer. After we correctly identified each manufacturer we then obtained three separate pieces of data from the BBB: the three year number of complaints filed with the BBB, the one year number of complaints filed with the BBB, and the BBB rating which is effectively a rating of how effectively companies address complaints that are filed with the BBB.

After obtaining the BBB information, Treadmill Doctor created an estimate of total sales volume, by units, for each manufacturer. These estimates were created as the results of research by the NSGA {National Sporting Goods Association), conversations with multiple manufacturers, and both small specialty fitness retailers and "big box" mass merchant retailers. With all of this information we created, what we believe are the most accurate estimates of fitness equipment retail sales data available

After we collected and assembled all of this disparate data we created a formula that incorporates and weighs the various data to create a composite score that allows us to compare the customer service outcomes for each manufacturer relative to its size. Therefore, Icon Health and Fitness, which is the largest retail fitness manufacturer, can be compared with Landice.