Chesham Pool - Poor Customer Service?
 On Friday 31st July 2008, we went up to the Chesham Leisure Centre (CLC) for a swim. There were five of us; three adults and two teenage children. What was advertised as 4 lanes available for public turned out to be only 1 lane. So the five of us were using one lane. After half an hour 3 other people turned up. They were also under the impression that there were 4 public lanes. So, we had the ludicrous situation of 8 of us sharing one lane in the pool.
I spoke to the poolside staff who apologised for the mix up. They said that this was caused by a mistake in the schedule over which they had no control. I suggested that they should refund us 50% of our fees which they duly did, and, I wrote a feedback on a standard form inviting a response by email. I received this response the next day.
"Dear Mr. Chan,
Firstly, my apologies for the inconvenience caused to yourself and your family by our inaccurate publication of pool sessions as detailed in the Summer Holiday Swimming Timetable.
I would like to assure you that this was a genuine mistake made on our part when scheduling Chesham Swimming Club (CSC) and Public Sessions during the summer break.
I have double checked with CSC and would like to inform you that, each of the subsequent Thursday evenings up to and including the 28th will be for lane swimming with four lanes.
I sincerely hope this incident has not altered your perception of Nexus at Chesham Leisure Centre and reassure you that we take all comments made seriously.
I look forward to welcoming you and your family at Chesham Leisure Centre again soon,
Kind regards,
Karl Alexander
Nexus Manager (Operations)"
As you can see, this is a standard apology with no commitment to take any action. There is no commitment to review the way their schedules are compiled to ensure such mistakes will not happen again. There is no commitment to find the staff responsible and ensure they check their work thoroughly.
If you look carefully at their summer schedules, you will find further problems. At the CLC, the two published schedule leaves gap of 1 week. Between 23th July and 28th July. I guess they expect their customers to guess what is going on.
If you look in detail at the published programme, it takes a fair bit of study to see what is going on. There are terms used that are not defined. On the Summer Holiday schedule for example, we have "1/2 PUBLIC" as the description the Monday 6.30-9.30pm slot. We have "PUBLIC(2 lanes)" on the Tuesday 7.00-7.30am slot. We also have "PUBLIC 1/2 open 1/2 lanes)" on the Wednesday 7.00-7.30am slot. It takes a while to work out what is going on here but one is not quite sure.
Now the pools are run by Wycombe Leisure Limited on behalf of the Chiltern District Council. These are public assets that are being managed by a privatised operation. Surely we should expect better from Wycombe Leisure Limited.
If it is public policy to encourage fitness for all, then surely more care and attention needs to be put on the publications like timetables?
Comments are invited from Wycombe Leisure Limited and the Chiltern District Council.
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