Willoughby Swim School admin is crap

Willoughby Swim School administration are crap. When I deal with them I feel like their sole purpose is to shaft their customer.

Willoughby Swim School have outsourced their billing to a company called EzyPay.  EzyPay purports to simplify your life by streamlining payment but in fact all it does is make things easier for the swim school by screwing you.

In fact the swim school are so keen to get you into EzyPay they give you a discount to convince you to sign up it. It’s a way to lock you into classes until you take active steps to cancel it.

• If you are on EzyPay, you are required to cancel your subscription 2 months before the class even starts if you don’t want to continue the next term. That’s crap.
• They have this draconian policy where they will charge you a $20 fee if the transaction is declined.
• They charge you an admin fee just using the EzyPay service, which you don’t even want. Also crap.
• To entice you to use EzyPay they give priority to EzyPay customers to book into classes. Then they sell it to you as though early booking into classes is a benefit of EzyPay, when it fact its not. It is unrelated to EzyPay but they do it to make you sign up to EzyPay.
• They sell the commitment that EzyPay forces you into as though its some kind of advantage to you. It’s not. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if they pitched it as something they have to do let them plan their class sizes, but they aren’t clever honest enough to do that, instead they sell it to you like its a benefit to you, when all along you know they are shafting you.
• You can’t cancel EzyPay over the phone, you have to go into their office. They wouldn’t want to make it easy to get out of it.
• I had the distinct feeling when I signed up that I’d hate it and sure enough I did.
• When I canceled EzyPay, they asked me why, to which I had to inform them that EzyPay was crap. Admin tried to tell me that the EzyPay terms and conditions were not within their control, but she failed to consider that using EzyPay is within their control.
• The admin at Willoughby Swim Schools is generally terrible. It’s a real shame as they teachers are fantastic. Another issue I have with Admin is they force kids to wear swim hats. No doubt this is to prop up sales of swim hats. They have a “no had, no swim” policy which I’m sure nets them quite a few swim hat sales per day. Not only that, they force the poor teachers to enforce this rule. They tried to bully me into forcing my son to wear a swim hat but I told them that he wouldn’t and if they had a problem administrator could come and talk to me about it. She was too chicken to though, she sent a message back through the teacher that it was OK but next week he would have to wear it.
• They don’t have any kind of grading for toddler classes. So they put my son into a class that was too high for his level, based on asking us what his swimming skills were. We are not swim teachers so how are we supposed to know. Anyway, after a whole term of swimming, they decided he was in the wrong class and demoted him to the beginner class for the next term. That’s fine but why did they waste a whole term before telling us?

If you are considering EzyPay for your business, steer clear of it if you value your customers. EzyPay might make billing simpler but it does so at the expense of your customer’s good will.