Marc Dagenais

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I waited several days before posting this and do not do it lightly.

The point of this post is to just warn those who have not dealt with this man to be on guard for aggressive sales tactics and for him to find a way to automatically charge your credit card each month. You probably all know who he is, the man behind softballpeakperformance.com. I doubt whether any of us are not on his e-mail lists.

I have purchased a couple of products from him in the past and have no issue with the products or his services or knowledge. About 8 or 9 days ago I ordered a DVD from his site (not even one of his DVDs) and saw that I needed to uncheck a box so as not to be entered into a "free" trial for a membership into his club. Of course, after the free trial your credit card is charged a certain amount each month.

I made certain to uncheck the box. A day after I placed the order I started getting daily e-mails from the Peak Performance Club, informing me of my "free" trial membership. The e-mails actually came from an address of "bizmailtoday" and said they were "on behalf of Marc Dagenais." After two days of these e-mails, I e-mailed Marc's support address. Two or three days went by with no response, so I e-mailed again. The first e-mail was polite and simply asked them to remove me from this club and to make sure my credit card would not be charged. The second e-mail was appropriately angry and I made threats to inform the BBB, softball message boards and the NFCA since he writes a column for them.

After another 2-3 days, I received the response below. Keep in mind that after this response and a subsequent phone call, I am still a member of this club and receiving the daily e-mails.

"Hi Joseph,

Thank you so much for contacting us.

We checked your records and it shows that you're not a member of our Softball Peak Performance Club.

Your last transaction with us is your order for Making Things Happen DVD.

Could you please tell us what is really your concern? (boldface added by me)

Or if you were charged for the membership kindly provide us the transaction for that?

Sincerely,

Angela Christy Alejaga
Executive Assistant to Marc Dagenais
M.O. Dagenais & Associates Inc.
support@softballperformance.com
http://www.softballperformance.com
Phone and Fax: 1 866 589 0439
Office hours: Monday-Friday - 10:30 AM to 6:30 PM EST"

Ok, so after receiving this e-mail, asking me "what is really your concern," I called Angela and explained to her that I was receiving daily e-mails informing me I am in this club and that I know one's credit card is charged after the trial membership. She insisted I wasn't in the club. I started to read one of the e-mails to her and she seemed to indicate that was impossible because they have no record of me being in the club. Her English was so bad it was difficult to understand her. I resisted going off on her for her idiotic question about what is really my concern and just concentrated on making sure my credit card (which belongs to Whitworth University) will not be charged. She insisted it won't, so we'll see.

And of course, I am stlll receiving e-mails every day telling me of the wonderful benefits of this club and that my trial membership is almost over.

Again, I have no problem with Marc's products. And although I abhor his time-share-like sales tactics, he has a right to come off like a greedy huckster if he so chooses. But the consequences of doing business this way are to risk having people expose your tactics and general unprofessionalism on the Internet and elsewhere.

Needless to say, I will never be ordering anything else from him. For that matter, my DVD hasn't even arrived yet, so between that and making sure my card is not charged, I might not be done with him just yet.

 

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Marc is a great guy and we are very good friends of his. He has worked our clinics, our players love his drill and he continues answers our questions without delay or charge whenever we call. He has always been standup with us.

I am 100% certain that this is a classic mixup and that he probably knows nothing about it. I have already emailed him and will call him now to make him aware of it and hopefully resolve it to your satisfaction...

 

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I'm glad he answers your questions, because I think I would have an easier time reaching the President of the United States than reaching him. When you talk to him, feel free to let him know if he doesn't clean up this nonsense (not just my case, but this nonsense in general) and instruct "Angela" to stop sending out idiotic, insulting e-mails, then the note I posted here will be repeated on every softball message board in the country, as well as in a letter to the NFCA.

Here is the bottom of today's e-mail I received (this is after yesterday's call with Angela):

Marc Dagenais
Your Softball Peak Performance Coach
SoftballPEAKPerformance.com

P.S. - I hope you're enjoying your f.r.e.e. trial at SoftballPeakPerformance.com. If you've found the resources valuable and want to continue your membership, you don't have to do a thing. We'll handle everything needed to switch your account over to a Gold Membership once your trial period is over (2 weeks).



Actually, if you do know Marc and he has any integrity whatsoever, I will expect a phone call from him today. I will update this thread as events unfold.

 

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I will... I will bet that her email is a matter of her not being proficient with english and it is more direct wording than you or I would use to reply... I hope so anyway...

 

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Seems like there was something about him on Huddle a few years back, similar to what Joe is talking about

 

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Knowing Marc and having bought from his site in the past, I know he will more than make up for this. My guess, this is a systems error and he will get it taken care of for you. I had a similar issue with a national recruiting site but eventually it was straightened out and I was compensated for my time spent.

As for the language in the email, I agree with Doug. French is their first language there so somethings get lost in translation. Hopefully, this will be taken care of sooner rather than later for you.

 

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In the same but different topic, I think that site charges exorbitant shipping and handling. I ordered a book for $25. I was pretty surprised when the cheapest shipping charge was $13. At the time I'm thinking it must be one big, heavy book. Nope! Paper back about 1/4" thick. I complained about it but I still wanted the book. Oh well.

 

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Eagle,
I think you are correct, but I know of several coaches that have talked about this same thing. I know from personal experience that the "remove" button is either ignored or not working, as I continue to receive emails inspite of trying to stop them.

Mad Hornet....Amazon is one of the best deals going for books. Best prices, but shipping can add up if they contract with another seller!

 

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Hi Joe,

First of all, let me say that I am REALLY unhappy about this. We obviously dropped the ball on this and I am never happy is a customer is unhappy.

Know that we have been online 10 years now, have served thousands of people in 10 years and would not be in business anymore if we did not care about our customers.

We do care. I care a lot. Softball is a major part of my life and helping people get better is what I enjoy most.

I definitely understand you being unhappy. If i was you, I would be very unhappy too.

I am not totally sure what happened in your case but I will take a look to make sure we learn and improve from it. Every complaint we get, we always strive to improve our systems and processes.

Actually, recently several people complained that they did not received an answer after sending an email or leaving a phone message. Of course, I was very concerned and we investigated to realized that our communication system had problems. Some emails did not get through and the voicemails after hours were not being recorded. That was fixed.

To address one of your concerns, we do offer a free trial membership to our softball peak performance club with some of our products as a bonus, our hundreds of members get a lot of value out of it. We offer a full, unrestricted, exclusive access for two weeks to all our highly valuable resources. Basically, you can download, watch and see everything at no cost for a full 2 weeks and cancel if you want. If people don't cancel, they are charged monthly for as long as they want to remind a member.

What probably happened in your case - and this something we have to fixed - if you uncheck the box but did leave the item in the cart and as the instructions says, you have to press the ''x'' in the cart to remove the item. We will look at it to avoid confusion. We want to always improve our customer experience.

However, we ALWAYS follow-through with cancellations requests or refund requests as we have a 60-day money back guarantee. And honestly, if someone if really unhappy, we compensate them or fully refund them.

We make it easy to do business with and we always have.

With that said, there are NO excuses for what you went through and I personally take FULL responsibility for it.

I want to apologize and know that I hate to learn about a customer who has experience this.

I will follow-up on your case and know that whatever wrong charges if there is any will be fully refunded and that we use 3 different systems to manage our membership site (shopping cart, automatic email system, membership site platform) and sometimes, they might be out of sync (not a member but still getting the emails does happens...) at times. We will do the necessary. Be assured of this.

We have served thousands of people over the years who have been very happy with our services, products and level of customer service.

I would definitely be happy to talk to you. Check your PM for my private cell phone number and please email me personally at: marc (at) softballperformance.com the best number I can reach you at.

Don't worry, as we do for all our clients, we will take care of you.

Once again, we dropped the ball with you this one time and certainly did not mean too. I apologize.

To make up for the bad experience, I will send you several DVDs (your choice) at no cost.

Sincerely,

Coach Marc

 

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Eagle,
I think you are correct, but I know of several coaches that have talked about this same thing. I know from personal experience that the "remove" button is either ignored or not working, as I continue to receive emails inspite of trying to stop them.

Mad Hornet....Amazon is one of the best deals going for books. Best prices, but shipping can add up if they contract with another seller!

@SunDragon

We have a free newsletter, you probably get these emails. If you wish to unsubscribe, feel free just to click on the unsubscribe button at the button and you will be taken off the list. That is all you have to do

Cheers,

Marc

 

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Marc's response in the posts above certainly are timely and more than reasonable. They are what I would expect from a reputable individual or business.

Marc did send me a PM, which was gracious and genuine. He also offered free DVDs for my trouble. Of course it wasn't my purpose to get free stuff, but I do like his products and like I told him in my reply, I'm not going to turn down that offer, either, so I chose a couple of DVDs.

I consider the matter resolved to my satisfaction and then some. I don't know if it's better to delete my posts here or not. I will leave it to Bear May to decide.