A frustratingly helpless jobThe good thingsNot many unfortunately. Most of the staff are casual so it's a great option for a student fresh into uni who is looking for something flexible and easy enough that you can leave it at the door when you leave. The pay was just fine for what it is (dependent on age). More often than not it's a great team you can work with. You get free access to the gym whenever it is open, and other clubs too.
The challengesMost of what you do at Crunch is too complicated for no reason, and you end up feeling a bit scummy. First and foremost, anything above taking someone's money has to be approved by someone in a membership services team. That includes freezing, cancellation, changing memberships, refunds, etc. The company does NOT trust their own reception staff to do this correctly - you send these forms through as a request only. On occasion, these requests would fail, more often than not due to the form not being filled in sufficiently, or because the membership services person simply didn't process it correctly.
That leads to my next point - anything you try to solve immediately around disputes takes weeks at best. This means you are constantly copping the complaints and aggression face-to-face while someone else skims over your email and says they'll do something they still haven't done. Doesn't make for a very pleasant workplace and honestly makes you feel helpless when you can't solve someone's refund dispute that has been carrying on for 3+ months. Of course there was a spread of members who were the problem, but not equivalent.
And a direct complaint about the specific branch of Crunch I worked at. Throughout most of my employment, a manager was hired and kept on for nearly a year, who within his first 3 weeks, had 3 s*x**l h*r*ssment complaints. This forced 3 staff members to leave in disgust as nothing was done, despite 3 lengthy letters recounting this. This manager stayed on and continued to be inappropriate to both members and staff, from inappropriate comments on appearance, to 'casually' r*cist jokes, to straight disrespect for no reason. It took a new employee, who had received 3 unpleasant phone calls during a difficult time in their life, to complain several times to get this manager gone. If that doesn't tell you enough about Crunch as a company I don't know what will.
The upper management at this company is insanely out of touch, and if you get through the training videos without cringing at how bizarre these folks are, I applaud you. The real world does not operate how these people see it, and they genuinely believe signing up someone for a membership is "saving a life".
If you value your dignity and don't want to wake up feeling like a villain, avoid this place. Plenty of better customer service/reception gigs out there - commercial gyms ain't it.