Miami University Student Foundation Triathlon : Official Thread (Page 14)

Just an FYI.  HFP didn't have any better luck last year at the Spirit of Racine Sprint with the old timing mat company.  No transistion or bike splits at all for the entire race.  No explaination on the website.  Nothing.

Now I see this one.

Got to be honest, I've now done 11 races and they are the only ones I've heard of that have had THIS much issue with timing mats.

Doubt I will be doing many more HFP races if this is their trend.

Well,  I know that they subcontract the timing work to other companies like speedy-feet, but still, HFP is the client facing entity, and ultimately they are responsible for the communication with the consumer.   

I know that sometimes errors happen with data collection... I work in marketing research, and I have had my fair share of data collection problems, but the key is being transparent with the clients (in this case participants), and keeping communication open.  I think that noone is really expecting HFP to magically pull that data out of mid air, but we are expecing to know that they are

It is called Customer Service, and HFP is showing to be incompetent at it.

Didn't mean to imply they always had timing issues.  Just talking about my experience with them and relating.

That being said, they do have some client service issues.  Which appears to be quite true based on your and other comments.  Could be that they have grown too big and too fast to keep up with all of the requests/questions.  If that is the case, then they need to set the expectation up front as to when someone will get back to the person with the inquiry. 

Oh, and thanks for the info on the Sprint in Racine last year.  NEVER heard any of that.  Ever. Least they could have done was put an apology on the website, which they never did.

Thanks again for the info, though.  It really does explain quite a bit.

I just tuned in and was surprised to see all the talk on some poor timing and poor customer service.

My two cents (maybe more like 50 cents):  This is not new to HFP. They regularly have error in the results (though this time the issue seems to be huge).  They NEVER care about fixing it.  They ALWAYS preach to participants that "what is really important is you know how you competed and you know your result".  They gave that song and dance to my 9 year old son Max who, after traveling with the family 120 mile the the Akron kids race, gave him the 3rd place age group trophy when he was 2nd due to a time goof.  All the kids times were trash. Absolutely no rhyme or reason to any of the times.  The older girl that finished 1 second ahead of Max had a time of 15 seconds slower.  They also cheated the kids out of the advertised overall awards.  They attitude through the whole thing was "Lighten up parents! This is just supposed to be for fun" (a lot of parents were giving them hell".

I also wrote Shannon K. a letter about some problems in another race 1.5 years ago.  The tone of my letter was very polite and presumed that Shannon was unaware of some problems that were not being resolved by emails. He never responded to my letter and the problems were never resolved.

I look forward to when HFP "get's it".  To "Get it" is to take full ownership and understanding that it is your duty to provide the best service possible from start to finish (advertising a race to answering questions on timing).

Experiment for everyone:  Call or email Jeff Sheard of UltraFit.  90% of the time you'll hear from him within 15 minutes.  UltraFit DOES NOT get everything correct.  THEY DO care about what we thing though.  And as I result they get a lot right and continually improve.

HFP is benefitial to the racing community.  Let's make not mistake about that (especially for you folks that want more then a Sprint event).  But as paying competitors, let us politely require all our race directors to hold up there end of the bargain, to treat us with respect, and stop passing the buck on races they own to the timing subcontractors they choose.