Benjamin W.
Yelp
I write this with reservations. I hate writing bad things about people, and when I brought my bad experience to Finish Line's attention, one of the founders offered to see me for free and was excellent and helpful. I also don't like whining. I just think the Finish Line founders and managers are pretty smart and can do better.
My main bad experience at Finish Line was with the physical therapist I was initially assigned. But I also had problems with the overall procedures, unhelpfulness and inattention of the staff in general.
I had two sessions with a PT here who didn't seem to be paying close attention to the details of my condition. When I came in to the second session barely able to walk, he didn't notice or ask me about it, and went right to work aggressively grinding at the most sensitive spot. At some point, after I repeatedly winced and gasped, he casually mentioned that he was surprised, since some other spot was the sensitive spot, right? He had forgotten where it was (of course, it had been a week) and hadn't thought to refamiliarize himself before diving in.
He didn't help me think through whether or not to run an upcoming marathon (!), and it was me who initiated the frank conversation about being realistic that I needed to recover and stop trying to train, while he just nodded. Then he walked away and left another PT whom I'd never met before to finish up, without any parting advice or instructions. I wasn't even sure if the session was over until I saw him working with someone else.
I emailed Finish Line to describe this, and a founder or manager asked me to come in for a free make-up session. She was excellent, and she frankly confirmed that the treatment the other PT had given me appeared to be irresponsible and damaging. For the record, because I see a similar name in another bad review and I feel it would be irresponsible of me not to warn people about medical damage, that initial PT's name was Mike. Sorry, Mike, I'm sure you're a decent person.
Additionally, it was a headache to get Finish Line to take responsibility for giving me one of those medical receipts reporting the work done that I could give to my insurance company. I realize I can be a pain about stuff like this, because I know that if some financial form gets backlogged, I can miss the chance to submit it properly and on time; that's happened to me before. I think it happens to lots of people, but most people don't really care. At any rate, it's completely standard to produce these forms and provide them to patients. I've seen half a dozen PTs in my life and it's never been an issue.
When they told me they wouldn't give me one at the end of the session, I was fine with that, but asked them to send it to me when they were able to produce it. They said no. They insisted that I collect several of these across multiple sessions, and that I take responsibility for notifying them at some sufficiently future date (they refused to be more specific about when would be OK) that I wanted the forms, and that at that point, they would start to produce them and send them to me. Not awful, just kinda annoying to make the process have that extra step, and a bit of homework for me... I was worried I'd put it in my calendar and never do it, and never get reimbursed. I was also a little worried that if I wasn't a patient anymore, they might not be in much of a rush to produce the forms when the future approved-request dates came. (That sort of thing has also happened to me.) Later that day I emailed them to ask them to reconsider, and they agreed to reverse the policy just for me, and actually take responsibility for giving the forms to a patient. What an unnecessary pain! Life's too short.
So in both situations, management's intentions and customer service are good, but they're not doing a good job instilling those values in their employees, and creating procedures that prevent stupid decisions, inattention, and damage.