A reply by Colin Laphan, Chief Executive Officer of Alessandro PLC
With regard to Ruby's posts:
Early Last year I had in house training with Alessandro I bought the Kit which was £300.00 which included the training.
At this price this can only have been a conversion kit, but without the lady's correct details I cannot be certain. If it was a conversion kit it would NOT include any training merely a FREE conversion for a fully qualified nail technician. Alessandro does not sell a full kit to anyone without proper FREE training!
We arranged training on a Monday so I didn't take any bookings for that day ,I also had two other girls training. We waited and waited for the trainer who should have come to see us at loam ,we waited another couple of hours she still didn't come,I rang Alessandro to find out what had happened they didn't know why she hadn't arrived she never came ..
I find this scenario whereby we didn't know where the trainer was slightly unbelievable and confirm that this was not training, merely a conversion for a Creative qualified tech. Which we take to be a "badge" of proper training.
So they arranged for another day a Tuesday ,the trainer should have arrived at 10am but didn't arrive until 1pm while she was with us her mobile phone kept ringing and she kept answering it she left at 3pm.
Again without all the details I cannot really say but it is not unknown for traffic problems to occur, one of our trainers was behind the fatal road accident on the M1 last week and was held up for 6 hours, it does happen. It is most unprofessional to keep answering the mobile phone unless there was serious family problems occurring. Some of our trainers work away from home for a couple for weeks. As a policy we will ALWAYS provide more FREE training at the next available training session and training is held free of charge at Head Office 52 weeks of the year.
I complained to alessandro who sent someone else for a few hours on another day .
We obviously reacted correctly and sent someone out at our expense, again
It does sound like the Customer Care policy was effected correctly here. This was only a Conversion, For a full nail bar the price would have been in excess of a £1000.00 and full training would then be given.
3 of my clients had allergic reactions to the gel and so did I ..
We are not aware of any genuine claims about the Alessandro Soft Gel causing allergic reactions. However we always investigate any comments such as this most strenuously. In this case we will pay for an independent Consultant Skin Specialist (not a chemist) to patch test the Alessandro Soft Gel on each of these ladies individually at a local hospital, as the reactions are apparently spontaneous, obviously we will know there and then. If the 4 ladies do react we will immediately issue an apology to this lady and her clients and uplift the products instantly and pay the travelling expenses of the clients.
I told Alessandro I am not happy with the product or the training and wanted to return the product. They would not accept the kit back and said that I would have to pay for the training if I did send it back.
I now have the kit which I would not ever use I don't have anything good to say about it at all .
After 22 years of trading with the Alessandro Soft Gel we know how the product works and its non-allergenic properties, but then people can develop reactions to chalk! So anything is possible. We are the only ISO9002, British Safety Council, FHT members of the nail industry that I know of, in pursuit of the aims of Health and Safety and Quality Assurance . We do know that when we sell the product to a potential client the product will do everything we say of it and we will always support the client with free training as long as they are users of the product. I am not aware of any other company that offers free training and support from fully employed trainers and customer care representatives. We do know that not everyone tells us their correct qualifications and their full training background and/or their genuine experience levels but we can only go on the information presented to us during the buying process.
We invest in the UK more money per customer to support and train those customers than any other company without re-imbursement. We have invested over a million pounds over the last three years and forgone making profits as can be seen from our accounts! Our quest is such that the Directors have not taken any profits from the company. However we are only human and mistakes can be made, the trick is obviously to spot the genuine mistakes and then evolve processes to prevent further errors. Our current annual growth rate is 40%, (something our customers generally reflect) and unfortunately this does mean that sometimes we cannot give the 110% support which we want to offer. We also rely upon taking on new trainers and Business Development Manager's from the rest of a very immature industry and then over time re-training them to European Standards. I have noted a number of comments from posters on this site that they have had a poor demonstration. For this I apologise, but whilst we have high standards and we constantly work to ensure these standards, sometimes in our eagerness to grow and to please, an employee does a demonstration totally in contravention to all that we and the company stands for. I have no doubt that these employee's were caught out and are no longer with the company. I would be grateful for full details (confidentially of course) of any of these instances.
If anyone would like to contact me directly to either ensure a new experience or for me to look into any problems they have please fell free to contact me on [email protected]
