Tom T

(Side note: don't put much stock in the BBB. Most complaints sent to the BBB are not to do with IPS but rather people send complaints to us about IPBs out there thinking we run them. Plus I could go on a huge rant about the BBB but that's a different topic.)

As with most businesses 99% of clients are happy but it's the 1% who are not happy who you hear from :)

Most of our complaints come from client-confusion. The last few posted here were people thinking we had somehow removed their license when they were just logging in under the wrong email address, for example. We also get a lot of "timezone" complaints. Like someone in Europe will post a ticket and wonder why it's taking "so long" for a reply forgetting it's 3:00 am here. Sure we have staff in tickets from Europe too but some stuff requires certain staff to take care of.

We also get complaints from what I call "abnormal expectations" like: client has IPB installed on a host using ultra-secure PHP setup with almost everything disabled and is mad because things don't work. Another one would be languages issues. We are continuing to work on language issues but when your whole staff only speaks English it's hard to debug language issues and some people become angry thinking we don't care when really it's just an ongoing process as it is so hard for us to debug.

Of course we sometimes miss a response timeframe for a ticket, give a client wrong information, and mess up. That's understandable. When we do mess up we never defend ourselves we acknowledge it and try to fix it. We do get defensive though when someone posts a rant on the forums and misrepresents the facts. That really drives me nuts :)

I sure hope he can. I hear he's a nice guy.

this is like trying to talk to a friggin wall...

Since when it is wrong for a company to make profit?

I am just wondering.

Wow. Well with that we will lock this.





I consider the fact that we are trying to comprehend what your issue is good customer service. I still don't know what it is to be honest and I think I am more confused now than ever.

The ticket you keep referring to that you believe took too long was escalated to the development department. That is our highest level of service we can provide. I do apologize that if you are experiencing an abnormal issue that it may take a while to research but we could hire dozens of support techs and it would not speed up an issue that needs to be researched by a developer at the code-level. There is truly nothing we can do about that.

As you yourself said: we have no open tickets for you. Just those that you are choosing to ignore the "waiting for customer response" status. If you cannot help us help you then I guess this topic has ran its course. When you would like us to work on any issues you may be having just open a ticket or reply to the one waiting for a reply from you. Until then... well... as far as we know you don't need anything from us.

Saying "thank you" is common courtesy. You know, it's one of those things that makes us human. No, you don't need to go out of your way to thank the cable company unless you feel the need - but refusing to do so, when given the chance, simply because you paid them money is what disturbs me. I honestly find it hard to believe that I'm actually debating this. Courtesy is one of the few similarities between all cultures and ignoring it simply because you think you're entitled to arrogance after forking out money for services is what gets me.

bobage:

I know you personally dislike me for some reason and I know you have a chip on your shoulder about us but other than complaining about me personally I see not a single complaint in your ticket history. The ticket you are referring to about your board issue is 7 pages long in our ticket system. At no time did our staff neglect your issue it just took a lot of research to find the underlying problem.

Please do not offer misleading rants and statements just because, for some reason, you're personally angry about something as intangible as personality clashes. If you want to rant you should not wander our forum waiting for someone to dare to say something nice about us and jump in as you have been doing lately. Further, and something that cannot be tolerated any further, is attacking and baiting fellow customers. That is simply unacceptable. We are not in the business of censoring people with negative-views on us (how else do we know how to improve?) but you have gone into blind, unfocused rant territory which only serves to distract and disrupt. When your fellow customers complain to us about your behavior it is something we have to take seriously.

We cannot address "I don't like them!" we can only address specifics. If you have a specific thing we can fix, related to your specific experience, open a support ticket, send a PM, an email, anything to point out that issue. As of this moment, you have not a single open support ticket in our system.

Thank you for your comments and for understanding that our response times are a bit slower than normal right now. Our staff is working amazingly hard to catch up and are making progress. Everyone here is looking forward to getting back to our normal response times :)

Of course there are times, especially with the volume of requests we get, a ticket will fall through the proverbial cracks but our staff works to keep that from happening. When it does happen a quick phone call or PM can set things back on track. No one should ever feel neglected and if you ever do feel free to contact me or someone else in management. We are happy to help and want to hear from you if we can do better. Don't worry though, we don't follow a "squeaky wheel" philosophy here - we will only escalate a request if it warrants more attention to keep the ticket wait process fair for all.

Um, no, that's not profit, that's revenue. That money then has to go toward paying the developers to write new code, the support staff for answering tickets and processing payments, the management who run the company, the ISP for internet access (which definitely isn't cheap for businesses who do their own hosting), and all of the building rent, utilities, upkeep, and maintenance at their headquarters. And even then I'm sure I'm missing something. (Also, on what planet is $140 9100% greater than $49?)

Bottom line, IPS isn't raking in mountains of pure profit from every sale. It bothers me when people forget that there's overhead to software development (says the guy with a grandfathered lifetime license of IP.Board for $129 :whistle: )...

Stated it many times? I disagree....

















They stated it a gabazilliontimes

I'm afraid we've stated over and over with every beta release NOT to update your live site. We said it would not be supported, and we've publicly stated that we did not expect to end up releasing an upgrade path from betas to final. The only reason the upgrader is available presently is purely for testing.

I'm sorry that you are in this position, but it is not something we will likely be able to accommodate.

Your work load may not be as big as it seems, hard to say. We do have a database checker int he ACP that will fix any database problems it can find - so long as you are able to access the ACP.

Uh, you misread my post. I said before June, not in June.

Additionally, we absolutely cannot release the forum upgrade without the components. Customers have purchased these components from us and it is our responsibility to ensure there are compatible versions available for the new version of the forums.