CyberPower UPS review – Never buy anything from CyberPower Systems

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CyberPower UPS Review – Never buy any UPS from CyberPower Systems. 

Why?  They don’t want to honor their warranty with customers and poor customer service skills from people like Madison Rines.

 

So, one of our clients purchased 3 UPS power backups from Best Buy 2 years ago that happened to be from CyberPower.  Two of the units were the same and One a different model.  One of the UPS went out and we called in to get support.  Their support verified that the unit have an existing warranty that is still valid and not expired.  After many attempts to get a replacement battery shipped out, their supervisor Madison Rines (who can be reached at 952-999-7640) refused on 2 occasions to resolve a simple issue.

Proof of purchase was provided for 1 unit along with images of the boxes and warranty paperwork in the boxes.  Madison Rines said that until a receipt can be produced, she will not send out the replacement battery to get the damaged unit working.  With all this Corona issue going on, which busy store owner is going to take the time to go down to a local Best Buy and ask them to dig up receipts back from 2 years ago?  How is that convenient for a customer?  Business customers that own and operate a business like a store, don’t have the time to do something like this when they know that they purchased the units, and they should be working and know that the units have valid warranty that the manufacture CyberPower refuse to honor.  It’s simple situations like this that cost companies like Cyberpower revenue and bad publicity which in return hurts their bottom line.  Now our customers, online followers and anyone searching for reviews and feedback from doing business with companies like Cyberpower Systems will see this negative review.

Now let’s break this down for a moment.  What’s the cost for the battery replacement?  Maybe $20 – $30.  This one client purchased 3 units which would’ve costed over $300 from the store, plus to set them up.  Wouldn’t it make sense to send a replacement battery to keep a faithful customer happy than to play “hard ball” and say no to a customer that already showed proof of owning multiple of your products?  Wouldn’t that simple solution from a cheap battery create a positive report on a company like CyberPower Systems?  Now, for companies like us that offer I.T. services to many different companies, if you show us that customers are not important to you, we will echo that message to the masses.  Why?  If you offend our customers, you offend us!  It’s in your best interest to impress our customers so that we can tell other customers about your products and service, especially when it comes to honoring warranties.

According to Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/madison-r-ba511957/ , Madison Rines have been a customer support manager for over 2 years, and after talking with her on two different occasions, a person like her needs to be demoted.  Customer support managers resolve issues, they don’t go out and cause more issues and revenue from the company.  They are to de-escalate issues by saving the company’s image, increase revenue and customer retention.

 

If you look at it, by them being difficult on 2 occasions with about 2 hours invested on the phone with their company to still get a “NO” on a unit that is under warranty.  This leaves a poor taste.   This really got our client upset and us disappointed.  We told our client that from now on, never buy CyberPower UPS, only purchase from APC.  Their support is 10 times better and we have never had any issues like this with APC which is a bigger company with superior products.  We’ve used them in consumer, business and data center enterprise environments, and they do perform well.

What’s the outcome that we would like to see?  Honor the warranty by getting the replacement unit shipped out.  Reprimand or demote people like Madison Rines until they show proper leadership skills and understand that when in a position of power, actions can affect the entire company.  What’s interesting is that on 2 occasions Madison Rines was warned that by her acting this difficult over a simple issue, this would be escalated and placed online.  She didn’t care.

Want this review and feedback to be removed?  Contact our company and show the resolutions above.

Giving away hotel stay certificates can boost your business

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In this article we are going to go over something is often overlooked when it comes to the way businesses view their clients. After recent studies, we find that most companies don’t give back to their clients for them patronizing their business.  Often business tend to be selfish and only think about money, and very rarely about their clients.

Clients tend to go where they feel rewarded which is why giving away coupons have a driving force when it comes to increasing sales.  However, there are other things that you can do to help grow your business that does not require giving coupons.  Take for example a hotel stay, companies can give away hotel stay certificates that can cost as little as $6, yet they can be worth over $200 when you consider that average cost to stay at hotels these days.  See if you give your clients a $6 coupon vs. a $6 hotel stay where their family can travel and have fun just for doing business with you, which do you think they would remember more?

When thinking about sales and marketing, you have to learn to think outside of the box.  Giving to clients can and will be very rewarding if you think about the laws of giving.  It also applies in business, not just the Church.  When you give someone a hotel stay, the first thing they’re going to do is “tell someone” about what just happened to them, which is what you want them to do.  This now goes to work and create a viral type of marketing campaign.  In one way you can look at it as free marketing, because once you give it to one client and they told others about your company, you didn’t have to pay to advertise to their friends or family members.  So in essence this is like free marketing and good publicity that your company could use.

This idea is something you can learn from good business coaches or marketing coach.  If you want to learn more contact our company to learn more https://nbsincorp.com/hotel_stay-certificates.php

Phonebooth.com review a division of Bandwidth.com – don’t use them

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If you are looking for a reliable phone provider for your business, at all cost avoid Phonebooth a division of Bandwidth Inc.  What you will read is a very balanced review and customer experience from us that have been clients of them for over seven years.  In all that time we’ve had our ups and downs with them to the extent where we will go back to doing phones on our own terms, in other words set up our own VOIP phone operation.  This is all thanks to the frustration of phonebooth.com and their recent upgrades that broke our business phones for over one month.  What’s even more ridiculous is that they kept billing us for something that was not working and could care less about the fact that we’ve tried to reach them so many times to have them resolve the issue.

This company was so smart that they rolled out a major update to their phone platform software that was done on 10/29/2017 to our account (according to Jacob from their tech support).  Whatever they did broke our phone system where no calls would come through to us, they would just go directly to voicemail.  We could make phone calls, we just couldn’t receive phone calls for over one month.  Whenever we call in to try to resolve the issue, it became even more complicated.

This is the process to receive support from phonebooth.com : (This process is brain dead)

You first have to speak to a customer service person even though you have a technical support related issue, so this is the first stage of frustration (because you have to wait).  Next that customer service agent have to then fill out the reason for your call in a ticketing system who then transfers you into a technical support line where you then have to hold for another person (even more waiting) to get on the phone with you to ask you again the reason for your call.  This process took us over 45 minutes the last few times we called to resolve the issue.  There was one time we were on hold for over one hour and no one picked up to resolve the issue we had.

The last conversation with their support tech:

It’s December 12, 2017 and we just got off the phone with Jacob their level 1 support technician because a supervisor was not available.  He said that he had to patch something on their end to resolve the issue, but tried turning us into idiots by stating that it was something that broke on our end.  He was then asked to clarify how can that be something on our end when we were on the phone with them talking on a phone line that supposedly couldn’t authenticate to their service?  He was also asked why did he have to patch something on their end and the error was supposedly on our end?  The conversation began to heat up because we don’t like to be told foolishness and blamed for something that is related to an issue that they caused and didn’t want to own up to.

The result after following their tech support:

The last thing we were told by Jacob was to reboot the device and the issue would be resolved.  That was done (even though we knew that it wouldn’t be resolved), and the issue is still there.  Another waste of time with this company and more frustration when having working phone service should be easy when the company your pay to do the job claim to be in industry leader.  News flash, they’re not.  Hence the reason why we will go back to sip trunking where you can use a reliable phone carrier and do phone on your own terms.

Our advice:

Stay away from phonebooth.com and bandwidth.com if you want to avoid pitfalls, headaches, being lied to and being lied on.  They will continue to bill you for a service that you don’t receive even though they are not fully providing the service you pay them for.

 

 

 

 

Fonality Review – MUST READ

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Fonality Review

Fonality Review from a customer of theirs.

Fonality should stick with just doing software development rather than experimenting with phone service. It is something that is 101% out their business model and something that they are incapabale of doing successfull. This is not an OPINION, its our story with them thus making it a FACT.

We decided to try Fonality based on a few things:

1. Their services at the time seemed reasonable but then we found out that cheap = downtime and excuses for lack of proper service.

2. Their sales person “(name removed as per person’s kind request)” make a lot of promises that sounded so promising but in the end turned up to be half lies. Even the part about referral payments for clients referred to them.  From our experience, their sales people who make false promises as to say “refer us some people to take advantage of our ‘expiring offer’ and we will give you “x amount of $$ per referral”.  We are still waiting for the check in the mail since then.  When we contacted this person about “keeping their word” they came up with some lame excuse as “hey I got promoted and you have to ask someone else about that”.

3. Their billing department was available during the beginning, then NO ONE was available for about 3 weeks. You had to leave them voicemails or send emails to discuss a billing issue.  It seems that their billing department has about 2 – 3 people working in it but they boast about have over 5,000 clients.  The question is, how can such a small billing department handle all the billing request of that many customers.  Keep in mind as per one of their billing person recently, they just hire more people 🙂 due to the overwhelming new boom in business????????

4. We were told by their sales people that some of their support personel left companies like “Packet 8” and other companies to work for Fonality. But, when you call these support people, 90% of the time you CAN NOT get them on the phone.

5. We ported a number in to them, but when the port finally went through, they DID NOT set it up in their system which resulted in over 1 week loss of important calls and business.  (Name Removed) from their porting department came up with excuses saying that it was our job to call them and that it was our responsibility.  If this were so, why is it that they are the first ones as a ‘wannah be’ phone company that ever came up with this excuse?  We’ve even done business with smaller VOIP companies before and never got a lamer excuse than that.  Obviously they clearly don’t believe in “the customer is always right” even when Fonality was clearly wrong and tried blaming us for their crap.  The person from the porting department also never even apologized for their lack of.  She then started to blame the support department and asked me to call them to resolve the issue.  She was also  blaming the support department saying that they were responsible for setting up the number in their system.

6.  Their call quality sounded good at first but then even that started to go down the drain.  They tried blaming the ISP (changed it 2 times), and they blamed the routers (changed that too).  The real secret that is hidden is we found out after making a phone call to an Associate that Fonality is using Broadvoice as a backbone provider.  For those of you who don’t know of Broadvoice, they are a company like Vonage, BUT their call quality is horrible and their customer service is worst than their service.  They also have issues with porting away numbers from them.  They actually deny ports and we have proof of that too since we were once Broadvoice customers and had a rumble with them.  Just to further inform you, GNAPS (The carrier) and Broadvoice have the same owners.  (We will write a review on broadvoice soon)

7.  They seemed organized and had it together at first (all sales talk) BUT, when we started to face issues we started to get the run around.  From sales, to billing, to support, to porting.  We did have a big issue when we got some new numbers at first from them and found out the next day that the numbers stopped working.  This happened several times with different phone numbers issued by them.  It took about 3 days for them to fix something as simple as giving WORKING NUMBERS to use for doing business.  We got so frustrated that we almost called their carrier (because they made a big mistake and forwarded us an email with the carrier information – which is to show you how dis-organized they are).  They were using Inphonex or Varphonex for the DID’s (phone numbers).

To top things off.  Not long ago they had a NON WORKING NUMBER on their site (keep in mind this was the number we used to contact them all the time) and when we called it, it was giving some bogus messages.  How can a phone company have a none working phone number?  A phone number (DID) only costs about $1 or less plus trunk or minute usage.

Overall we rank them as a 1/10 due to all these issues.  As mentioned above, they are better offer sticking to software development (which they are good at) as they are the developers for Trixbox which is used for VOIP Phone servers.  Fonality seems to want to put other VOIP companies out of business (as per the proud sale talk), but the way they are going now is down a road of putting themselves out of business and possible some of their customers.  We lost business due to their lack of.

For now Fonality’s business phone service is more bark than bite and we would like people to learn from our experience before jumping to a company based on only price and nice sales talk.  At the end of the day, when you have a business to run or operate, you need your phones.

WordPress Auto Blogs

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WordPress Auto Blogs and the people who use them.

Many people make money by creating and flipping word press blogs. Some find it hard to do but it’s pretty easy, having the right tools of course. One tool that does come in handy is WPRobot. It can easily automate any blog which can also take away the pain of constant updates. It does all the work for you and only need a few minutes to setup.

Click here to visit Lunatic Studios.

How can your business survive in this tough economy? Part 1

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Many people want to know the answer to this question.  They want to know how can they survive in this tough economy.  The answer is not quiet this simple.  However there are different things a business can do to cut back and try to stay afloat in this current economy.  And it does not all have to do with laying off people.  It’s more like being creative with your employees and your finances.

Part 1:  Office Rent.

Many business try to expand too fast and take on a big overhead with high office expenses and rent.  Sometimes having a big glamorous office can run you out of business.  To be frank, if a customer cannot respect you for who you are as a business, then they can go somewhere else.  In our experience, those customers who are stuck on this type of stuff are normally the ones who gives the most trouble.  Also they are normally the ones who don’t even want to pay for your services.

Reality is, more expenses means that you have to raise your price or end up taking from Peter to pay Paul.  Sometimes this also forces us to lay off good workers just to try and “keep up with the Jones.”

Not all customers are like this.  In business you will have a few categories of clients.  The in and out, the stick with you till your doors close, and your average pain in the but clients who are there to make your business atmosphere miserable.  Try to keep away from the last set of people.  Why?  It’s simple.  They are too demanding and time consuming.  And business really breaks down to time.  Time = Money.  And if you are stuck spending your valuable time on clients who will not appreciate it, they degrade you, they devalue your service, then simply ask them in a nice way to go.  You will make a lot more money focusing on your other type of clients rather than wasting time with the bad bunch.