Tuesday, November 11, 2008

CBeyond Destroyed our Business almost Single Handedly

CBeyond failed repeatedly to provide even the most basic phone and internet service for our small business. As a result of Cbeyond's negligence and/or ineptitude, our small business was nearly closed as a direct result of losses related to their failure to correct their technical problems. To learn more, please read the correspondence below. Cbeyond never found a solution and we eventually found a provider who could deliver basic phone service to our offices. I strongly recommend reading our correspondence to their support team that describes our experience with Cbeyond prior to engaging into any service with them.

Here is an open letter sent to CBeyond's support team on October 2nd, 2008:

Hello Cynthia,

I realize that you are not the person responsible for tech support at CBeyond, however, I would like your help in getting me to the right person over there to get a response to our very urgent problems with our CBeyond voice services.

The attached letter describes our problems and I'll be sending it to the 3 executives in your Atlanta corporate office today (with the proper account number which is not in the letter yet but will be later this morning).

Now that we are not using the BV2 at all for internet, we'd like to use the remaining bandwidth to add phone lines asap. Perhaps if we had an "overkill" of phone lines available, this might alleviate some of the network issues. That's my amateur theory. Meanwhile, I cannot stress enough the urgency in resolving this matter.

Please provide a contact for me, preferrably a member of management in your support division who might be able to follow through on resolving our problems. Please also provide a contact to management in your billing department so we can articulate our position to them as well.

Warm Regards,

Charles Lloyd (real name)
CEO

Here is the content of the attached letter:

November 11, 2008
CBeyond Corporate Office
320 Interstate North Parkway
Atlanta, GA 30339
Ms. Terry S. Trout
Mr. Minaz K. Vastani
Mr. Christopher C. Gatch

Dear Ms. Trout:

We are customers of CBeyond and have the account number, ……
In May of this year, a CBeyond sales representative, David Jones, cold called our office to solicit phone and internet services. At the time, we had planned on expanding to a new location based in Irvine and had an existing location in Orange, CA. Based on Mr. Jones claims that CBeyond would provide consistent phone and internet service for a competitive price, we signed a contract with CBeyond in late May.

Service was installed promptly and all of the contact we had with CBeyond support representatives were courteous and professional, however, within the first 2 weeks after service was initiated (June 23rd through July 3rd), we began experiencing interruptions of our basic phone service. Specifically, calls were dropped in the middle of a conversation and in many cases our entire office was unable to dial out or receive incoming calls.

We began submitting trouble tickets during instances where our service was down for extended periods of time, however, there were so many instances of interrupted service that it was not possible to report each instance.

Our vendor, along with several outside experts who have analyzed and continue to analyze our internal equipment (we use an Asterisk based PBX with Cisco phones and network equipment), have been in contact with Tier 1, 2, and 3 support personnel at CBeyond and as of today, the service outages not only continue, but they continue to worsen.

We purchased the BV2 product. We were using voice and internet service through the BV2. As of 2 weeks ago, we acquired new internet service that is completely separate from CBeyond because the CBeyond support department said that it was possible that a virus on our computers may be responsible for the ongoing problems. Since switching our internet service over to a new, independent provider, the BV2 has not been providing internet access to anyone at our office and thus, the problem is now isolated. The results of this change did not end our basic telephone service interruptions. Since we relieved that burden of internet access from the BV2, our phone service has only become worse.

This week, we have continued to document the service outages. On an average of every 10 minutes, we document and report the following instances of interrupted service:

1. When on the phone with customers, audio to the customer is completely interrupted.

2. When dialing out, the message, “all circuits are busy” is played and the call cannot be initiated.

3. When dialing into our office, the caller cannot get through and hears the message, “this number is no longer in service.”

4. Complete and total interruption of phone service for 1 to 20 minutes at time.
As a direct result of these ongoing service outages, we have incurred massive losses.

We have documented losses from the following sources:

1. Hundreds of clients have canceled their contract with our firm due the fact that they heard a “this number is no longer in service” message on many occasions. They believed we were delinquent in paying for service and thus our company was unstable.

2. Advertising efforts have been wasted. As we have a robust advertising campaign (we are a marketing company), our inbound sales volume from advertising, which is the primary source of revenue for our firm, has been reduced by 75% due to the fact that we cannot sustain a reliable phone call.

3. Sales personnel have resigned as a direct result of CBeyond’s inability to resolve our service outage issues.

4. Sales revenue as a whole is down 75% as a direct result of our inability to promote our business which is done completely over the phone.
We have attempted to work with CBeyond in good faith, however, we believe that CBeyond is directly liable for these damages. We continue to incur damages described above every day.

At this point, we would like to try to use the BV2 until we can acquire service from an alternate provider; however, we would like to mitigate our damage by exploring every possible option with your support team that might reduce these problems while we still need your service (6 more weeks).

The damage incurred by our firm as a direct result of our ongoing lack of phone connectivity provided exclusively by CBeyond has been so debilitating that we may be forced to close our business permanently.

We are reporting this case to the Public Utilities Commission and the FCC, and we will publish our experience with CBeyond via digital and other media sources. We may also furnish a demand letter for accumulated monetary damages we have incurred. Meanwhile, it is our desire to have these issues resolved and if they are resolved, we will report the issues as such.

As you may have gathered from reading this letter or the hundreds of contacts with your support team, this is no less than an emergency and we are asking once again for an appropriate response.

Sincerely,


Charles Lloyd

8 comments:

truth said...

CBeyond Class Action Lawsuit Info:

http://www.pr-inside.com/notice-of-filing-securities-class-action-r593662.htm

truth said...

More poor service by CBeyond:

http://www.trixbox.org/forums/trixbox-forums/sip-and-iax-trunks-and-providers/anyone-else-have-issues-cbeyond-communication

truth said...

More Cbeyond Complaints:

http://www.complaintsboard.com/bycompany/cbeyond-a21961.html

Unknown said...

More documentation of Poor Service from CBeyond:

http://www.dslreports.com/comment/2706/71475

Unknown said...

More Customer Complaints about Cbeyond:

http://www.broadbandreports.com/comment/2706/62202

Unknown said...

More CBeyond Service Problems:

http://telcotrash.typepad.com/telcotrash/2005/05/cbeyond_communi.html

DJ said...

A CBeyond sales representative just visited my office last week.
After talking to him, I saw this blog. I need to know more information on the lawsuit pending. Also, I'd like the company whose CEO is Charles Lloyd to email me back.

Thanks

Don Johnston
Regional Business Manager
L.A. Baptist City Mission Society
email address: dbj@abcla.org

hornskill said...

As a former sales rep for 1.5 years, which was an eternity for Cbeyond because of the way sales management routinely set people up for failure, I can tell you that Cbeyond occasionally lost phone service at Cbeyond's sales/service headquarters in Houston. Customers routinely complained about sub-par service/outages. Cbeyond said that they have their own network with "built-in redundancy", but this is yet another lie. The myriad law suits alleging inflated sales and /or false turnover numbers are par for the course. I would strongly advise you to avoid this company.