Tuesday, September 10, 2013

CBeyond Service Review - Buyer Beware

CBeyond nearly destroyed our business and eventually was the single largest contributing factor in the closure of our offices in Irvine, CA.  Look no further than their long trail of BBB complaints or our story posted below that details our attempts to obtain consistent phone connectivity with their service department.

If you have had similar problems, report it here and we will publish your story as well.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Cbeyond has 100 Better Business Bureau Complaints

Despite 100 Better Business Bureau complaints, CBeyond is awarded an A+ rating by the BBB. As mentioned before in this blog, numerous complaints are also present on complaint message boards and I can't emphasize our story enough - they nearly destroyed our business and now they are sending a collection firm after us for payments we refused to make after services were not rendered (details of our Cbeyond story are found on our November 11th, 2008 post).

According to the Better Business Bureau, here are the classifications of the 100 complaints against Cbeyond (ours included):

"Customer Complaint History

When considering complaint information, please take into account the company's size and volume of transactions, and understand that the nature of complaints and a firm's responses to them are often more important than the number of complaints.

BBB processed a total of 100 complaints about this company in the last 36 months, our standard reporting period. Of the total of 100 complaints closed in 36 months, 67 were closed in the last year.
Advertising Issues
BBB Definition:

Advertising Issues - Claims alleging print or electronic media advertised claims or practices misrepresent the service or product offer.

Resolved
BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

1 - Company resolved
BBB Definition:

resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.
the complaint issues. The consumer acknowledged acceptance to BBB.
1 - Company addressed the complaint issues. The consumer failed to acknowledge acceptance to BBB.

Contract Issues
BBB Definition:

Contract Issues - Claim of alleged failure to honor contract or agreement, work performed without authorization, or invalid contract.

Resolved
BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

2 - Company resolved
BBB Definition:

resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.
the complaint issues. The consumer acknowledged acceptance to BBB.
10 - Company addressed the complaint issues. The consumer failed to acknowledge acceptance to BBB.
Administratively Closed
BBB Definition:

Administratively Closed - BBB determined that the complaint could not be satisfactorily settled using standard methods of voluntary dispute resolution

7 - BBB determined that despite the company's reasonable effort to address complaint issues, the consumer remained dissatisfied.

Billing or Collection Issues
BBB Definition:

Billing or Collection Issues - Claim alleging billing errors, unauthorized charges, or questionable collection practices.

Resolved
BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

1 - Company resolved
BBB Definition:

resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.
the complaint issues. The consumer acknowledged acceptance to BBB.
8 - Company addressed the complaint issues. The consumer failed to acknowledge acceptance to BBB.

Sales Practice Issues
BBB Definition:

Sales Practice Issues - Claims of alleged sales presentations made in person or by telephone that contain misrepresentations of the product or service, high pressure sales practices, failure to disclose key conditions of the offer, and verbal representations not consistent with written contractual terms or agreements.

Resolved
BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

5 - Company resolved
BBB Definition:

resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.
the complaint issues. The consumer acknowledged acceptance to BBB.
10 - Company addressed the complaint issues. The consumer failed to acknowledge acceptance to BBB.
Administratively Closed
BBB Definition:

Administratively Closed - BBB determined that the complaint could not be satisfactorily settled using standard methods of voluntary dispute resolution

1 - BBB determined that despite the company's reasonable effort to address complaint issues, the consumer remained dissatisfied.

Delivery Issues
BBB Definition:

Delivery Issues - Claims alleging delayed delivery of ordered merchandise.

Resolved
BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

1 - Company addressed the complaint issues. The consumer failed to acknowledge acceptance to BBB.

Repair Issues
BBB Definition:

Repair Issues - Claims of alleged incorrect diagnosis of a problem, delay in completion of repair, or inferior workmanship.

Resolved
BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

1 - Company addressed the complaint issues. The consumer failed to acknowledge acceptance to BBB.

Service Issues
BBB Definition:

Service Issues - Claims of alleged delay in completing service, failure to provide promised service, inferior quality of provided service, or damaged merchandise as a result of delivery service.

Resolved
BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

8 - Company resolved
BBB Definition:

resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.
the complaint issues. The consumer acknowledged acceptance to BBB.
29 - Company addressed the complaint issues. The consumer failed to acknowledge acceptance to BBB.
Administratively Closed
BBB Definition:

Administratively Closed - BBB determined that the complaint could not be satisfactorily settled using standard methods of voluntary dispute resolution

6 - BBB determined that despite the company's reasonable effort to address complaint issues, the consumer remained dissatisfied.
2 - BBB determined the company made a reasonable offer to resolve the issues, but the consumer did not accept the offer.

Customer Service Issues
BBB Definition:

Service Issues - Claims of alleged delay in completing service, failure to provide promised service, inferior quality of provided service, or damaged merchandise as a result of delivery service.
BBB Definition:

Customer Service Issues - Claims alleging unsatisfactory customer service, including personnel's failure to provide assistance in a timely manner, failure to address or respond to customer dissatisfaction, unavailability for customer support, and/or inappropriate behavior or attitude exhibited by company staff.

Resolved
BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

2 - Company addressed the complaint issues. The consumer failed to acknowledge acceptance to BBB.

Product Issues
BBB Definition:

Product Issues - Claim alleging a product does not meet the expectations of the complainant, including defective merchandise.

Resolved
BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

2 - Company resolved
BBB Definition:

resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.
the complaint issues. The consumer acknowledged acceptance to BBB.
1 - Company addressed the complaint issues. The consumer failed to acknowledge acceptance to BBB.
Administratively Closed
BBB Definition:

Administratively Closed - BBB determined that the complaint could not be satisfactorily settled using standard methods of voluntary dispute resolution

1 - BBB determined that despite the company's reasonable effort to address complaint issues, the consumer remained dissatisfied.

Refund or Exchange Issues
BBB Definition:

Refund or Exchange Issues - Claim of alleged failure to honor company policy or verbal commitment to provide refunds, exchanges, or credit for products or services.

Resolved
BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

1 - Company resolved
BBB Definition:

resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.
the complaint issues. The consumer acknowledged acceptance to BBB."


Talk about a Pay Off!! If my company had 100 complaints (we have none), I wonder if the BBB would be awarding me an A+ rating.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The CBeyond Attack Dogs Come Out

I received a call from an anonymous phone number this morning from a person who identified himself as "Tom". He provided no company name or last name, however, "Tom" did say the call was regarding the outstanding CBeyond balance.

He said, "what's the story with this bill, are you going to settle it?"

I said, "There is a story that you can find quite easily by typing in 'Cbeyond' into Google. You should see a cbeyondservice.blogspot link on the right hand side to reach a complete detailed story of why we are not only refusing to pay Cbeyond, but we are demanding all monies that were ever paid to Cbeyond to be returned to us."

Tom said, "I'm in front of a computer and it's not here - it must not be getting any clicks."

I said, "Oh, ok, let me spell the domain name..."

Tom interrupted, "I know how to spell it! Are you refusing to pay this bill!?"

I said, "Absolutely, can you help me..."

Click - Tom hung up on me. I guess he didn't want to help me recover my payments to Cbeyond - he was more interested in remaining anonymous while attempting to collect a debt on behalf of Cbeyond.

I imagine Tom hears that a lot. I don't envy anyone having to make collections calls for Cbeyond, however, I do believe that he may have violated some laws with regard to collecting a debt. This deserves more research. Does anyone know what laws Tom may have violated while representing Cbeyond? Any help here would be appreciated.

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