I am on my fourth ecommerce website with Volusion and all was going well until I discovered that if there is a bug in the Volusion infrastructure, your support needs and a timely solution gets flushed down the toilet.
The first three websites we referred and coordinated with Volusion were less complex. The Volusion creative and technical support team did well on these tasks. This experience was completely the opposite and a strong warning to anyone with time sensitive or mission critical ecommerce websites. If you don’t need to be functional and can stand a few weeks of downtime, then Volusion will suffice.
But if you have a complex project, find a bug in the Volusion system, or need to conduct sales every day you may be screwed. Case in point, we were ready to go live with a Honda car parts website three weeks ago when we found that their platform ”search” control did not work on a list of items in a category listing page.
We submitted a ticket, and had placed follow-up calls and every time we got the same unacceptable answer. The summary was “We have submitted a ticket to programming and we have not heard back from them.” This is a great answer when your client is screaming in your ear and wants to go live!
Volusion Website Support
So I decided to create an escalation support ticket to describe that my client, who wanted to capture some of the December sales traffic, was getting impatient. I needed an ETA on when their bug would be fixed; I was clear on the urgency. I explained that we had done our part and now were being held back by a bug in the Volusion base product.
So the technical support representative told me to send an email to Raymond Black, which I did. I attempted to convey the urgency of my case and that two weeks had gone by without a resolution. Here is the response to my escalation email that asked for a date that the bug would be fixed so I could advise my client when we could go live:
Hello Brian,
I have not yet been provided with any updates from our development team on this issue. All bug reports submitted to the development team are subject to review and prioritized by the Project Manager. The Project Manager then assigns the bug to a developer and an estimated time frame is supplied to the Project Manager by the developer. As soon as any updates are posted to the bug report, I will be notified and can provide those updates to you. Until such time, all I can counsel is patience until the issue is updated.
If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us. Thank you for choosing Volusion!
Tells us how we’re doing: http://customercare.volusion.com/review
Raymond Black
Volusion Support
800-646-3517
Pissed Clients
Try explaining to your customer that has spent thousands of dollars in data formatting and setup that we can’t go live because the ecommerce platform you recommended has bugs. Then try to explain that for the past two weeks we have not been able to get a clear time-line for the problem to get fixed.
This is so bad I had to hold back my full emotions on this post. It seems that Volusion is treating their own bug with shameless low prioritization. I just don’t get it.
Brian,
I’ve been following you on Twitter for awhile now and was very excited when you started your blog and subscribed right away. Today, that has ended.
For some background, I started my consulting firm 4 years ago after spending 5 years working in technical support for a major cable provider and putting myself through school on a meager budget. Trust me, after that much time working in a call center, you begin to see the worst in people.
Thus, I am very disappointed in you for publicly displaying the name of someone who is simply passing along a message to you. If I were to ever see someone do that to me when I worked in tech support, I would be humiliated. Do you really think it’s his fault?
Have some respect.
Humiliated? I just documented an urgent matter that after two weeks has been handled with no resolution in sight. No one is holding Raymond accountable for a support system that can’t fix a production bug.
Raymond’s email is clear that his hands are tied. The issue is clearly in the development team’s hands and if they are so backed up that weeks will go by without a resolution, potential clients should know about that style of support.
Another week has gone by. It’s January 5th and Volusion has not responded with any new updates. Client is growing impatient with no date to fix the problem.
Has Volusion’s award winning service been affected by the economy and cutbacks?
Everytime I contact Volusion support to get an answer, I am dissapointed. The answers they give work for stores with small number (may be about 20) of products, but for larger stores, i recomend going elsewhere, other wise you will be wasting your time with Volusion. Seriously.