Who's handling wire transfers now? Options

[Mallorca_Admin]

For several days I tried to reach Dale Jordan from the accounting department,
as he was our contact for several years now and the one who handled our wire
payments.

Does anyboday know who's replacing him or who is responsible for wire payments
now and in the future?

I tried several times to find that out, but obviously nobody cares or is able to
answer that question.

[Tomy Durden]

I've sent an email over to the accounting manager for this information. I'll relay the info once I receive it.

[Mallorca_Admin]

Well, I was told by 3 or 4 different people that my questions was forwarded.
I just never got an answer.

[JohnB]

99.9999999999999999% of the time, when Tomy, Kevin etc say you'll get an answer.. you get one pretty quick They mean business.

[Mallorca_Admin]

Sounds good!

I also contacted Kevin last weekend to make sure someone takes care,
as I try to get an answer for just 10 days now ;-)

[Mallorca_Admin]

Got still no news and getting a bit worried.

[markcausa]

Can anyone give an official response on this please?

[Mallorca_Admin]

It seems they just don't want to answer my question. None of the persons I've contacted gave me
any answer, except telling me "I've forwarded your message to bla ...". Even Kevin didn't answer at all.

Being a customer since 2003 and paying 13000$ a year for 4 servers is oviously not good enough
anymore for being treated like a valid customer.

Since this is not an acceptable situation, we're going to look for alternatives now.

If you have any suggestions / personal recommendations (US or Europe), please PM me!

[Kevin Hazard]

It seems they just don't want to answer my question. None of the persons I've contacted gave me
any answer, except telling me "I've forwarded your message to bla ...". Even Kevin didn't answer at all.

Being a customer since 2003 and paying 13000$ a year for 4 servers is oviously not good enough
anymore for being treated like a valid customer.

Since this is not an acceptable situation, we're going to look for alternatives now.

If you have any suggestions / personal recommendations (US or Europe), please PM me!

I'm sorry that I have not been in the office since you initially requested this information on Saturday. Tomy saw the thread and responded that he forwarded your question to our accounting group.

Anyone in accounting can assist with the fund collection, but I'm escalating 4941502PLNT to the manager to handled as soon as possible.

[Mallorca_Admin]

Kevin, if this is such an easy question then why was nobody able to answer it since my first contact on June 25?

I tried to contact Dale Jordan 3 times. When I then contacted your Management, I was just told that Dale left
the company. Then I contacted Accounting and was told by some guy he would forward my request to another
person. This person told me the same thing again. Opened a trouble ticket and guess what? They told me to
forward it to Accounting! Next time I was told by Accounting they would forward it to the Management.

My problem is, that our account area is totally messed up and we don't know if our funds will correctly be added
to our account if we send another wire payment. Next payment would be due on July 18, but we can't wire it,
since we now don't know if ANYBODY would even take care of it or if it would just be hitting a new black hole.

Even if we would be able to pay by credit card: The change button in the Orbit Account Management doesn't work!

[Tomy Durden]

Lupe G., the Accounting Manager, will be updating your ticket shortly with more details.

[Mallorca_Admin]

Lupe contacted me through the ticket system.

Due to all this confusion we have to decide if we switch some of our servers to a another provider,
because we don't want to run into a situation like this again.

[Tomy Durden]

Lupe contacted me through the ticket system.

Due to all this confusion we have to decide if we switch some of our servers to a another provider,
because we don't want to run into a situation like this again.

Sorry for the inconvenience and sorry that you're considering leaving. If you need any assistance, feel free to let us know.

[Kevin Hazard]

Kevin, if this is such an easy question then why was nobody able to answer it since my first contact on June 25?

I tried to contact Dale Jordan 3 times. When I then contacted your Management, I was just told that Dale left
the company. Then I contacted Accounting and was told by some guy he would forward my request to another
person. This person told me the same thing again. Opened a trouble ticket and guess what? They told me to
forward it to Accounting! Next time I was told by Accounting they would forward it to the Management.

My problem is, that our account area is totally messed up and we don't know if our funds will correctly be added
to our account if we send another wire payment. Next payment would be due on July 18, but we can't wire it,
since we now don't know if ANYBODY would even take care of it or if it would just be hitting a new black hole.

Even if we would be able to pay by credit card: The change button in the Orbit Account Management doesn't work!

Looks like everything is straightened out now ... Michael T. will be able to help you through the process. I'm not sure who you contacted on June 25, but there is no record of a ticket regarding the issue until 4941502PLNT which was updated on July 4th (when many people were out of the office here for the US holiday). This certainly isn't to say that you didn't pursue the help before this ticket, but it's much more difficult for our support management to monitor and follow-up with issues that do not have tickets in our system. Emails sent to any addresses besides of our normal support channels cannot be tracked, so they won't raise any flags if they have not been responded to in an appropriate time frame.

[Mallorca_Admin]

Well, I can track to whom I've sent emails.

Here's the list of emails:
- June 25: Dale Jordan >>> no response.
- July 1: Dale Jordan >>> no response.
- July 3: Dale Jordan and notify_manegement >>> Response on July 4 from J.R Criner telling me Dale left TP.
- July 4: Accounting and notify_management >>> Response from A. Ybanez telling me email was forwarded.

Here's the ticket details:
- A ticket was opened on July 3 from somebody (not me) without any content.
- Since nothing happened I updated this ticket on July 4 explaining the issue again.
- On July 5 I was told in the ticket, that it was forwarded to management.
- Again, no response. On July 6 I explained the issue again, more detailed.
- And again, no response until I got really started making trouble here.

[Tomy Durden]

Tickets, Chat, and Phone are our primary and official channel of support. Without tickets, we're unable to properly track an issue. Emailing our staff directly may result in a delay of resolution and contribute to confusion.

Dale Jordan left The Planet on 6/20, which explains why your first two emails went unanswered. July 4th-6th the accounting and management teams were not around due to the holiday and the weekend, only EOP(Essential Operating Personnel). I just happen to troll the forums on my off days.

[Mallorca_Admin]

Tomy, Dale Jordan was basically our only contact (besides technical stuff) for at least 2 years.
I was only in contact with him by email and never through any other channel, so I would say
that this was an official channel for us.

How should I know that he left? The email didn't bounce or anything, it just went unanswered.
Why is it to much just to answer an email properly or even take care of the issue, especially as
it was not a big deal.

You must understand that a lot of your customers (like us) sit somewhere on the other end of the world.
We can't keep track about when there is a holiday in the US or whatever issue you might have at TP.

Just to give you an idea: It's near midnight here in Western Europe and I had to spent hours today
just to take care that we have a hosting partner at all after July 18.

[Tomy Durden]

The problem with emailing directly to our guys is that we don't have that 2 years of information. You'll probably want to consider this during future correspondence with our staff as you may reference something we have no records of.

The other problem is that we don't announce when our employees leave or go on vacation to customers, which will definitely create a situation like yours.

I really, really, recommend that you use the ticketing system supplemented by chat or phone to track any issues you may have. It'll allow us to better support your needs. Multiple people will be able to respond to your tickets and there will always be a history of past issues.

Understandably, you're not familiar with our holidays, there's plenty of holidays that our staff isn't aware of. Our mentioning of the holidays is just informational to help bring some light to the situation.

[Mallorca_Admin]

There was a ticket opened at July 3 as I stated before, but it still was unanswered.

What would you expect me to do? Just sit and wait until someone get's the idea in
a few days that our servers are unpaid and pulls the plug? Or just wire the money
without knowing if anybody takes care of it and maybe still someone pulls the plug.

Wire transfers take between 3 and 5 days from Europe, if the receiving bank is lazy,
it takes even longer sometimes. For that reason I always contacted Dale soon enought
to make sure that everything is OK.

[Mallorca_Admin]

I just wanted to follow up on this, so everybody knows what happened. It was and is a complete mess:

• It took me about 5 days to only find out who's the responsible person for wire transfers now.
  
• After explaining the whole issue several times, which took several TTs and about 25 emails, they finally needed about a week to just issue a manual invoice. As our account isn't connected to the TP accounting system anymore and we didn't receive invoices for several months, we needed this so we could transfer funds for the next months.
  
• When we finally got the invoice and wired the funds, it took more than a week for them to just "find" our money in their bank accounts. After several complaints I was still told the funds weren't there. Just when I've sent them the original receipt from our bank (which dated back more than a week) they finally "found" our money.
  
• I then got an email from Craig Johnson at the accounting department, confirming our wire transfer. The next day one of our still open TTs was updated, telling me that they were still waiting for a payment receipt! Although it was already confirmed by their own acounting department and the original receipt from our bank WAS ALREADY attached to that exact ticket!

And guess what: Just yesterday I found out that they charged our credit card for one of our pre-paid servers (already paid several months in advance)! Without any note or reason! There isn't even a entry anywhere in our TP account about this. Now the whole thing starts again. Opening a trouble ticket. Waiting for response. Getting a response from someone who knows s**t, being forwarded to the next guy and so on. I also contacted Michael Tabbert (the responsible person at the accounting department) by email, but - of course - without response. Now I have to issue a charge-back with our credit card company, which will again take MY TIME.

I'm just happy that we already transferred half of our servers to SL (the rest will follow in 2 months) and we don't have to rely on The Planet anymore. It has become impossible for them to solve any problems in a quick and professional manner. Everything here ends up in a big loop of BS and I'm frankly fed up with this company!

We have been a good and reliable EV1/TP customer since 2003.
Now we wouldn't even stay here if they would give us the servers for free. Honestly!