Hello everyone, I'm a former employee and I'd like you all to know that on Tuesday, January 4th volusion laid off its entire simi valley office and consolidated the company to texas, anyone familiar with the technical support at volusion knows that for the longest time all the technical support was located in simi valley, and they got rid of every last one of us, the knowledge and expertise in their technical support department is now gone, expect great support from college students in Austin, it was decided that a department twice as big and a third as competent would make for great customer service!
As a member of the Volusion team, I'd like to address the claim of weakened customer service and our consolidation efforts. As of January 4, 2011, we began consolidating our Austin and California offices to better serve our customers. Our organization experienced outstanding growth in 2010, and by centralizing our US employees in one location, it will enable us to innovate our award-winning products and services even faster for our valued customers. With this new direction, we are excited to know that all of our team members will be together and working closer than ever. We will also be aggressively hiring many new roles in Austin as we continue to grow our team. This will be a phased transition and we have taken steps to ensure that it will not impact the level of service our customers have come to expect. We are excited to know that this direction will enable us to execute at a higher rate and further fuel the success of our customers' business. Please contact legal@volusion.com if you have any question.
Not judging Volusion or it's quality or tech support, but if your company "experienced outstanding growth in 2010", why was it necessary to close an entire operation and put people out of work? Seems more of an economizing move than a growth move.
Matt - I have to agree with Sarge, though I have not had any contact with Volusion support for some time now. While I still operate 2 Volusion based stores, our companies main focus is on our main website. I did'nt even know that Lynn had left the company until I read his Linked-In profile.
Matt@Volusion - Being a merchant who is quite interested in moving to the Volusion platform, I have spoken with several Volusion employees (including supervisors) on similar forums to this and they have stated that they were not given the option to relocate to your Texas branch, which combined with the fact that prior to this relocation you had NO support in Texas leads me to believe that your support there would be (for lack of a better word) inexperienced. Why is this the case? I can certainly understand moving to one location, but why would you cause an overall loss of support to your customers? I'm quite certain everyone has had the experience of having to call tech support (I know I have!) only to speak to a neophyte and have to call back later for an informed technician. I am quite interested in company and appreciate your reply in advance.
PS. Why would we send further questions to your legal email? That makes little to no sense.
We have built up our Austin technical support team, including some valued and experienced members from our Simi Valley team, in anticipation of this move. Coupled with moving our tech support team closer to our other operations team members, we expect this consolidation to have an improved impact on the customer service that our customers can expect.
Further questions can be directed to legal@volusion.com, as all public statements are made through our legal team.
As a former employee, I can tell you Volusion has been cutting costs for a while. It's not that they are looking to improve service like they will tell you, they simply don't care. Everything that Volusion did was about finding the lowest cost solution possible. When IT told the executives that the san was going over capacity, the executives ignored the solution IT gave and went with the cheaper solution which caused the first major outage (they later had to implement IT's original solution). This situation continued to repeat itself, each time the result was the executives responsible for the outage firing people so they didn't have to admit mistakes.
Another example of the company not caring; a lot of customers would just stop using the software and forget to cancel, waiting for their credit card to expire. Volusion decided that this was a problem, so when the cards expired they started changing the expiration date so they could continue charging the customers. I have never had a recurring service do anything like that.
The company has a history of being very closed about anything going on with the company, both to employees and to customers. The company had a data breach in 2009 which resulted in thousands of credit card numbers being stolen, along with names, addresses, phone numbers, and CVV2 codes. Network solutions had the same thing happen to them just a few months later. The difference is that Network Solutions sent out a press release while Volusion kept it quiet.
The focus of the company from a service perspective seems to be on features that they think enterprise customers want. They try to attract small businesses with the wizards by showing how simple the software is, but it's really a facade. Aside from UI changes, they don't seem to be giving any thought whatsoever to their existing client base. From what I could tell when I worked there, the biggest concern was the amount of downtime the company had, and it just seemed like the company felt it wasn't in their budget to solve that problem.
Another example of the company not caring; a lot of customers would just stop using the software and forget to cancel, waiting for their credit card to expire. Volusion decided that this was a problem, so when the cards expired they started changing the expiration date so they could continue charging the customers. I have never had a recurring service do anything like that.
We packed up and left Volusion the first of this year and haven't looked back. Our new site is fast, we aren't plagued with downtime, orders are picking up, and I don't have to deal with ass-hats at Volusion. It's a total win.
As a current Volusion customer, I have to say their service in the last year has gone downhill very fast: Very long periods of downtime, very slow response from customer service, very poor compensation for lost customers and revenue. Their press release about the consolidation to Austin sounds like pure spin to me. Maybe time will tell, but for now, stay far away from Volusion.
Wow, I had to register and post after seeing/linked to this thread!
Ive been a customer of Volusion for 5 years as well, they "recruited" me after I emailed them (our Monstercommerce site was just acting up). Kevin (Owner of Volusion) contacted me directly! He promised me V would be a better service and we signed up. The first 2-3 years were great, then everything starting going downhill. Downtime every week, and now downtime almost daily! Not to mention downtime at the worst possible times, like cyber Monday! Ive posted dozens of tickets describing problems, every response (which takes a week) is the same. We had a small problem and fixed it, everything is fine. Or its please tell us exactly what time and what happened, which gets nowhere.
The forum at Volusion is just riddled with hundreds of customers complaining. My posts get deleted and i get PM's that im breaking guidelines when in fact all i would say is V is not doing a good job. Ive been slowly starting a move and will shortly be out of that spiral of horrible service soon...
Very poor service. Down a lot lately. And getting worse quickly. Canned answers with support. Costing us sales daily. I'm leaving just as soon as possible.
Matt's answer is typical of Volusion and my 2 year old "I didn't do it"
Wow, I had to register and post after seeing/linked to this thread!
Ive been a customer of Volusion for 5 years as well, they "recruited" me after I emailed them (our Monstercommerce site was just acting up). Kevin (Owner of Volusion) contacted me directly! He promised me V would be a better service and we signed up. The first 2-3 years were great, then everything starting going downhill. Downtime every week, and now downtime almost daily! Not to mention downtime at the worst possible times, like cyber Monday! Ive posted dozens of tickets describing problems, every response (which takes a week) is the same. We had a small problem and fixed it, everything is fine. Or its please tell us exactly what time and what happened, which gets nowhere.
The forum at Volusion is just riddled with hundreds of customers complaining. My posts get deleted and i get PM's that im breaking guidelines when in fact all i would say is V is not doing a good job. Ive been slowly starting a move and will shortly be out of that spiral of horrible service soon...
You sound just like me. We (were) a customer since 2006, and have personal phone calls from Lynn (no longer there) during migration and a sales rep who actually called to check on us. Things were great in the beginning, then the last year and a half have been *horrible*. I'm glad we saw the writing on the wall months ago and bounced, I feel bad for the companies that don't have the experience or knowledge to leave Volusion. Being stuck with a company as horrible as Volusion really sucks.
Which reminds me. I need to post a complaint to the Better Business Bureau. I posted a response to a thread on Volusion's forums about who customers should complain to, and I specifically linked the Better Business Bureau. The post was immediately deleted and my account has since been banned.
Curtis, the BBB is a relic of an organization that is relevant only to local, service based businesses. You need to either go to the Texas St Attorney General, or if you think you have a case seek out a class action suit
I don't believe the BBB is a relic. They provide a useful service, and maintain a rating of a company based on complaints and responses. Either way, it was unprofessional for Volusion to delete the post and send a "Hey, don't educate our customers where to complain about us" notice.
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Originally Posted by formervemployee
