Complaint Review: Aptela

We signed up for Aptela in July 2008. The sales representative was great, always available and very helpful. As soon as we paid for the initial costs, all that changed. Suddenly he stopped answering calls and emails. Our dedicated Customer Service Rep' (Sonia) also was very hard to get in touch with.

In late August we were experiencing dropped calls, poor call quality, DTMF issues (unable to dial extensions when calling other companies) among many irritating issues. In the 5 months that we struggled with this service, I personally spent over 12 hours on the phone with tech support trying to resolve the plethora of problems we had. I didn't have to identify the company I was with when I called because the tech department talked to me so often.

During the sales process we'd ensured with the rep that our current router and internet connection was more than sufficient to support their service, and we were assured they were. After many weeks of unresolved problems we are told that we must upgrade our router to support better call quality. We resisted because it didn't seem right to us, and we needed our specific router for other things we do.

In the end we got the recommended router, and ran new cat5 cable throughout the entire office suite so the phones could be linked specifically to that router. The labor costs for this alone were hundreds of dollars, not to mention having to buy another IP address for this router at a monthly cost. And it didn't improve the service at all.

Over a period of 6 weeks I sent 3 separate emails to 15+ people begging someone to get in touch and help resolve the problems, or at least respond with some kind of apology. Not a single person answered.

In November, after signing up with a new company, we requested a service cancellation. According to the cancellation request we filled out, our main number was to remain active while being ported to our new service provider. All other Aptela features and extensions were to be stopped but we did not want to lose the number the company has had since inception.

Well the cancellation request certainly woke up the customer service people. I spoke to the Director of Technical Support, Mary Lanier, who seemed genuinely shocked at the service we'd received and said she would try and get us a refund for the previous month's service. I haven't been able to get in touch with her since.

On Monday December 1st our number had been canceled. Our customers and employees in other states were getting the this number is not in service message when calling in. After a long call to Aptela I discovered that they accidentally closed the account, including our main number. As far as we can tell the number had been out of service the entire weekend. They turned it back on that day.

Final porting to the new service provider was completed the first week of January, yet we still received a bill for that month. I called them to again ask for the service to be stopped. They assured me it would be.

Feb 5th I had to call yet again because they were still trying to bill us. I spoke to Megan Marshall, the supervisor in Billing. She stated that they never received my cancellation request. I asked how that was possible and referenced the above information about the number being canceled early. She had no response except to insist that my cancellation request was never received.

They do not return calls. They are completely unreliable. They refused to provide any kind of refund or compensation for the fact that we couldn't use their service most of the time, and for the capital expense of the new router, cabling, and administrative & labor time required to try and resolve all the issues that were never fixed.

Do not use this company for your phone needs.

R
none, Florida
U.S.A.