Complaint Review: Hello Big Idea

We are a self-funded, new company who chose Hello Big Idea because we liked their work. Although we noticed a lack of flexibility and availability from the beginning, we were happy with the overall quality of work. 

Issues: 1) Clients can not access the HBI team for a live conversation unless it is a prescheduled conference call. Perhaps that works for some people, but when we launched our new site (and as we were counting down to launch), we needed support & didn't get it.

2) After our final project was delivered (and we had paid $30,000 in full), we were told that the functionality issues we had discovered with our site could be fixed...for an additional $5,000 (!) because they were "outside the scope" of our contract and we "were out of hours". Yet the contract we signed did not have any language about hours. We were essentially left with a pretty, but incomplete and not fully functioning site.

Hello Big Idea also completely stopped responding to us after we politely expressed our dissatisfaction with the situation and asked for help. It would have been worth their time to simply complete our project, fix the functionality glitches (caused by their development team), and walk away with a happy client. Unfortunately, HBI is lacking in the customer service department, and does not take feedback well.  The owner/Creative Director even publicly responded to a different client's negative google review by stating that she took it "as a compliment".

My advice: choose a company who doesn't charge the final payment until the complete product is delivered, and think twice before choosing Hello Big Idea for your project.