Complaint Review: Nationwide Cyber Systems

My husband and I bought our NCS terminal on July 2nd, 2003 for $14,995. The first bad experience was the relation with the locators (the person assigned to find a location to your terminal). We had very hard time with the locators, the first one was very rude, after I start to call him every week.

Of course, on the first call he was very nice "Here is my contact information... You can call me at any time.", "I am going to start to work right away to find a location for you. This is my job, my job is to search for the best possible location to place your terminal. This is what I do for leaving, what pays my home mortgage." I remember him telling me this. He found a prospect Mall which was 175 miles from my house when I said that it was too far, he said that he would not mind driving this far to get money. When I would call him to follow up on the status of the search, he would always give an excuse like "I do not have your file with me right now", "One of my assistant is working VERY HARD on your file. I will get some info and call you back." I do not need to say that nor he or any other locator ever called me.

What was most frustrating on all of this was that at one point (very early on the process), we realized that they were not going to look for/ find any location, we had to go look for a place ourselves or we would get stuck with a $15K-metal-box on our garage for the rest of our lives. Then, I created a simple brochure and went after some potential places. I made a list of coffee shops, convention centers, hotels and start to visit them, but soon after, I realized that I was not good convincing anyone to have the terminal on their premises. Besides, as it was already mentioned, nowadays most hotels and coffee shops have already internet available for their customers.

Luckily (I should say), almost 5 months later, the terminal was placed on a Hotel, close to an International Airport. The Hotel Manager contacted NCS after watching the TV ad, he wanted an Internet Terminal on the Business Center on his Hotel, which means, that NCS did not find the location, the location found NCS. Well to make a long painful experience short, it took another 2 months to make the terminal operational and another month to make the wireless operational. Now the terminal is fully operational (although the wireless range is only 10 feet although they say it is 300 feet), but the income is nothing close to our worse estimate. Very little income, we are still paying to have the terminal operational.

My whole experience with NCS has been a real disaster, from the locators to the locators managers, to the person responsible to ship the machine to the location. They have never made a follow up call to know if I was satisfied and how the business was doing. When I tried to contact the sale person to claim my rights, the secretary would always transfer to somebody else, so I was never able to reach the sale person again after I closed the deal. They really do not know what Client relation is, if I treat my clients the way they treated me they would cancel all contracts with my company to say the least. The only good experience, I have to admit, was the response I've got from Kiosk Information Systems, they are nice people and they always try to help me.

Anyway, I think we should organize ourselves and try to do something about it. I do not know what we can do, but it seems to me that there are enough people unhappy to make something about it.

Karla
Kirkland, Washington
U.S.A.