I have been a small business owner for 10+ years. I have never had a
charge back from a customer, nor do I have ANY outstanding debts,
judgments, with any previous vendors and I have stellar credit. Now that
you know the type of person I am, let me tell you about my experience
with FirstACH and why you should strongly consider looking for someone
else to process your payments.
1. I have never had a charge back or disputed item with them, yet at
times, without notice, they would decide to withhold my funds and would
not even communicate this to me. I would notice that funds didn't show
up in our account, and after sometimes repeated calls to 'the manager
Rolonda', who is merely a puppet with no authority, she would tell me
that they are holding onto funds in their risk department and that NO
you can't talk to anyone higher up about this to appeal and NO I can't
tell you when we will release them. Wow...incredible.
2. Their customer service is absent, unprofessional, and at times, rude.
They refused on several occasions to call me with updates (proactively)
to keep me apprised of status on when they would give me my money, and
they told me that calling a customer to let them know what is going on
is 'not our policy.' They did tell me I could keep calling them if I
wanted to. Gee, thanks.
3. On 1 occasion I went to the company dial by name directory and
entered someone at random to try to speak to someone with authority to
make decisions. I got Randy who is in the risk department. He seemed to
like to use his authority and his demeanor was very rude, almost cocky,
and didn't seem to care that I was a customer and that his arbitrary
decisions to hold our funds, randomly, was worth any reconsideration.
This man seems to be angry and like to use his power to make himself
feel better or something by making people's lives more difficult.
In the end, we had every transaction released but this routinely put
stress on cash flow, sales cycle, and sapped precious time and energy
and caused HUGE frustration. I still don't think they care. Sometimes it
took over 1.5 week to get paid and even though we had contracts with
our customers, they actually made us rewrite our contract 3 times on 1
occasion. Talk about looking stupid in front of your customer and
inconveniencing them to death. Take my advice, keep looking for a
different company. They also have a D on the BBB report for good reason.
Although, maybe it should be downgraded to F.
Bill