Roxilla

iBust does it again

After being offline at home since Tuesday last week, and spending far too much time, airtime, energy and stress having to chase up this issue to get it sorted, finally this evening I am back online.

The problem started when I got home from work last Tuesday to try and get online, only to get an error 691 (unauthorised access) message stating that my logins were not permitted on the iBurst domain. After calling support, I was told that it was a network issue and having heard that there were widespread issues, I took their advice to try again the following day. Wednesday, I got home to find that I was still offline. This time, after waiting over 20 minutes to get through to support, I first had to go through the pain of re-connecting my network connection (which was done slowly because the poor girl I dealt with had no idea what she was doing and couldn’t keep up with me) only to then be told yet again that it was a network issue, and to try again later to see if it came back up.

Thursday came around, and by this point my patience was going. I tried to log a complaint on their website, which got me a nice error message stating that the website is bust (what a surprise). I emailed iBurst at their accounts, support AND info addresses and to this day have had no reply. I tried getting hold of @iBurst on Twitter, a number of times at that – still nothing. Eventually when I got home to find that I was STILL offline, I had to go through the long and frustrating process of calling support. I spoke to one of the few decent support people there (thank you Adrien for at least showing some sort of concern!) who then told me that actually it was not a network issue, someone my account had been messed up and all my bandwidth balances were set at zero. Considering it was only the fourth of the month and my internet had gone down on the second, not to mention the fact that my cap is currently at 5GB, this was rather interesting. A ticket was logged with their special support team, I was told that it would be resolved within 2-72 hours, and I was told that someone would get back to be the next day.

On Friday morning I was called by special support who told me to call back later that day. Friday afternoon when I called, they told me that my balances were set right again, and they refreshed the account on their side… but still nothing. They told me that uber support were still busy, and that I would be called soon. Nothing over the weekend of course, and it was only this evening that things have finally come right. But no one has bothered calling me to find out if this has been resolved, not support or ultra support or customer services.

This doesn’t really surprise me of course, you only need do go onto Hello Peter to find out what kind of ’service’ iBurst is most famous for, and being a company who doesn’t respond says it all. I am beyond irate with the fact that this could happen at all, let alone the fact that their customer relations department just doesn’t seem to care much about their customers at all.

Just to wrap up my wonderful experience, here are the biggest iBurst fails:

1. No internet for six days
2. Zero customer service whatsoever
3. No reply to my email or tweets
4. A grand total of one phone call from support
5. No clear explanation of why I was cut off for this long
6. Aside from one or two apologies from support staff, no feedback at all
7. Over R300 in cellphone airtime after having to call back almost every day
8. Delays in my freelance work from being offline almost a solid week
9. Internet cafe expenses for the week I was offline
10. Stress, frustration and anger at dealing with this issue all week

I am NOT going to spend more airtime trying to get hold of someone who can tell me how this happened, and I also think that they should give me this entire month at no charge – not least because of the money I have spent dealing with this fuck up, let alone the fact that I have lost work hours because iBurst has had yet another fail.

Of course this is iBurst we are talking about, and it will be pretty surprising if I get any sort of reply at all, let alone compensation for the week I was offline. At this point, I am just so relieved to be back online that a lot of fight has gone out of me… I will however be looking at changing my internet service provider fairly soon, because I just cannot risk another monumental stuff up like this again!

iBurst, if you really do want to keep your customers happy as you are trying so hard to make us believe, you may want to start with actual customer service rather than pats on the back at your increased social network presence.

I can’t speak for your other customers, but I for one have had it up to here!

* Please note that the views in this post are my own personal opinions. I accept no responsibility whatsoever for any reactions or views expressed in this post.

UPDATE: After about an hour or two online, I was cut off again. Half an hour on the phone, plenty of promises and apparently they will be calling back tonight. Meh!