The worst provider award goes to Nufone.Net for taking 3 weeks to get back to me (today) on a help desk ticket. I had my 800 number with that company since I started in this industry. Well not exactly, the company I was with previously was a Nufone number. All the same, I am not sure what the problem is these days with VOIP providers and resellers.
This guy, “Admin Jeremy” proceeds to tell me about how it was my fault his company was duplicating tones on my 800 number. He proceeds to tell me that I had to upgrade my software and a whole slew of things to make the problem go away. He went so far as to tell me that it was not possible for his company to be at fault…except the part where it took 3 weeks to answer my help desk ticket. Even then the guy never expressed any type of apology for his company’s behavior.
Apparently according to “Admin Jeremy” I had to be a post paid customer and not a prepaid customer in order to receive support. What this dufus doesn’t understand is that he never responded to the help desk ticket. So what difference does it make? There is no Customer Support or Help Desk phone number on their website and they sell phone numbers! Real shady!
Either way, Nufone.Net is the worst company and I don’t care that they don’t refund my money. I am tired of these VOIP Providers and their “company of one” mentality. It just goes to my theory that just because you have a background in IT, IS, Telecom, and a mixture of them all, you still have to be able to deal with your customers. Unfortunately you can’t learn customer service in school. You can’t learn this gaming 18 hours a day in a Warcraft expansion game. It involves you actually talking to people and dealing with their problems. You can’t just open up a company because you have the expertise in the industry. It takes many other factors that go into building a company. Most importantly, you need to be able to take care of your customer’s issues.
JP at Binfone.com has been my saviour. He took care of me when I ported my number from Nufone (which took a week to get ahold of…another reason I knew I was not at fault). I was up and running within 3 days, the minimum amount of time it takes to port a number. I hopefully have distanced myself from everyone that is incompetent and I can move ahead. Best part of all, I didn’t have to upgrade anything. That’s because there was nothing wrong with my setup because it was designed by CT Integration Systems with Rochester Institute of Technology telecom expertise.
Here is a link for another guy who thought Nufone went out of business:
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-biz/2004-November/001082.html
Another:
http://lairds.org/Kyler/stupidity/Jeremy_McNamara
http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t233111-p2-re-is-nufone-going-out-of-business.html
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2004-May/039645.html
http://ircarchive.info/asterisk/2007/3/16/1.html
Wow! I didn’t know I could find all this on the first few pages just Googling “Nufone.” Maybe I should have done that before I dealt with them! Reading through most of the dialogue, Jeremy McNamara hasn’t learned his lesson about handling customers over the years. I feel sorry for people who can’t learn for their mistakes. It just shows that these types of people have no capacity to learn, but will probably own another company someday…
I will just name my award the Jeremy McNamara Award for Worst Provider. The saddest thing is that I have a whole list of names of people that could be named for this award. People just never learn anything about customer service. I have found that the largest concentration of customer service violators come from this industry. That is why I wished that the Federal Government licensed these people. That way it will weed out the incompetent people. Man this really burns me…
** As a disclaimer (for a certain someone), I am going through old emails and I don’t see your direct link except that I do know that you were an owner/representative of Plainvoip that has my money and I have no knowledge of any other owner. I think your type is dispicable and I will edit my blog for you, but please note that I don’t buy your “innocent” act when you left a message on my voice mail. Your old employer had quite a few things to say about your behavior at Molten, Inc. This is not a coincidence.
You might fill the Internet with your “I am a cool telecom guy, choose me as a resource.” However I am well aware of your history, whether or not you were directly involved with leadership of these companies, you represented them. To me and the legions of unhappy customers you left in the wake of at least two (that I know of) companies, there is no difference between ownership or representation. If you are truly innocent, then maybe your ability and judgment to work with legitimate businesses really sucks! At the very least, with your knowledge of the operations of many of these “scam” companies, you owe an apology to the screwed customers for knowingly allowing people you helped and doing nothing.
Your name actually causes many other people to NOT do business with that company. I wonder how you live with yourself and get up everyday. I seriously consider your ethical behavior and I hope that you personally don’t open a business in New York because you are a phone call away from the Consumer Protection Bureau. I have mentioned to several ranking politicians here about companies that “set up and fold” only to set up again without criminal charges. I hope to seriously cause some politicians to regulate the reseller industry. I will make it harder for people like you to continuously set up your companies and scamming others; giving companies like mine a bad name. Oh and the whole “I was just following orders” excuse won’t fly with a judge. Ask the guys at Nuremberg.**
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[…] Apparently the worst provider ever award goes to NuFone… Well, at least according to this blog post. […]
Here’s my response to that coward Jeremy McNamara of Nufone.net because I am sure that he wants to save face by not printing my response from his site:
Actually it is Nufone who is slanting the issue. I never received a response in 62 minutes. I never received a response in 3 weeks. I would be happy to show anyone a screenshot of my email account’s Nufone folder that shows exactly when they responded because my account was set up to ping my home account when a ticket was updated through Nufone. Since I posted three consecutive comments to the initial ticket without response is actually the problem.
Feverish attempts, I just laughed out Loud! I didn’t hear from you in three weeks. Plain and simple. The links on my blog shows other people that were treated the same way. Since Jeremy didn’t even have the guts to respond to any of my emails, I know he manufactured this story. That’s what guys like him do when they are faced with scrutiny.
As far as the guy calling me a putz for not finding the number, I clicked on Contact Us. If I had to click anywhere else for the number, I’m trying too hard. I thought a phone company had phone numbers, I mean that is what you sell right? Any person who doesn’t have a contact number for support (he failed to mention that Mark) really is trying to take your money. I found the sales number no problem, but there isn’t a customer support number. That I do know for certain and I have a screenshot of that as well.
You never actually educated me on anything. If I even got a response asking me what I was running or the fact that it was necessary to tell you the software I was running, I would have. By the time you graciously got back to me, I had already left your company. For the record, I never had to change, fix, upgrade, or do anything to my current Asterisk configuration. That’s because it was like I said, Your company was at fault for the dual tones when I pressed any number on my IVR setup. It didn’t happen at Gafachi where it was tested, not at Binfone, but at Nufone.
You my friend need a crash course in Customer Service 101. The customer is always right (in my case I was) and no matter what customer you have whether it’s post paid or prepaid, I am still your customer. If you forget to answer a helpdesk ticket, it’s cool. People do that, things happen, equipment goes down. What I gather from your email exchanges from various other former customers is that you can’t even admit you did anything wrong. It’s totally your fault. Just own up to it. Had you done that, I would have taken the $20,000 call center contract I was just awarded and used your company. Instead Binfone got the money.
Now you can rest easy knowing that you outsmarted your customer! Good Job! You really told me! Stop with the “we” stuff. Everyone knows you are just one person running the whole thing. A monkey could do your job and still answer a help desk ticket in 3 weeks.
Now have the courage to post that, but if you don’t, not to worry I will just print the same reply on my blog! Don’t lie to these people Jeremy, you are totally caught red handed. Own up to your mistakes.
WordPress wrote:
I would have taken the $20,000 call center contract I was just awarded and used your company. Instead Binfone got the money.
If you would have even bothered to read NuFone’s T&C, we don’t provide provide services to automated calling services, so your alleged 20 grand would not have been accepted (or returned) the moment we* determined you were violating our terms and conditions of service.
Hopefully you read Binfone’s T&C before signing up. It would be a shame for your savior to throw you to the curb for violating their service agreement.
Have a great day,
Jeremy McNamara
* It is very much ‘we’…. Why don’t you come to Eugene to see our network operations center? …Then go to our facilities in Orlando, FL…Then go to our facilities in Washington DC…. Then go to our facilities in Los Angeles, CA …to find out for yourself exactly what you are talking about before making obviously blatant assumptions based on your simple google search about NuFone.
My response to his email because he won’t face me here:
Did I say anything about running an automated calling services from your number? I said a call center, with hundreds of DIDs, phone extensions, dialing in and out of the building, people sitting at desks, VOIP phones. I am to understand that is what you do right?
If you even bothered to spend the time to actually read my email, and believe me, I know that you have trouble reading things, you would pay more attention to what I really said. You are the idiot who keeps thinking I am the idiot!
Jeremy, it’s not hard to have colocation buildings all over the country and call them locations. I am incorporated in Nevada and New York, and I have my facilities in two other states. Who exactly are you trying to impress. It’s called redundancy and that doesn’t constitute a “we!”
This is priceless, keep talking because you are such a fool! I have to post this on my blog. Keep digging that hole!
The last round (I Hope) of email exchanges from Jeremy with a portent of things to come…Mind you he won’t engage me directly like the chicken the crooked VOIP Companies are:
Jeremy says:
You can blog about whatever you want. At the end of the day I have a VoIP company to operate as I see fit no matter how you feel about it…
NuFone has been around since 2001, surely we have happy customers who could care less what some PR0 blogger with an attitude says about us.
I can assure you, if NuFone did not have happy paying customers, we would have thrown in the towel a very long time ago – especially after loosing over half a million dollars to fraud, yet we are still around…
Jeremy McNamara
I stated:
Well if you are losing that much money to fraud, you obviously don’t have a sound system in place. I would have never gotten into 4 figures before I did something. Maybe it was a blessing that I am not with your company. Seems to me like you are losing money faster than you can make it. I would hate to be another VOIP company victim.
Jeremy retorted:
Notice I said lost and not loosing – obviously you are going to believe whatever you want. In five years you will see who is still around, won’t cha?
He sent me a link to a Forbes online article where he was mentioned because he was scammed for $450K by a foreigner. Google VOIP and Vanish and Forbes. I won’t give him the satisfaction of a link back.
My response:
Right, because your the fool who took 20K and thought it was a deal and got shafted for 450K? Wow! what do you think I do? I have been in this business a few years. I was your customer when I was co owner of a company called Winning Calls. I learned from my mistakes and spoof customers. I never lost that kind of money.
Before that I used to be a supervisor for ATT Cingular the first time the name change. I was in charge of 12-14 people on a sales team. I know what fraud looks like. Thats why I have certain things in place here that won’t allow my company to get scammed. I have IP address verification. If a customer tries to give me bogus information I will know. I had a guy today try to spoof his IP address. He didn’t get an account set up.
It’s like I said before, just because you studied telecom in college, doesn’t mean you have business sense. I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with people before coming to this industry. It’s less about what you are selling than it is about who you are selling it to. If those people don’t check out, then you only have yourself to blame. If I had actually landed just 1% of the sweetheart deals I’ve seen because they were too good to be true. They usually were.
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