Since about February, I have had problems with IPower. They are a hosting company originally out of Phoenix, but possibly recently merged with an East Coast hosting company.
They have been working to consolidate and upgrade their systems and website. (Kudos for trying to improve, they had a very rough reputation for their systems in the past).

That said, in February they were still getting a lot of things wrong. I was interviewed by a Phoenix reporter towards the end of February and at the time discussed a problem with their ordering system.

(Nut of the issue is that every time you try and order some new service from them, they want to create a new account for you. I’ve been doing business with them for about 2 years and have accumulated over 100 accounts. That’s a bit of a pain to deal with!)

So their new website upgrade includes the ability to add new services to existing accounts.

This process has been buggy at best since February and so I discussed it with the reporter. He wrote an article about IPower customer Complaints published in early March, but decided not to talk about this problem and instead focused on some of the more serious problems.

In the meantime, I have been able to add a few new services to existing accounts, but it usually takes a half dozen repeated attempts before the web site will react the way it’s supposed to.

—–

Until a few days ago that was the norm. A few days ago, the system stopped working all together and would only generate new accounts again.

I tried to explain this to a help desk rep via live chat and he basically refused to listen (I’m being nice; the guy was a jerk imho).

I offered to create and email a video to him to prove there was a problem with the system. He accepted and I sent it (they asked for it to be sent to their customer management system email address, so my hopes of a result were very low).

Later that night, after waiting on hold for over 2 hours on a separate issue (for a client) I mentioned the problem to another rep (in billing). I told him that I had video of the problem and this rep was interested to see it.

You see the 2 hour hold time and many of the problems IPower had responded to recently were possibly related to this website bug causing people to create new accounts, bogging down the system and worse.

I told him that I had already sent in the video, gave him my from email address and the time it was sent so that he could dig it out of their system.

Unfortunately, I later received a support ticket email from their system stating that the video was not viewable and had been corrupted. I’m not sure how this was possible, but I resent it today and hoped for the best.

I also went through and edited the video to hide personal account information and I’m posting it here in order to now share a link with Ipower for this video streamed from Utterz, where I know the video will not be corrupted by their email system.

So if you are viewing this video/message from Utterz or from my blog, please understand that this is designed more for IPower to view, but might be helpful if you are already a customer of theirs and running into similar problems.

If you are a customer this problem could be one of the reasons (not likely the only one) creating extremely long hold times with Ipower.

It definitely is not the reason why some of the help desk representatives are not helpful at all, but could be a useful tool for those few holdouts at IPower that are helpful, that are trying to remove the blinds from people suffering from group think and are actually trying to fix a company that has many problems.
Mobile post sent by 001brettbum using Utterz.  Replies.