A couple of months ago I began evaluating web meeting services. I had used one before, I can’t remember which one it was, but it worked well. The only issue was you couldn’t host meetings on a Mac. A few of the competing services allowed you to do this so I set out to find one. I signed up for some trials and they all seemed to work ok. It kind of came down to Citrix GoToMeeting and the WebEx meeting center. They both seemed to do what I needed. Low and behold I receive this e-mail from Jeffrey Mulholland:
Tomorrow is the quarter end for WebEx. If you are interested in our core service of Meeting Center, I can offer you your first month of service for free if you sign up by tomorrow.
Great! They’re being pro-active, they want my business both good signs for a ongoing service relationship. I had him sign me up. During that first month I was in the process of moving and didn’t get chance to use it too much. During the second month I setup a handful of webex conferences. Each time, something else went wrong.
Bad Service
One time, my screen wouldn’t refresh for anyone viewing it unless I accessed a drop down menu. So every time I navigated to a new page I had to go up to the drop down and ask everyone on the call if they could now see the updated screen. Made for a very painful demo.
The next time the teleconferencing was horrible. There were massive delays, one person would finish and different people would hear that person at different times. Everybody was unsure of when to speak and people kept getting cut off.
Variations of these problems continued. Ok, not so great a service. It’s not good, but not the end of the world. I’ll keep using it as I shop around for an alternative.
Bad Usability
Throughout the service it had been difficult to navigate. The meeting organization system seemed very clunky. When the usability (or lack there of) really shined though was when we got a paper invoice. That’s right, for a web service that we signed up for online they sent us a paper invoice. How annoying. And for $69. Ok, let’s go setup paperless billing and pay this w/ a credit card. After what can only be described as a process I get to the point where you have to register to be able to see / pay your invoice online. Yes, that’s right, I already have a login, am the only user aka the admin and have a complete control panel (confusing as it may be), but now I have to register. Ok, fine.
Yup. The error message says it all. After going through several web interfaces to try to get to support, I finally dig up a sign up e-mail giving me my user name that has a direct support e-mail address in it and send them an e-mail letting them know of my problem. As of starting this post, I had received no response. In the middle of writing it I got a response telling me that they had now associated my e-mail address w/ their billing system. This was 5 days later.
Bad Support
In the mean time, given the bad service and terrible usability of the service, I decided it was best if I just flat out cancel it. Well, this is when I really got irritated. One of the worst things a web service can do, in my opinion, is make it difficult or impossible to cancel. There is no information online that I could find on how to go about this. There was a lot that talked about MeetMeNow (their other product), but nothing for meeting center. Finally, I decided to just fill out the support form. In the middle of it, when I selected it was an “emergency,” it popped up w/ a phone number. I decided to just expedite this process and pick up the phone.
I was directed to a call center in India. The representative told me I had called support and I needed to talk to another department. Thankfully he transferred me. When the other representative was on the phone the accent was so thick I could barely understand what he was saying. Not that it matters a lot, but in my current mood it really made the process even more unpleasant.
After telling him I wanted to cancel and after being asked telling him all the problems I’ve had with the service, he agreed to go ahead and cancel it. He then came back and said, ok, you need to give 30 days and then it extends to the end of the next billing cycle, so the soonest I can cancel the service is on July 27. Are you kidding? I responded.
No, sadly he was not kidding. So, they’re milking me for another $140 for a service that never even worked for me in the first place.
I write all this for one simple reason. If you are weighing your options and considering one of these services, heed my experience and do not use webex meeting center. I have subsequently had serveral good experiences w/ citrix go to meeting and would recommend them any day over the webex product.
