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	VCOM Central

Customer Support

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VCOM Central customer service and support services are very poor. I have not been able to receive any official written reply to many issues I have posed to the company and of which I have reported in this review.

The manual for the VCOM tool is a one and half page set of notes, which has not been updated in a long time and which does not cover nearly all of the functions and dialog boxes available through this program.

The forms for signing up or providing authorization for billing are very badly designed and include some gross usability mistakes which do not help or comfort the user attempting to register or sign up.

Look for example at the monthly credit authorization form and see the suggestion (in red) for how the date should be written and then look at the field in which you are supposed to type that date:

Though vocal help has been recently added to the back office area of the service (this is a service area you can access only after having subscribed to the service) there is still a long way to go to provide quality service on this site.

Credibility, transparency and openness do not seem to be key traits of this company which in the words of his chief marketing person "we are the best, and no other competitors can do as good as we can. Our product technology is the best available...."

I have had an instance when my private room could not be accessed but I could not get any customer service if not for contacting my "agent", which in turn contacted by phone other colleagues and friends he had in the organization.

The problem was increased also by the fact that I am about 8 hours ahead of Arizona's VCOM headquarters and therefore if their server goes down at their site at midnight, I am cut off altogether from my presentations scheduled at 9am and have nobody to contact.

Happily the drum beat of my agent and his colleagues was effective enough to make my solve solved within the day, but by the time I had regained access to my private online virtual room I had cancelled the three online presentations I had scheduled for that day already.

The overall feeling when talking, exchanging, asking for help through the official channels is that these people are not or do not want to be neither friendly, nor customer centered. For example, this is the kind of corporate customer support messages VCOM puts out on its web pages. See how it makes you feel.

The email communications sent out to VCOM customers or "agents", as the VCOM corporate owners like to see them, are all marketing letters to motivate and inspire VCOM owners to be successful and profitable in their efforts. This is always done without ever explicitly saying that they want you to sell VCOM accounts to others.

Email communications are also poorly written and when the content has not been copied and pasted from other sources it is frequently full of spelling mistakes. For example in the last email communication from VCOM Central / The Champion Network President Edward C. Hebner, dated December 10th there were at least five major spelling mistakes. Here they are:

1) membersonly 2) Configuation 3) buttton 4) throught 5) Basicaly

Dear Vcom user;

You wanted it ..... We worked hard to get it for you....

PASSWORD PROTECTION FOR YOUR PRIVATE VIRTUAL OFFICES...

You can now password protect your virtual offices from
your membersonly area Moderator Configuation link..

Then click the buttton "Password Protect Room Entry Here"

Please note the following:

1. Your moderator password is still changed from the room
configuration screen
2. When you change a password it is your responsibility
to write it down or memorize it
3. Forgotten password request to support or throught the
support system will be processed on a lower priority rate
than other support requests
4. No support will be available for password protection
of your virtual offices... You can delete and configure
passwords at will and therefore as long as you have your
Moderator password you have full control over your room's
password protection system...

Basicaly if you find an alias or password that doesn't
work the way you'd like... Then go into your
Authentication Interface and delete it and or add
another...

There is no limit known at this time to the amount of
Aliase and password pairs you can place on your virtual
office....

Thanks and
Go... Go... Go...

Edward C. Hebner
President/CEO
The Champion Network, Inc.
VCom Central

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Posted on June 18, 2003 at 05:39 PM

Updated on June 30, 2005 at 03:04 PM

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