Yes we can see how important telephone support is and that we need to look at that urgently.
The reason we prefer email contact is that it is the best way of ensuring the most appropriate and knowledgeable person responds to school queries in the first instance, rather than someone on a telephone taking a message and you being passed around to get a response (call centre mentality). However, listening to your experiences it is clear that this needs to be revisted.
Definetly, we use NRS and they seem to have someone who can answer most of the time. Its more so I can go tot he head and say someone is actually looking at it. If I were parent pay at the very least I would have an automatic email send back stating 'John Smith has assigned this - Job level: Urgent' though I wouldnt want a standard email saying 'we are looking at this'
I'm trying to square your comment with the one posted by pcstru earlier:Originally Posted by ParentPay
"I'd echo the comments on here regarding ParentPay. I'd add that email might be an acceptable means of support if it was responded to quickly AND if someone bothered to read what was written. Our experience has been that through the recent technical problems, it was blindingly obvious by the third email, that they hadn't read or understood the problem we clearly set out in the first."
"email contact is the best way of ensuring the most appropriate and knowledgeable person responds to school queries in the first instance" you say...just more sales rhetoric I think!
Your comments reminded me that someone told me ParentPay doesn't actually have an office - everybody works from home. Is this the real reason for not offering telephone support?
To be fair, if properly managed with a steady focus on providing excellent quality, I see no reason why that shouldn't be true.
Modern VOIP offerings make location largely irrelevant. I think the main reason companies now offer only email support is that it can improve the perception of workflow. If you are stuck in a phone queue for an hour, it's very obvious to the customer that staff levels are insufficient to deal with the peak loads. If your email doesn't get replied to for a couple of hours, that's just the normal expectation.Your comments reminded me that someone told me ParentPay doesn't actually have an office - everybody works from home. Is this the real reason for not offering telephone support?
That can be true, but in reality staff gain so much more knowledge from colleagues by actually working day to day in the same room. I can work from home sometimes, but I miss out on learning skills and experience from my technicians here. Doing support work from home is fine if it is reading from scripts but it doesn't work so well on complex projects (not saying parentpay is a particularly complex project...) and emailing a response is much easier if you can ask someone on hte desk next to you - next time you don't need to ask.
I am so fed up with parentpay, they support where a nightmare when it came to setting up NRS and it wasnt until one of the directors stepped in that non issue was resolved.
Integration and documentation is geared up for SIM's only so it would seem and the manual MIS sync they have provided us has proved buggy and no one from support seems to be forthcoming with a solution so we are manually uploading still.
Last week it seems ParentPay support achieved all our current year 13's during a preadmissions upload so none of these users can currently pay for anything and I’ve had no real response from support as to how this as happened, why we weren’t told or how it can be resolved. (apparently archived users can’t be made live again!)
The parentpay website seems to suffer from outages and general slowdowns far too often.
For the poor lady in finance much of this is too much for her and I’ve had to step in to perform functions which should be quite simple and has others have said there is no number to call to log complaints, speak to support etc.
Last edited by Tallwood_6; 13th July 2011 at 05:42 PM.
ParentMail now has a payment option, but I can't say what it's like.
I'm going to look at some of the other options dicussed in this thread and possibly have a dicussion with our finance dept and NRS about switching unless i get some acceptable responses from someone at parentpay.
I've got the Parentmail rep coming to see me on monday so I'll find out more then. According to their website they integrate with NRS and other cashless systems.
It's called +pay I think? We had a demo a few weeks ago.
Can you ask them what the process is if a student leaves half way through the year please.
Ben
We're currently looking at using sQuid for our online payments. Previously we were almost certainly going with ParentPay, but have decided after all the horror stories to stay away! sQuid is actually working out much cheaper for us though, with a much simpler transaction fee as they're currently doing a special offer for Cunninghams installs
Sure, I'll ask the question and report back!
I'm still awaiting some suitable answers from Parentpay this morning. The replys i have from support have me fumming and they are refusing to tell me why we had a whole year group archived last week and why we were not notified.
ParentPay is being used successfully to collect payments in many schools and in the most part these schools are happy with the product and our service.
Recently we have been undergoing some major upgrades in both the software architecture and server environment. Unfortunately, these didn’t go as smoothly as we wanted. I’m very sorry that has meant we let down some of our users.
These improvements will allow us to scale the platform to many thousands more schools, whilst further improving stability and availability. The work is nearly complete, apart from the final layer of hardware upgrades taking place in the summer.
With the issues we faced, it meant some users experienced degraded support services from our team over the last month or so while we battled with these issues and the increased support load. This is neither our usual service, nor what we strive to deliver to our customers and I’m very sorry that happened. My sincere apologies if you were affected by the recent events.
We have added more support team members and have several more joining this month ready for the new term. With the additional infrastructure improvements, we believe the future will be much better for all our users.
ParentPay will not respond to individual cases in forums, but if you have any unresolved issues, please resend details to the usual support email and mark them “FAO CEO” and I’ll ensure they are dealt with appropriately.
Clint
So telephone support yes or no?
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