localzuk Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 Hi - I am going to respond more fully to all the comments very soon, but just wanted to respond to yours specifically Mr_Writer. Really sorry that your friends have had problems - we process hundreds of thousands of payments and very rarely have any problems at all. I obviously can't comment on the individual transactions but if you were able to supply your location I can provide a list of other schools for you to contact who can give you their feedback on the system and you can factor into your research findings (not ParentPay 'pet' schools either!) Refunds are really easy to do with ParentPay too - click of a button. Refunds might be simple, but they also end up costing the school to do due to processing charges...
ParentPay Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 Sorry that wasn't meant to be a sales pitch at all. Just thought that schools who are looking at all the systems might find it useful to see what's on offer and have the full picture regarding things like transaction charges and refunds. The issues are the priority - we have listened and are actioning currently. The server outages are resolved and we have no reports of any problems.
Mr_Writer Posted July 13, 2011 Author Posted July 13, 2011 Have any of the non users seen a demo of the ParentPay system? Happy to arrange without any obligation if you would find useful? The number of schools you have using your service has nothing whatsoever to do with the problems users have reported on this forum. The fact that you keep repeating your own sales rhetoric and then have the bare-faced cheek to try to sell to a forum of unhappy users, displays an utter disregard for your customers and a total lack of acceptance of the problems in your service! If I hadn't made my mind up already … your appalling responses would have now made it for me. 1
pcstru Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 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.
NikChillin Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 Well after discounting ParentPay I'm still researching other online payment systems:-( companies I have found are: Wisepay - seems like a good system but a small organisation and I'm concerned about how good their support would be. Parentmail and their pluspay service, again seems good and have a rep coming in next week for a demo Anybody got any experience using any of the above or other payment services? We have been using WisePay for 8 months now which links up to SagePay. Seems to work fine apart from the odd occasion when SagePay bottlenecks at lunchtime. Thats rare though.
drdos256 Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 Sorry that wasn't meant to be a sales pitch at all. Just thought that schools who are looking at all the systems might find it useful to see what's on offer and have the full picture regarding things like transaction charges and refunds. The issues are the priority - we have listened and are actioning currently. The server outages are resolved and we have no reports of any problems. I'm getting "server timed out" ... is it down again?
ParentPay Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 We have no reported service issues at present. I've just checked my system and it is fine. PM me and I'll have it checked out for you?
CyberNerd Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 I'm getting "server timed out" ... is it down again? seems to be ok here. quite quick infact (for ASP)
drdos256 Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 (edited) Seems to be working now - thanks Edited July 13, 2011 by drdos256
irsprint84 Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 We are on parentpay, will there be phone support soon? otherwise I will prob lookat reconsidering our position
ParentPay Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 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.
irsprint84 Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 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'
Mr_Writer Posted July 13, 2011 Author Posted July 13, 2011 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. I'm trying to square your comment with the one posted by pcstru earlier: "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?
pcstru Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 "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! To be fair, if properly managed with a steady focus on providing excellent quality, I see no reason why that shouldn't be true. 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? 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.
CyberNerd Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 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. 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.
Tallwood_6 Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 (edited) 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. Edited July 13, 2011 by Tallwood_6
elsiegee40 Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 ParentMail now has a payment option, but I can't say what it's like.
Tallwood_6 Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 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.
Mr_Writer Posted July 13, 2011 Author Posted July 13, 2011 ParentMail now has a payment option, but I can't say what it's like. 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.
plexer Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 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
Soulfish Posted July 13, 2011 Posted July 13, 2011 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
Mr_Writer Posted July 14, 2011 Author Posted July 14, 2011 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 Sure, I'll ask the question and report back!
Tallwood_6 Posted July 14, 2011 Posted July 14, 2011 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.
ParentPayCEO Posted July 14, 2011 Posted July 14, 2011 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
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