One of the allegations from the Broadweave insider is that they don’t know who their customers are until they call in for support. A commenter recent confirmed this saying that they had been installed in August but have yet to receive a bill for any service and says that a neighbor is in the same boat. The question, of course, is if Broadweave can back-bill these customers successfully or not. It’s the customer’s responsibility to notify a company if they aren’t billed for services rendered, but good luck trying to keep the customers happy when you do it.
Anyone else getting service from Broadweave without being billed? Sound off in the comments.
Broadweave couldn’t manage a flea circus! They’d have more luck trying to pick up Pixie sticks with their butt cheeks than accurately accounting for their customers! Good Luck!
It is the responsibility of the customer to make sure their bill’s get paid after they have signed a contract. Yes, Broadweave can back bill you for time not paid. The customer signed a contract with either Broadweave or MSTAR and since Broadweave purchased all of MSTAR’s contracts the customer is now responsible for paying Broadweave. If you are a customer of them, which I am too, I would suggest calling them and getting it resolved before it bites you in the ass. It is dis-honest to go on not paying them.
There is a responsibility of Broadweave to get this figured out but if you get back billed you only have yourself to blame, even though its a minor inconvenience for you to call in and get it taken care of.
The question isn’t if they can back-bill or not, but if they can do so successfully. By successfully, I mean getting customers in arrears to pay those bills and not cause PR problems in the process. Part of the problem is that if they don’t have a record of the customer, how do they know what to charge them for and how long? This sounds like a really bad situation.
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Like I said, that’s the problem. They don’t know who to bill, what services they have, or for how long they have had them. Matt is right, you need to be honest and pay your bills and live up to your contract, but, shouldn’t Broadweave also be honest and have a system that accurately documents what customers they have and who owes what? They put on paper that they have increased customer counts and so forth, but honestly, they never pre-planned and set up a billing system, ticketing system, or any sort of tracking system. They thought they would just use systems from Provo and Nuvont and mush them together to make them work. Very niave thinking on their part. And now they are in the midst of trying to apply yet a third system from their Traverse Mountain project to clean it all up. How many more customer records will they lose trying to make that transaction? Let’s not forget, they can’t even pay their bills as promised either. This is the same thing they slammed Mstar for (not being able to pay bills)?
I understand they’re blaming their “deplorable” current billing software for these problems and that their #2 engineering priority is to move to the original system they were using for Traverse Mountain.
I was a leader of the team that developed that “deplorable” system and I admit that it is probably the whole reason why Broadweave has billing issues. I’m sure Veracity and Nuvont, for whom the system was originally developed, and who are still using it, are also having trouble keeping track of their customer installations and billing their customers. I’m sure we would have noticed the problems there too if we had been looking hard enough.
Like Steve says in the paper, they do things so much better than anyone else including Provo. It’s bad enough to have these issues, but throw in the arrogance too and you get a real piece of work. I’m not saying I’ll dance on their grave but there will be a polka in the vacinity of the cemetary…
Jarrod, you can’t possibly take the blame for how Broadweave has handled the billing system! I worked with you during the initial stages. You are on top of your game my friend. You work hard and I think the system works great for NuVont and Veracity. the problem is this, you designed the program for a service provider on a network. You designed it for Veracity’s and Nuvont’s current business model and structure. It works great for them. Broadweave didn’t want to spend any cash on a new system and during the merge grabbed up the system. Well, they are trying to use the same system to not only provide services, but to track the network provider aspect. Also, NuVont and Veracity developed and built their data base solid. Broadweave attempted to tweak it and modify it. Then when they attempted to do they data dump from Mstar’s system, it added a million and one problems to the system. You did a great job Jarrod, don’t ever doubt that. Your a brilliant guy. Mark tried to reverse engineer what you did and honestly he wasn’t too good at it. Broadweave tried to make a system do something it was not designed to do. They refused to invest in daily operations. they never designed a work flow plan, and their infrastructure is caving in on itself. Cause and effect my friend. You did the best with what you had, and honestly Jarrod, don’t EVER blame yourself for any of that mess. They should be thanking you because you did try so hard. I watched it all, and you have no fault in this.
I suspect that Jarrod was employing a wee bit of sarcasm… He knows the product is fine.
It is interesting that Provo selected this “best in class” provider who showed up with no viable billing system. This is just another shortcoming Provo overlooked. Man they did some great diligence in their search…