WebAfrica E-Mail Warning

onlyme said:
We recieved the same E-mail today letting us know that we had to pay or our account will be suspended in 3 days.

What gets me is that we opened the account 3 years ago and have for 3 years had a 30 day terms account, now all of a sudden R 40,000 later we get sent "pay now or" letters :mad:

What really pissed me off is after I sent a polite message to them asking them to please investigate I was sent a copy-paste response with a F$#$%ing Smiley face at the end :mad:

I'll be looking for a new ISP this week, and moving all our sites and customer sites from thier servers unless they deem fit to at least respond properly.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they send out a mail to all their customers in march detailing new changes in their billing structure?
 
Armizael said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they send out a mail to all their customers in march detailing new changes in their billing structure?
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even if they had, it says a lot if you jump down the throats of customers who have spent great deals of money on your business at the first opportunity after changing your systems. it's commonly called good customer goodwill. that way you do not have to fight negative exposure over your service. cause people do remember that.
 
milomak said:
even if they had, it says a lot if you jump down the throats of customers who have spent great deals of money on your business at the first opportunity after changing your systems. it's commonly called good customer goodwill. that way you do not have to fight negative exposure over your service. cause people do remember that.
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I really don't think it was their intention to 'jump down the throats of customers who have spent great deals of money'. The problem should probably be directed at their developers rather than billing since it sounds like they got a crappy program/algorithm to send out collection notices. I'm guessing it doesn't take into consideration one's average monthly spending or for how long one's been a loyal customer. I'm just guessing here but it sounds more like a (if money_is_due AND days_due >= 7) type script :)

I'm not trying to be protective or commend them for this, it's clearly a big @#$@#$ up, and I've also had my fair share of problems with them, coincidentally mostly with billing
 
I had the same problem, didn't bother me at all, is called competition, I just moved ISP after many years of loyalty to WA. Chit happens. :)
 
KALSTER said:
WHINERS!!!
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Yeah, what the hell is wrong with all these people discussing their opinions on a discussion board. Who gave them a right to bring in negative opinions here? This board is for positive feedback only, Kalster and I don't want to hear any more negative feedback from any of you. You don't have a right to your opinion here.

Any person that gives any negative feedback on any ISP from this point onward is going to be belittled by my friend Kalster here! What gave you people the impression that you have the freedom to express your opinions on these boards?!

[/Sarcasm]
 
I see that WA have still not fixed their billing problems...

They are losing alot of customers due to this stupid system / setup of theirs.
 
gdiza said:
I see that WA have still not fixed their billing problems...
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would be nice of the account cancelation button actually worked. I went the support ticket line route.
 
Alot of WA's support and stuff works great Necuno, that's not the problem.

Even Mariet said in a post that they are fixing the billing problems soon (the system maybe) so they know it's causing problems.

I would stop with the e-mails (automated) till they do this, they pissing alot of people off.
 
gdiza said:
Alot of WA's support and stuff works great Necuno, that's not the problem.
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Necuno said:
would be nice of the account cancelation button actually worked. I went the support ticket line route.
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note i said account cancelation button, the thing still gives you fail message just after you pressed it- its been like that since i remember, quite sure if you do google search you would find my initial post on the topic. maybe its just FireFox, but i wonder...

...not like i was fuming at the mouth, merely noting that it still seems not to function as it should. however, obviously it was handled quickly via ticket line- why i did it in that manner.
 
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Armizael said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they send out a mail to all their customers in march detailing new changes in their billing structure?
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I went back and looked at the email. At my first glance of the email, it looked like the "corporate" customers would pay in 37 (30 + 7) days and the prepaid people would pay in 7 days. Reading it again now:

Payment for services are currently due on the 1st of every month for the month ahead. This will be referred to as Standard terms (0 days). Payment is due on presentation of invoice. Should payment not be received within 7 days, the account will fall into the collection cycle as indicated in the graphic below.

In order to accommodate our corporate, government, education, NGO’s and reseller clients, we are introducing an extended terms cycle which may be requested from our billing department. Extended terms* (30 days) means that payment is due 30 days after invoice date. Should payment not be received within 7 days of the following month (i.e. 37 days after invoice date), the account will fall into the collection cycle.

*To qualify for extended terms one needs to have an average monthly spend of R2000 or more.
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It basically says that they were right to send us and our client the email (although that does not gel with what WAColin said). Putting it simply, we have no intention of doing a couple of transfers every month when we go over our limit. Not going to happen. We can get that from any ISP. For the client in question, it will be even worse as they have red tape for that sort of stuff.

Still waiting for an official response from WA billing. What really annoys me (thinking back) is that we went through this sort of pain a while back when WA went from post paid contracts to pre-paid contracts (which included a nice double debit). We accepted that because it was reasonable but to want pre-payments every time we use a couple of extra GB is madness for a company.
 
How many ISPs can you order 1GB of bandwidth for and not immediately have the fee immediately taken off your account?
 
Freshy-ZN said:
How many ISPs can you order 1GB of bandwidth for and not immediately have the fee immediately taken off your account?
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That was the benefit of going with WA. Cybersmart include that option as well. Not sure about the others. Right now, the best alternative for the client in question is Neotel but for us it's not that simple. I was basically saying that I can get the transfer option from any of the ISP's out there.
 
Good Morning All,

I can not express enough apologies to rectify this mistake. I can however with great glee assure you all that this current error has been fixed indefinitely.

In Feb 2009 we had sent off a "Billing Notice" mail to our clients, informing them of the WA Terms, effective 1 March 2009.

This in turn affected the generation of our client lists pertaining to the Friendly Reminders and Suspension Warnings.

Therefor, erroneously included in this generation were the debit order clients. This we have now found out after the error had been experienced by our debit order clients, for which we humbly apologize. It has allowed us to find and resolve the issue indefinitely.

A short description of our terms, launched 1 March 2009:

1. Standard Terms:
Invoices are due on Invoice Presentation Date. 7-Day Account.
[Clients with a Average Monthly Spend of Less than R2000]

2. Extended Terms:
Invoices are due 30 days from Invoice Presentation Date. 30-Day Account.
[Clients with a Average Monthly Spend of More than R2000][On Request]

Our debit orders are processed once monthly and thus, the Standard Term had affected these clients by having them added into our Friendly Reminder and Suspension Warning run. We have now realized the mistake, rectified it and ensured that it will not at all re-occur.

Debit Order clients whom have bounced/unsuccessful debit orders, these clients will and could still form part of these runs.

Debit Order clients who's debit orders are successful will in future be excluded from these runs. And their fees will at present still be deducted once monthly.

If anyone may have any additional queries, feedback or require any assistance whatsoever, please do not hesitate to contact me.

We will continuously be working on our systems, aim to offer the best possible service to our clients and will always do whatever it takes to place our clients first.

Yours sincerely,
Mariet Visser
 
wamariet said:
Good Morning All,

I can not express enough apologies to rectify this mistake. I can however with great glee assure you all that this current error has been fixed indefinitely.

In Feb 2009 we had sent off a "Billing Notice" mail to our clients, informing them of the WA Terms, effective 1 March 2009.

This in turn affected the generation of our client lists pertaining to the Friendly Reminders and Suspension Warnings.

Therefor, erroneously included in this generation were the debit order clients. This we have now found out after the error had been experienced by our debit order clients, for which we humbly apologize. It has allowed us to find and resolve the issue indefinitely.

A short description of our terms, launched 1 March 2009:

1. Standard Terms:
Invoices are due on Invoice Presentation Date. 7-Day Account.
[Clients with a Average Monthly Spend of Less than R2000]

2. Extended Terms:
Invoices are due 30 days from Invoice Presentation Date. 30-Day Account.
[Clients with a Average Monthly Spend of More than R2000][On Request]

Our debit orders are processed once monthly and thus, the Standard Term had affected these clients by having them added into our Friendly Reminder and Suspension Warning run. We have now realized the mistake, rectified it and ensured that it will not at all re-occur.

Debit Order clients whom have bounced/unsuccessful debit orders, these clients will and could still form part of these runs.

Debit Order clients who's debit orders are successful will in future be excluded from these runs. And their fees will at present still be deducted once monthly.

If anyone may have any additional queries, feedback or require any assistance whatsoever, please do not hesitate to contact me.

We will continuously be working on our systems, aim to offer the best possible service to our clients and will always do whatever it takes to place our clients first.

Yours sincerely,
Mariet Visser
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thank you.
 
Hey WAMariet.

So if I continue to pay through EFT how would the following example work.

Example:
12 March - R125 Prepaid Unshaped
14 March - R70 Prepaid
22 March - R70 Prepaid

If I want to EFT pay that total on or during the period of (end of month) 25th till 31st March like I use to I cant? (because my account doesn't spend R2k per month)

The only way to do that is by choosing the debit order option? For interest sake when is the debit order monthly cycle now?
 
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They should remove the "Please beware" from the email.
Will sound a lot less threatening.
 
Hi MrG,

As the service name implies, it is a prepaid service and therefor the bandwidth should be paid for prior to adding it.
Thus, if you are to add 1gb prepaid (R70) on 14 March 2009, you will have till 21 March 2009 to pay that invoice. Although, please bare in mind that our runs work as follows:

7th of a Month - Friendly Reminders are sent out
14th of a Month - Suspension Warnings are sent out
16th of a Month - Final Suspension Warnings are sent out
18th of a Month - The actual suspension takes place

Our debit orders run once monthly at present (this may change in future as we are currently looking at some enhancements to our current system). The debit orders run on the 1st working day of every month.

Hope this answers your query

Regards,
Mariet
 
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