My goal is to issue a formal complaint against a Halifax based Company called Salesboom.com DBA Salesboom, Inc.
Since contracting with them I have spent over $40,000 and believe them to have breached their contract with me.
Our contract specifically states in section 3.1 that Requirements Gathering was part of what I had paid for and that my implementation should take 3-5 weeks.
To this date they still dont have a thorough understanding of my requirements and the timeframes and costs forecasted were obliterated and their business tactics were bullying.
I have pulled the plug on this project and requested a full refund. It was denied. I later requested a partial refund as we have credits with them, they also had down time which under the service level agreement needed to be compensated for, and a project to deliver integration to QuickBooks accounting software was stalled for so long due to their lack of resources that it my mind a refund was a no brainer and of course this was all denied.
I will be suing this Company for breach of contract, but I wanted others to know the pitfalls of working with them. After the fact research shows they have other complaints with the BBB and with complaint, so Im hopeful mine will be added to them in attempt to help others down the road.
This Company over promised and under delivered. I was constantly told they didnt have enough resources for my project which caused delays, but the main issue was the total lack of understanding of the requirements. They will state that my requirements changed. And yes we did add new requirements and thus more money for the project, but as they never conducted the requirements gathering, which they were contractually obligated to do; they never had a baseline for my requirements.
To prove the point, my most basic requirement was that the project be hosted on very secure (Hippa compliant) servers. This was critical, as we have patient data to protect and in America this is taken very seriously. Patient data protection in the Healthcare industry here is highly regulated.
After a number of months I discovered we were not on Hippa compliant servers. Thus from day one the requirements were off and the project could never recover.
Meanwhile, I was paying for annual licenses. I was told verbally and in writing by the sales staff their, that my licenses expiration date would be one year after the project was complete. They later claimed no knowledge of this and when I forwarded in e-mails to prove my point, they did agree to extend my licenses by 9 months, but the effort it took even when I had documented proof had me very concerned and they still didnt honor what they were supposed to.
But I got fed up with arguing.
Later when we tried to go live with the very limited product we had, the software continuously failed and many times we couldnt gain access to the data. They always had reasons and excuses but enough became enough and I only wish I had come to the decision to pull the plug sooner.
For this and many other reasons I am glad to no longer be working with this Company.
As supporting evidence we have:
1. A contract that shows requirements gathering as part of what I paid for including time frames. See section 3.0.1
2.13 pages of an e-mail chain, dated Sept 30 showing my order date for QuickBooks integration, the costs of such, the issues around it, and the expected delivery date of 10 days later. To this date, this hasnt been delivered and they will not refund.
3. An e-mail dated 4/14 showing that my initial contact Jim Bakers efforts were worthless and a Tom Stefano had to be pulled in to re-design what was already designed, all due to lack of understanding of requirements.
4. An e-mail dated 4/14 detailing why they denied my refund request for my credits, the non delivered QuickBooks integration and their down time.
5. An e-mail that details they forced me to purchase additional licenses for testing purposes. I was under the impression these licenses would not have their annual renewal date start until after we went live, based on number 6 below. This was a false assumption. Who has ever heard of having to purchase licenses just to test, but that tells you the business practices of this Company.
6. A 7 page e-mail chain, where their salesman Jim Baker contacted me from his private e-mail (not Corporate e-mail which is very suspicious in itself) and he documents that he said I could wait to use them (meaning the licenses) if I want. Thus leading me to believe my annual renewal clock had not started ticking.
Unfortunately we cannot attach these. Pdf files here, but will gladly forward as requested. Do not do business with this Company.
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