What Buyers Have to Say

Twenty Reasons Why You’ll Lose a Customer

1. “Good Products but very unprofessional service. Responses are dependent on individuals with no processes in place.”

2. “Reluctance against new technologies such as text and data mining or against the usage of artificial intelligence to ‘scan’ the content is not considered good business behavior and a hindrance to further developing efficient workflows.”

3. “The platform is unpredictable if one can authenticate to access. The support desk is the only option to get the account sorted out and regain access. The support is best described as erratic, sometimes they get back to me, other times not, and I have to try again. There is an inevitable delay, and by the time they come back to me, the need to access their application has passed, and I have found what I am looking for by an alternative supplier. When access goes wrong, my heart just sinks with this unreliable application and ‘do you feel lucky’ level of support.”

4. “Focus is 100% on sales and not on solutions and true partnership.”

5. “They are always right; little regard for customer needs/requirements. Very rigid and not flexible in their pricing. I feel like I need to have my guard up whenever I interact with them.”

6. “They have a good product. It has the potential to be a great product, but their development program would appear to be run by a committee and developments voted for by an academic community. We have made suggestions for product developments and improvements, but we have seen/heard nothing as to where these are in product pipeline or their importance only that they are on the roadmap. The company has refused developments we would like have and contribute towards the development costs. We have a feeling we have been sold the product and rather abandoned. The relative difficulty to get engagement or answers to questions though their Salesforce customer support system is a real chore. Once you have a contact dealing with your ticket this can be mixed from great to weak.”

7. “Worked hard to get us to sign up, but since then they have pretty much left us alone and their technical help desk can be difficult to navigate.”

8. “Sole Source that act like sole source.”

9. “Increasingly bad … lack of communication, internal focus and clearly seeing our accounts as ‘transactional’ and not considering big picture.”

10. “The most problematic for us. We feel like the product is not fully supported, and we are left trying to figure out how to resolve problems without much assistance.”

11. “Perhaps I am being unfair as we don’t work with them, but in courting our business it was clear they do not understand the workings of our current document delivery provider and spent a large part of the call running down their service, which I felt was unprofessional. They didn’t take our reservations about their service seriously and try to work around them.”

12. “They are providing limited pricing model options (moving from ID based to “department based” (whatever that is). They seem to be taking a take it or leave it approach.”

13. “Takes way too long (sometimes over a week!) to get information and pricing on resources/products that local rep is not responsible for. At renewal they pass you off to third party to negotiate renewal and pricing not transparent.”

14. People have disappeared since the buyout, despite trying to contact the account manager. There are alternative channels of communicating via forums. These would also appear to be now abandoned. Get the occasional survey on what should a new platform offer, but no feedback on what/when there will be any response or resultant developments to see, what developments they have I have lost confidence in them as a company 12 months on and they still appear to be struggling internally with which way to do things or what to do, compounded by an elusive account manager. The support response is mixed — when I raise a ticket with a request for a change sometimes they come back to me to let me know they have applied the requested change, more frequently they no longer come back to inform me the change has been implemented.

15. “Sales team in uncoordinated, inconsistent statements. Invoicing consistently wrong.”

16. “Don’t hear from them but once a year, if at all. Auto-renewing agreements go up at least 10% each year. They all say, I’m your contact person but then I have to say, which division? All their divisions operate independently, yet they all say the same company name when introducing themselves. Also, they turnover account reps frequently and reps don’t come across as experts in the products they are selling.”

17. “Automatically generated and mailed account statements that are dated one day outside of the terms of payment, indicating past due accounts.”

18. “As a publisher their support is next to nothing. One can raise support tickets, they never come back with a response. It is a huge black hole. The account manager is not great either, difficult to track down. The platform changes are in line with another large publisher changing for the worse, trying for style instead of reliability quality, usability or robustness. The search capability has been reduced, the number of clicks to see the metadata has increased. I am looking for information they hold I have to use third-party databases to find papers and use their platform to link to, to obtain information. They have content we want to access.”

19. “Inconsistent with their responsiveness and can be inaccurate or sloppy in presentations and keeping up-to-date with our account. It does vary by individual and, of late, their flexibility and responsiveness has improved.

20. “While our customer account manager is very efficient I find their customer service cumbersome and frustrating. We spend a lot of money with them but find we have to make all the running!”