Worst Company I Have Ever Worked With
Before I begin let me start with the good. Naylor purchased Timberlake mid way through last year and so there has been a lot of new leadership and management that is trying very hard to repair the broken systems and staffing issues that came with Timberlake. The leadership of Naylor is able to to communicate effectively and are reasonable to work with -- and provided our organization almost a complete refund as our installation, integration, and ongoing use were all a complete disaster. We started in January and were forced to stay on the system until December after researching and securing another more reliable vendor. Naylor leadership were helpful and friendly, and saw the legitimacy of my serious issues with the failed customer service, failed systems, and failed installation of our non-profit organization's website through Timberlake.
Also for the good, after a terrible start with our project manager, another one took over as our primary point of contact for our project after the first representative provided such poor performance during the first two weeks of our installation. This person, I will refer to as PM was kind, helpful, polite, intelligent, and effective. She was the ONLY staff person at Timberlake that knew how to speak to a customer. The rest of the Timberlake team are horrible at communication and were a complete nightmare to deal with.
The Bad:
IMO We were sold a lemon by the founder / former ceo of Timberlake, whom I will refer to as FCEO.
We had read reviews of Timberlake (on reviewmyams.com) that suggested the company had problems with communication. When I asked during the sales process about these problems, he ASSURED me it was because several many websites were abruptly transferred to Timberlake from another company that went out of business -- which caused a temporary challenge for their team. Having spent 9 months dealing with FCEO and his team (again outside of PM who was awesome and an outlier for this company) -- I can guarantee you that the customer service issues with Timberlake were a direct result of Timberlake's mis-guided priorities. FCEO himself, on multiple occasions, always seemed to want to point the blame on us as the customer. Promises were made and never kept. Scheduled meetings with us went unattended by Timberlake staff. Blame was shift ed from their fault to everyone and everything else possible.
Its not that Timberlake didnt have the systems we wanted - its that it took FOREVER for them to actually start working, and even then, half the time they would break again. It was seriously MONTHS before simple things like the front page looked the way they were supposed to and CONTINUED not to break weekly.
We were very specific with our launch dates and promised Timberlake leadership we would move quickly on our side to provide necessary approvals, content, data etc. Timberlake leadership told us they would also work quickly and could match our aggressive pace (again FCEO). This was the FARTHEST THING FROM THE TRUTH.
The level of incompetence started almost instantly as our primary rep FORGOT to schedule himself for our weekly meetings twice in a row, and did not READ the emails we sent with answers to questions he continued to ask us. So I complained and we got PM - who was great - but she was an account representative and could not force the development team to actually do their jobs. So what would happen is she would tell us something was reported as fixed. I would go, and check, and it was still broken. Then she would have to go back and find herself as well that what was "Tested and confirmed working" was not working at all. This happened FREQUENTLY. I had to ask PM - I know its not your job to beta test new features or fixes but please do before you contact me as its eating up so much of my time.
I refused to just give up on a system that we had been sold, which was not functioning, and continued to hound FCEO (and later Naylor leadership) to get even minimal results. FCEO's rudeness and inability to OWN his mistakes was ridiculous.
On one occasion on a phone call with 3 staff people from Timberlake, we were going over for like the 5th time about a bio field in the user profile that was broken.
Issue was that the bio field text suggested 500 character limit. But when anyone TYPED into the bio field this 500 character limited countdown reset itself to 1000 characters. While the system would allow more than 500 characters in the bio profile field, the new user's account would not complete because there was this error (unknown to the user) that they had entered too many characters. I bring this issue to FCEO's attention. FCEO tells me my users are "Doing something they are not supposed to do". Consider that for a moment. The system is showing people they can enter in 1000 characters. The system ALLOWS them to enter in more than 500 characters. But to FCEO, this is my user's fault for not seeing the initial 500 character limit indicator (which again, was BROKEN) and unknowingly put more characters than 500 in there.
I explain to him "Look, fix YOUR website system to show 500 character limit countdown not 1000 and fix YOUR system to not accept more than 500 characters and then MY users won't be able to break the profile field." Totally lost on this guy -- its like he would rather blame me than take responsibility for HIS system.
Some examples of Emails with FCEO:
FCEO - I have received no communication that from you that our (you and me) daily 8AM phone calls ended. Not sure why I am finding this out Monday 8:30AM after two days scheduled for this call. If you were unavailable, like Thursday, that is fine. But why as your "Top Priority", am I being left in the dark here?
Poor proactive communication from you is wasting my time and extremely frustrating. I've suggested on multiple occasions that additional communication is critical, especially with the long list of broken issues that still remain unfixed (ie landing page is design is still a mess), an previous poor communication practices.
Yes I am back and forth with Deb and PM, but remember we were meeting daily so you could remain aware of these issues.
Until the website is functioning as you sold it to us I would appreciate to continue these morning calls with you, albeit a half an push to 11:30/8:30 would be better.
I am in a meeting until noon my time so I will schedule afterwords.
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FCEO,
There remains a lot to be accomplished today for our website from Timberlake's side. I feel as if we have done everything we could to communicate that we would be moving at an aggressive speed to have the website launched no later than March 1st.
Things not finished or working:
Main page blog
Main page sponsor ads
Event registration (has critical display failures)
Additional events cannot be entered in fully (entering price causes failure)
Content pages
Member account creation (tried to create an account to pay and subscribe to simghosts.org as an individual subscriber -- and got an unexpected activity error message).
Mobile version of website not performing properly
Directory malfunctioning and not displaying all results
Bullet points don't display properly on content pages
PM has been excellent at communicating between myself and the development / design team considering the speed of our installation.
However I do not believe she has the authority you do to focus the team to complete the work required on our project including the TESTING required to confirm key components are functioning as they imagine them to be.
At this point I wish we had not launched the website over the weekend as I have not heard back from you with an explanation that the work your team needs to accomplish to complete this build properly will be taking place today.
From the very get go we announced our plan to launch this website at the latest March 1st and while we have been diligently working to accomplish that goal I am feeling that Timberlake has let us down with matching the effort. If this was not something possible from your side it should have been communicated to us during the sales pitch in November, and the project management phase starting January. As it was it was explained that if we could move that fast, so could Timberlake. Has this not been the case?
What is the plan to get this website working today?
We are supposed to launch australia registrations today. This is a critical factor for our finances and our organization's mission. Every day we cannot is threatening the very life blood of our non profit.
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Their new "Event registration system" never worked for us we had to buy Cvent for all our events in 2015 (some of which Naylor themselves decided to pay for because they knew Timberlake was broken).
In conclusion, I feel bad for anyone currently using Timberlake. I feel worse for Naylor who acquired Timberlake. I have a feeling they were sold on false pretenses as much as I was -- by a CEO who in my opinion, was probably one of the most unprofessional people I have ever communicated with.
Naylor MAY be able to transform Timberlake --- but I don't think that will happen properly until FCEO Choate no longer works for the company. Yes -- its that bad. So-- give them a call and ask if FCEO still works there -- if he does -- save yourself the endless frustration and hang up.
Thank goodness for Naylor leadership -- they are the saving grace to this sad story.
