ETEAMZ Website Blues
ETEAMZ, a part of the “Active Network” (whatever that is), is a youth sports website hosting service I started using several years ago because it was an official sponsor of Little League Baseball and offered online registration. It has been a pretty handy tool to have for not only signing players up but sharing information with interested parties (players, parents, coaches, board members, etc). We even expanded our use of it this past year to sell our own advertising, for an additional fee to Active. That’s fine.
What chaps me is the constant problems I have administering this site on two fronts.
First, getting to the site admin tools without them timing out on me and having to redo what I’m attempting to change two, three or even four times to get it to “take”. That’s just insane. Remember, I PAY for this site.
Second, getting help from customer support is a joke. More than half the time I have to ask them to do something which cannot be done on my own with the tools they provide, they screw it up. Followup communications with them to attempt to get the screwup straightened out frequently result in them implying they never screwed it up to begin with. I can handle them making some mistakes, but they make far too many and their customer services should never deny it or attempt to imply the customer did something wrong (remember these requests are the result of the customer not being able to do these things on their own).
Anyway, if it were not for the Little League registration process, I’d forget about using Active.com. If you’re looking for a hosting site and don’t need “official” Little League features, I’d suggest you run, not walk, away from Active.com and ETEAMZ.
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Seems I have appeared on ETEAMZ radar. Here is an email their support manager sent me after someone read this blog entry:
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Hi John,
One of my co-workers at Active happened to come across your board post at: http://shallowbottom.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/eteamz-website-blues/
Please provide us with further details so we can assist you further. Specifically, what do you mean by having to redo information? If you see an “update successful” message then your edit/change was made. Many times the old page is stuck in your browser’s cache so you will need to delete your cache/temporary internet files.
Regarding the time out, we notified the techs previously regarding the error in the Sportswear folder.
I’m not sure what you mean by this section:
Second, getting help from customer support is a joke. More than half the time I have to ask them to do something which cannot be done on my own with the tools they provide, they screw it up. Followup communications with them to attempt to get the screwup straightened out frequently result in them implying they never screwed it up to begin with. I can handle them making some mistakes, but they make far too many and their customer services should never deny it or attempt to imply the customer did something wrong (remember these requests are the result of the customer not being able to do these things on their own).
Do you have further details or questions?
Sincerely,
Ericha Webb
Customer Relations Manager, eteamz
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I have already covered all the sordid details in emails back and forth with their customer service, some of them with Ericha herself. What else does she need to know other than I think their customer service is lacking seriously? The fact that they cannot grasp that after making many inputs and changes, then experiencing a timeout (perhaps repeatedly) on their end from which one cannot recover without having to go remake all the inputs/changes previously attempted, is truly frustrating. Cached webpages on my computer my rear end. I’ve even copied the HTML source of the timeout responses so they can see it’s their end that is timing out and on what page. Now I will give them credit for upgrading some of there systems and/or increasing capacity which has helped this issue some, but I will withhold stating that timeouts are no longer a problem during baseball season when I and many others are attempting to maintain such sites.
As for their developers? Get real. A couple of examples of things they have done to mess me up. They have unleashed highly advertised “templates” which screwed up LOTS of peoples sites when they tried them out, like me, and it took them weeks to correct it. Some of these templates really mess up the articles users put into news items by doing such things as putting text and template graphic borders overlapped so the text cannot be read, and fouling up the layout such that articles don’t appear until after the template graphics — making it appear to the user that there ARE no articles. The first attempt to revert back out of the new templates resulted in an inability to restore custom colors for our site, a problem that only took 2-3 weeks to correct. Hello? Ever heard of QA?
Now the problems with the sportswear link, possibly compounded by the fact Ericha will have told them it’s a “time out issue” when it’s not so they will probably not be looking at the right problem if they look at it at all. When I try to explain something like that I get the “there was no confusion” response.
These people are simply not good at what they do. That’s the point of the rant.
I agree, which is why our little league does not use the eteamz site for much other than our home page and a few handouts.
Things like, we have no user name and passwords, but if I add people to the system, it emails them all a username and password. Why, we just told it we don’t need our community to use them.
It doesn’t use industry standard terminology, for example they call a csv file AETF or something like that. Once again why?
The charge exorbitant rates for online registration. We just built our own instead. We could even automate the fee collection online, but why do it, if the county requires us to have parent sign the form, so we just collect fees, when they bring us the forms. But we get all our data online, reducing data entry. Costs to do these things are not great these days and yet they charge close to $7 per registration. That would cost us $8K a year, but if we do it ourselves its $150 for hosting fees and some basic programming which our members provided for us. If we collected fees electronically we might incur $4k in revenues we must give up to the banks. So we are already $4K ahead.
Eteamz is over rated and Little League should evaluate their relationship with them. But in my experience Little League is also about money as much as they say its about kids.