Hello all,
I am just wondering if anyone else is having issues with a lack of service from Payment Express. Our issues started, basically from day one with them. Installing EMVs was a months long endeavor waiting for responses from Payment Express. Our Controller has had a support ticket open for over a month to change MIDs on our EMVs and she gets ZERO response from any of them. I had to open a separate support ticket to ask them to respond to that ticket (that's how bad it's gotten). Now...our EMVs are declining every single transaction (and I just don't have the patience to deal with their lack of service).
I'm writing to see if anyone has any contact information for a higher level executive at Payment Express that I can give our CFO to write very strongly worded email to. We need to get some action from them and it seems the only way to do that is going to be contacting higher level execs.
On that note...if you use WorldPay/Vantiv, what has been your experience with them?
- Chris
Chris,
I could write a small book regarding our negative experiences with Element/Mercury/Vantiv/Worldpay, but to address the point of your post I'll stick to our most recent experience which we're still recovering from.
In March our orchestra went out on strike. They were out for seven weeks. During that time we processed a large volume of refund transactions (measured in both quantity of transactions and dollar amounts of transactions). Settlement of these transaction batches through Vantiv/Worldpay began having problems several days into the refund process due to two reasons.
1) Vantiv/Worldpay experienced a problem on their end which impacted a large swath of customer batches (there is still a message that's over a month old in their support queue that references this problem) causing them to not settle. They had to be re-keyed by hand by Vantiv.
2) Vantiv/Worldpay automated fraud detection processes flagged our Ticketing merchant account due to the large volume of refund transactions. Due to the strike we were processing more refunds than sales causing batches that were tens of thousands of dollars below $0.
Our Finance Department was on the phone regularly with Vantiv support to work on the stuck batch. Every time they were on the phone with Vantiv they reminded them that we were aware of the high volume of refunds and that they were legitimate transactions. I should mention that each of these daily calls took a significant amount of diligence to initiate. Even with an open support ticket we were not provided with any way to contact support agents handing our case, other than by email or wading through their phone queue. Both processes can take hours.
On May 1 someone in the the Vantiv/Worldpay fraud department noticed the daily potential fraud alerts but failed to notice that we had an open support case regarding the activity. Instead they summerially CLOSED our Ticketing merchant account and all processing immediately ceased. This stopped our ability to process our refunds and more importantly, it completely stopped our ability to conduce new sales which was imperative since our strike had just ended.
We were able to determine the source of our card processing failures within an hour and called Vantiv/Worldpay support to report that were were in a PROCESSING DOWN situation. Tier 1 support was no help. Tier 2 support noticed the fraud flag on our account and told me that there was nothing they could due because of this flag. Once set, all support had to go through the fraud division. They transferred me to the fraud division where I sat on hold for more than two hours before hanging up in frustration.
At this point, I reconfigured our production Tessitura Services so that the Tessitura Merchant ID used by our Ticketing Department would use the same Vantiv MID that is used by our web site for web sales. This work around allowed our production system Phone Room and Box Office Ticketing sales to go through using the Web Sales MID. The following day we continued trying to reach someone in the Fraud Department, eventually succeed and were then informed that there was nothing they could do to reverse the closure of our account and that we should just open a new merchant account. We were stunned by this response. There was a days worth of transactions now stuck in the closed merchant account which they were offering no assistance with. Needless to say we rejected this solution and insisted that they fix the problem by reversing the closure.
Over the next several days our CFO leveraged personal senior executive contacts with Card Connect who reached out to personal senior executive contacts with Worldpay who called in their senior support executives who ultimately resolved the issue.
The fact that resolution of this issue required a personal request for assistance from a senior executive of a competing company is completely ridiculous.
This situation has placed our entire Tessitura utilization in jeopardy. Our CFO is DONE with Worldpay and has no interest in Payment Express because of negative experiences from prior business experiences and a deep understanding of the card processing market due to her personal relationships with other C-level executives in competing card processing companies. She is very upset that our only options for processing through Tessitura, especially if we want to leverage hosted payments, is through Vantiv or Payment Express.
That's the brunt of our experience. We'll stick with Vantiv/Worldpay because between the two options we have with Tessitura, the devil we know is better than the one we don't.