IntelliContact Pro Clients,

I wanted to personally update all MonsterCommerce clients who are also IntelliContact Pro users on the status of the software, existing bugs, and best method of contacting our support team.

As you likely know, we launched the 3.0 version of IntelliContact Pro last Sunday afternoon, April 3. This version now provides an autoresponder and list segmentation at no additional cost to our users. We also added the concept of campaigns so that related messages could be grouped for reporting purposes.

After we launched on Sunday afternoon, it became apparent to us that a few functions did not work due to the migration of user data from version 2.0 to version 3.0. I apologize for any errors you have experienced over the past few days due to this. Over the past five days our developers have been working eighteen hour days to fix any issues as quickly as we can as we find each one.

At this point, we have fixed the majority of issues that affect all clients. There remain a few issues that occur in specific accounts that we are presently working through. I very much encourage you to post any problems you are still having here in this thread. Our Vice President of Business Development David Roth and myself will be checking the thread regularly today, this weekend, and over the next few days until we have all of your issues resolved.

Regarding support, we have experienced a much higher call and email volume than usual. Average hold times on Monday and Tuesday were around 25 minutes. The volume has gone down significantly since then and hold times presently are averaging under three minutes and many times calls are going directly through without any hold time.

We have gone from receiving around 60 support tickets and 25 calls per day to 200 support tickets and 180 calls per day this week. We are in the process of hiring additional support staff today in order to help us get back to our support goals of replies to emails and voicemails within one business day as soon as possible. We will also make sure to hire additional representatives prior to any new version launch in the future. We will be working through the weekend to get back to as many persons as possible and fix any remaining technical issues as they arise.

If you need immediate support, the best method at the moment is to call us directly at 1-877-358-5564 or use the live chat feature on our web site.

Thank you very much for assisting us in fixing any remaining issues as quickly as possible. I encourage you to post any issues you are having here. I am also happy to answer any questions you may have. If posting any issues, please be as specific as possible so that we can replicate and fix the issue promptly. I can assure you that it is my personal goal and mission to make IntelliContact Pro once again the most reliable, easy to use, and full-featured email marketing software product in the market as quickly as we possibly can.

Please feel free to post any questions, issues, or problems you may have and we will respond as quickly as we can or contact you directly.

My warmest regards,
Ryan P. M. Allis, CEO
Broadwick Corp.
http://www.intellicontact.com
2635 Meridian Parkway Ste 100
Durham, NC 27713
1-877-358-5564
support@broadwick.com

Ryan,
Thanks for this information. Problems that I'm still having as one of your users:
Username is kdog
• Send list owner 'add' and 'remove' receipts isn't functioning, I don't receive any emails.
• Newsletter didn't distribute (yesterday) to a full list setup, instead of releasing to 1100 emails it only released to about 20 and the stats are now not reflective of the amount of opens that your system had shown. Stats say 21 unique opens but there are only 2 users listed in the full report mode.
• Forward to a friend is not working at all, doesn't display in emails distributed anywhere.
• Valid physical address in each email message is pulling from my contact & billing info rather than from the campaigns settings so the incorrect address gets served into all campaigns sent out.

You guys should offer a sign-on system for your subscribers to debug in a staging or dev area before actually pushing out major upgrades like these. It will not only be beneficial to your company to have users who use your system on a regular basis debug for you, but also to the end user as well. While it's great that you offer all of the additional features at no extra cost, it's better to have a system that actually functions and can do what us users expect it to do. I work full time for a company that serves over 10,000,000 page views daily so I know the importance of putting a functional product out there for the user and thorough testing is a part of the process. While errors and mistakes are all part of the process in this volatile industry we call the internet, customer service should stil be first and foremost. While I'm sure you didn't realize the extent of the bugs in your system, it would have been nice to receive an email from intellicontact to let its users know that there are temporary issues and are in the process of being resolved from day one and not a full week later.

Regards,
-Kjup

well you at least now acknowledge there were issues - your support didn't seem to think anything was wrong except for some uncounted bounces. That pi$$ed me off beyond belief.

As an addendum to Ryan's statement, please be sure to include your account login name and the name of affected groups or segments if applicable. Most problems that are being reported are specific to certain accounts and are not systemwide, so your account information is crucial in investigating the issue. We again thank you for your patience and understanding and are doing our best to return to the level of support that you, as our customers, deserve.

Please continue to post issues here as encountered, or call our support line at 877-358-5564 if you need immediate assistance.

Brad Gurley
Director, Customer Support
Broadwick Corp.
http://www.intellicontact.com
2635 Meridian Pkwy Ste 100
Durham, NC 27713
(877) 358-5564
support@broadwick.com

Kdog,

1. We believe we have fixed the add receipt problem. We have tested this on our end. Would you test this on your end and post if this is working for you. Remove receipts are still not working in some accounts, but this should be fixed soon.

2. The valid physical address in each email message will be drawing from the Campaign settings definitely by midnight and likely by 8pm. Please double check your address settings under Settings > Campaigns to be sure the proper address is listed there for each campaign.

I will keep you updated.

Warm regards,
Ryan Allis, CEO
Broadwick
http://www.intellicontact.com

Ryan, where did the "delete duplicate subscribers" button go? I can't send out our newsletter until I find it!

My Reply:

Kdog and Robert (as well as anyone else with this same inquiry),

The new system architecture does not allow duplicate records to be created within a group. Therefore, the Delete Duplicate Emails function is no longer necessary and has been removed. A few customers did report seeing duplicate records in their account during the week due to a display error that has since been corrected.

Thank you for your continued updates.

Brad Gurley
Director, Customer Support
Broadwick Corp.
http://www.intellicontact.com
2635 Meridian Pkwy Ste 100
Durham, NC 27713
(877) 358-5564
support@broadwick.com

Brad,

I hate to say it, but this function is still not working.

I've just uploaded over 5,000 contacts from my MonsterCommerce customer list. I upload these, and usually delete duplicates. This time, the duplicates did not delete, and there is no way to do so without the delete functions.

I need this fixed so that we do not send to all customers twice.

Our login name is "rungreen".

Thanks,

Paul, rungreen.com

Problem #2

I uploaded all of these subscribers to one list. I have another list, a join-only "club", that had 600 or so members this morning, and now has 4,000 plus.

I'm going to be very, very upset if this list is not corrected. I might even have to take back all the nice things I said about Intellicontact on another thread.

Paul, rungreen.com

Ryan & Brad,
it's looking like it is still sending any welcome mails from my personal account and I'm also still not receiving unsubscribes at this point. Please let me know when you get this working properly, I'm still concerned that this mailing I have to go out on Monday still wont send properly based on the fact that it is pulling all footer info from my contact & billing info for all emails that I distribute and all welcome messages that are received. Any update would be greatly appreciated, as I don't want my personal address to be in each email newsletter that I distribute for individual clients.

Also, regarding the duplicate address removal feature. It appears that you can get duplicate addresses entered into your system. Not through individual signup from the website forms, but from manually entering the address as an administrator. There are many occasions where my clients will send me a list of addresses to add in manually not knowing that many of the addresses have already been entered in by the users themselves through each clients website. I was just able to manually enter in an address from your system 3 separate times into the same list so this isn't bullet proof either which would justify the delete duplicates feature to be re-enabled.

-Kjup

Paul,

Do you still have duplicates in your list? Last night all duplicates were removed from all lists and the duplicate checking system was enabled to ensure that duplicate email addresses cannot be added.

Are you still having any trouble with the size of the size of your lists? I have emailed you directly with this question.

Kjup,

1. I am testing the source of the footer information and will reply momentarily.

2. As of this morning you should no longer be able to manually add duplicates through the system.

Warm regards,
Ryan Allis
Broadwick Corp.
http://www.intellicontact.com

Kjup,

Do the following to ensure emails will go out with the footer information you have set in your campaign settings.

1. Log in
2. Go to Settings
3. Click on Campaigns
4. Click on edit next to the campaign you intend to associate your next message with
5. Make sure you've typed in the from name, from address, and physical address you want to show up on your next message.
6. Click update campaign.

When you send your message, be sure to associate it with this campaign you've just modified.

Footer information on welcome messages will come from the information stored in your account since physical address is set per interest group. We are considering either removing the footer information for welcome messages or adding a method of storing a per interest group address setting just for welcome messages.

Warm regards,
Ryan Allis
Broadwick Corp.
http://www.intellicontact.com

while your looking at specific accounts make sure arteauto.com's is OK. Last email did not go out at all.



john

Ryan,
thanks for the update on all of this. Can you remove the footer for me on all welcome messages then until you get that issue resolved? The welcome messages are nice to have on but I just don't want my personal address attached with each clients welcome message. Also, the sender comes up as empty when receiving the welcome messages which isn't the end of the world but thought I would mention it nonetheless.

The notification seems to be functioning rock solid now when new subscribers join but not when they opt-out. Again, while this isn't the end of the world it's nice to be able to know who is unsubscribing from each clients list. I know you or Brad had mentioned that your dev team was working on this feature, but just don't want thes important features that made your system better than the others to get lost in the mix of all of the request which I'm sure your still getting.

The duplicate entry feature seems to be working now, thanks for the update on that.

It appears that the forward a friend feature is now working for me on mailings...I ran a couple of test and they seem to have functioned ok, thanks.

I also sent another request in one of my original emails that I sent out. I would imagine it would be a really simple mod for you guys and it's really more of a typo issue in the footer. The footer information seems to have an extraneous comma in it. Where it says It was sent from: , note the comma after the from: Users can't control that feature as that is dropped in by your system but I have gotten a request from 2 clients to remove that comma after the colon.

Thanks again for your prompt replies, it seems the majority of the kinks have been worked out here.

Regards,
Kjup

OK, so for the most part things seem to be better with Intellicontact BUT I still have concerns.

PART 1 -- I sent out email on Friday, and now I see 15 unsubscribed people in that list. What about the original thousands? Do they exist as an unsubscribed list that we just can't see?

PART 2 -- So when i add my entire database back in again, will those who were on the unsubscribed list referenced above as invisible, not be added as subscribed?

PART 3 -- I just attempted to upload a list of approx 8,744 to my FWHOUSE list. Many of those are duplicates, but there are probably 200 or so new customers. When it was completed the screen had come to a PAGE CANNOT BE DISPLAYED. What happened? Why didn't it upload? and When will this be fixed? Is the list too great? I was told prior to 3.0 that I should subdivide my list so it uploads, but that when 3.0 is out, it will handle large lists.

I have called many times in the last week, and been patient while holding for upwards of 30 minutes at times. My time, like everyone else that uses your service is valuable, that is why we pay you to do what we do! I am losing money everytime I have to call, email, post forum notes, wait for uploads that don't upload etc etc.

Dave
Liquorama.net

INtellicontact,

Can you PLEASE remove my extra thousands of subscribers- I've left a message plus email, and they're still there. I can't send out an email until they're gone, or upgrade to something I don't need.

Thanks!!!

Paul,

Yes, I will follow-up with David in the morning to make sure he removes all the subscribers who added themselves on April 9.

Dave,

I believe Brad has answered these questions for you already. I will reply to make sure.

1. Yes, the people that were previously subscribed have been added to an account-wide remove list. The 15 people are the people who have removed themselves just from that interest group. You can view this by going to View and then selecting "All Subscribers" from the drop down menu and then selecting "Unsubscribed."

2. When you upload any list, any persons currently on the account-wide unsubscribe list will not be added. To make sure that you don't add back anyone who just deleted themselves from an interest group and didn't unsubscribe from all of your mailings, be sure to click the "Ignore" radio button rather than "Overwrite" radio button when you upload your full database again.

3. We have done some optimization on the upload process today to allow it to bring in more persons in one upload. The list that didn't work on Monday morning may work now. I believe Brad or Rob has helped with this, but if not, please let me know.

Warm regards,
Ryan Allis
Broadwick Corp.
http://www.intelicontact.com

May work now? We run a highly active e-commerce website that sends out a weekly newsletter as an integral part of our marketing campaign. Last week I was unable to use intellicontact to get the job done because we were used as guinea pigs for a new version release that obviously was not properly tested. I DO NOT appreciate that.. Some minor bugs I can accept but being used as a beta tester when we're trying to run a business is completely unacceptable.

I just hope by Thursday the system will be fully functional.

BTW: I just uploaded new subscribers to our Customer List and we again have numerous duplicates. The email addresses are duplicated with N/A for first and last names.. Please fix this asap so we can be ready for Thursday distribution..

Ryan,

I think what Jim is trying to say is that Intellicontact is putting themselves on the edge of losing valuable customers, and word travels very, very quickly around here. I'm going to hang in there for now because your company has been quite good for the year I've been a customer. There are, however, other options.

Thanks,

A few more issues with the intellicontact version 3 upgrade.

• Even though I've set up each individual campaign with "To be removed click here" to be dropped in the footer of each campaign, it is throwing "Manage your subscription" in place of it. I'm not quite sure how this is happening?

• When I click on the Manage your subscription link on the bottom of the mailing it is displaying all of my campaigns including all of my "test" campaigns that I have configured to go out to a hand picked group of users for testing. This will enable anyone to view and/or sign on to these groups mistakenly or intentionally not knowing what they are. It also makes for a very unfriendly user environment to actually manage your subscription. Shouldn't the only campaign that gets displayed be the one that they are subscribed to? Why would it display campaigns in their management page that they would have no interest in or even know about?

• Wanted to remind you of the fact that there is a grammatical error in the footer that users can't control. Here is the URL to my post: Previous post about extraneous comma in footer

I'll post again if I see more for your dev team to mod. Please keep us posted as you have been, it's been extremely helpful in this painful process for everyone.

Regards,
-Kjup

Jim,

Would you check now to see if you see any duplicates? There are a few addresses that are very similar like aaron.martin@symparico.ca and aaron.martin@sympatico.ca but no duplicates as far as I can tell.

Regards,
Ryan

Thanks for the continued feedback Kjup. In response,

1. We are aware of the "manage your subscription" wording being displayed in place of other selected options and will have this resolved shortly.

2. The intention of this is to allow the subscriber to have a centralized place to manage their subscription to all of a company's lists. I do, however, recognize your point. I have added to the "add in the next week" list a feature that will allow lists to either be displayed or not displayed based on a setting that will be stored under Settings > Lists > Edit.

3. I don't think this comma is showing up for most people. Here's what the footer normally contains:

"This message was sent from Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce to allisr@broadwick.com. It was sent from: Chapel Hill Chamber of Commerce, 104 South Estes Drive, Chapel Hill, NC 27515. You can modify/update your subscription via the link below."

Can you post your login name. With this information I can see if there is any reason an extra comma may be showing up in your footer.

Warm regards,
Ryan

Kjup,

I believe the extra comma is there in your messages because you do not have a business name specific for your account. You could either add a business name or retype the name of the sender. If this doesn't make sense to you let me and within a couple minutes I can specify a customized footer just for your account.

Regards,
Ryan

Another problem I noticed today...

When you upload new email lists to your existing lists it is overwriting the old data.. For example I have my customer list with email, first and last name fields populated.. Then I added to that list another list which contained some of the same email addresses but without the first and last names.. Well the software is erasing the first and last name info and leaving just the email..

We are still waiting to send out our newsletter been almost a week now.
We can't get the duplicate email addys out of our list and also when I upload images from the image library they show up on my draft or template but when I test send them the customers only get a box with a red x in the center , This feature worked fine before your up grade.
Please help our customers are wanting our newsletter and its getting late in the month.
Sincerely,
Phyllis Parkins
Scrapping na Style
user name rambo 59

Our newsletter was sent out on Thursday.. after spending an hour trying to make sure our list was right....then I discovered...

the stats are not functioning correctly at all.. 700 opens with 0 clickthroughs.. Completely wrong.. When will this latest bug be fixed?

BTW Please at least have the courtesy to reply to your customers emails when you know they are dealing with a bug riddled version of your software.. I've sent out 3 emails on this issue and not a single response.

I was happy with Intellicontact service until the ungrade happened.

I couldn't receive emails in various accounts that were in the email lists. I called the Intellicontact of the problem. They said they would check into it and called me back.

Intellicontact never called me back so I called them again to explain the problem.

I understand that they were getting many calls and they might forget to call me.

The person answered my call said he had report my problem to the engineers and they were looking into it. They would call me if they found anything.

Still didn't hear from Intellicontact after one week.

I then made another call and then another call. Every time, Intellicontact said they would call me but it never happened.

My account with them expired. I then called the intellicontact about the service asking to solve their upgrade problems and let me try for one or two more weeks before I decided to renew the service. The person said he would "call me" but , again, they never called me.

One to two weeks later, I got a credit card charge from Intellicontact for one whole year.

When I called Intellicontact today, I was trying to find out the situation. However, the conversation with the person answered the phone led me to decide to discontinue the service with them right away.

The person, director Brad, said, Intellicontact would not support call-back service. He was sorry someone promised to call me back. All future support with intellicontact needs to go with emails. Brad's attitude on the phone made me feel I was the one causing the trouble not their system or service.

This led me to determine to cancel the service permanently. If Brad had handle my call differently, I might give Intellicontact another chance.

I learn this experience from Intellicontact and reflect upon on my business. "Never promise your customers something that you can't deliver" else you would lose a customer in no time.

Now, the search for a new mail service begins. I receive newsletters from various companies. I will find out which email services they use and I am sure one of the email service companies would welcome me with 25K cusotmers.


Regards,
Wayne