11 April 2011
http://mpmbradford.co.uk
Reviewed by Ben Wilson
— Moulds, Patterns & Models Ltd
I approached Arkom to assist in our companies growth via the internet and our website. Initially this seemed to be a correct choice of supplier, their proposal was very good and looked professional and helpful. Unfortunately this was the end of the good stuff in my opinion. The relationship was very distant and the more the project wore on, the less I felt they wished to add value and assist the company in our growth. The communication was very cold and they had a tendancy to fill your head with jargon rather than it being nice and simple, yet they covered everything off with unhelpful emails that made us feel they didn't wish to help they just wanted more money. The training for altering/populating the website was included in the original price and we did recieve some, but received no formal manual that could be used on-site when doing the actual work. The website may have been a fantastic working product in design, but I believe it is a customers experience and results, as well as the product that counts, and the only thing Arkom did exceptionally well, was offer a poor customer relationship that got worst as the project wore on. In conclusion, I would say that the website was over priced, the service was appalling and Arkom never did everything they were supposedly good at, letting you grow a business doing what you were good at. I am far from perfect and I would only thank Arkom for the lessons of how I did not want my business to act, communicate and add value assisting another companies growth. I was that unhappy with the overall eperience and performance of the website, I scrapped Arkoms website and worked with a different supplier with whom I am delighted with and we now have a website where I have enjoyed the experience and already have great results.
Arkom creative technology comments:
We responded by letter to this review on the 18th July, below is the content of the letter
Dear Ben
Thank you for taking the time to leave your review on WWDC. We try to learn from any feedback we receive and obviously negative feedback, whilst it is very rare for us to receive, gives us more scope to learn where we can improve.
We have worked through the points raised and are happy with our current procedures, policies and delivery. Your point about the manual is a valid one and we are in the process of putting such a document together. We are finding this challenging as each website we build is bespoke, we don’t have an off the shelf website so each manual needs to be tweaked.
We build websites that puts the client in control with a simple CMS that allows 95% of copy, images, downloads to be amended. It also gives optimisation tools for every single page. Due to this, the success of the project relies upon client involvement, input and maintenance of the site. For clients who are struggling on this side of the job we offer our population service.
I do strongly disagree with the point you raise about customer service. Despite my attempts to assist you and offer guidance we were only made aware of the difficulties you were experiencing once you had decided to scrap the website. If we had been made aware of the issues before you took this decision I would have ensured Arkom did all we could to help. The product was sold with a guarantee if it didn’t perform yet you chose not to exercise the guarantee as you admitted you hadn’t followed our guidance required to succeed.
I can only encourage you to visit our portfolio section and read some of the client testimonials. http://www.arkom.co.uk/web-design/portfolio/
We have a client retention of above 94% for the past 3 years and feel your experience of Arkom is in the minority.
All the best for the future with MPM, I’m pleased to hear things are going well up there.
Regards,
Ben Saxton
Customer Care Manager
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