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Teletrac Very Disappointing
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We are a trucking company based in the Midwest, we've had Teletrac nearly two years. I wish I could recommend their service but I cannot. When the entire package works, it works well. Unfortunately it rarely works up to its potential. The hardware is obviously
not built to commercial standards. The display units don't hold up well and the actual "black box" portion that does the GPS part is a tiny, flimsy unit with a slender cord that attaches to the display unit. This cord easily kinks under any stress, after it
kinks the wires inside cease to function and the entire unit is useless. This has happened on a dozen or more occasions. The kinks always occur where the cord has to be routed through or around the dash to reach the display. The entire set up appears less
heavy duty than most consumer GPS gear. In order to get their support people to send out a new cord/blackbox (they are one inseparable unit) they insist you swap the blackbox into a different unit to verify that it doesn't work. Same with the display, if it's
not working, swap into a different unit. This is a MAJOR inconvenience. It almost seems that they think every company has a dedicated person on staff to deal with their equipment problems. I can't count how many man hours my mechanics and I have wasted dealing
with these annoying issues. This would annoy me less if they would just say, "we know the hardware is flimsy, we'll just send out some spare parts for you to stock" rather than force you to wait for new parts to be shipped. Better yet, provide more rugged
hardware!! By the way, forget about getting one of their contracted techs out to help with an issue. It's like trying to have lunch with Jesus or like dealing with the cable company - all on their terms and their times. And yes, the techs are contracted from
various companies, the same people who do custom stereo installs and car alarm installs. The few techs I have dealt with don't have glowing reviews of Teletrac either. The software. This is an SAAS offering and there is nothing wrong with that if executed
well. They appear to have some of their own servers on the west coast and contract with a "server farm" type company called Pentaho to do some of their reporting services. I don't think Teletrac has mirrored servers anywhere because of latency issues we frequently
have here east of the Mississippi. The various reports they have are kind of an odd, jumbled collection as though they've added reports over the years and never bothered to streamline or consolidate them. While I realize this IS commercial software, it is
not very intuitive, not easy to navigate and takes too long to drill down to find the info you really want. Currently one of the major reports we use is not functional and their engineers have been "working on it" for four days and have no idea when it will
be resolved. If we had their HOS offering and this happened with that particular report, I would be in a panic. Support. They talk a good game, actually fairly friendly etc. Too bad it usually takes no less than a week to resolve ANYTHING. I have had it take
over two weeks to receive hardware replacement (out of stock!) after we have done the various "swaps" mentioned above to confirm hardware issues. If you call the support number, you'll speak with a first level support person who knows very little. He/she will
speak to you with empathy, confirm that their servers are up, etc. and then tell you a case number has been created for your issue and someone will be in touch. You MIGHT hear back from someone that day....might be next week. Anyway, I could go on and on.
Bottom line, these people have a ton of potential, on the rare occasions that everything is working properly, this is actually a very good product. Too bad it very rarely functions 100% and I simply can't afford to hire a staff member to babysit their product.
Teletrac has recently been bought out by another VC group, maybe the new owners will recognize the issues and implement some fixes. Too bad we'll be long gone to another provider by then.
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Business's response - by Dan M.on 9/3/2013
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We consider product service one of our top priorities at Teletrac, so we read Gary’s review with grave concern. We are truly sorry for your experience with us as this certainly does not represent our company. As we have no way of identifying the customer properly, we cannot investigate and look into the details of his account to determine a specific cause of his issues. I urge the customer to reach out to me personally so I could straighten out these issues. Please email me (dmee@teletrac.com) your company name and phone number where I can best reach you and I assure you that we will do our best to resolve any issues you have. Dan Mee Vice President, Operations dmee@teletrac.com
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