Organic Climbing review for Route Protection and Tracking

March 4, 2021

Let me start by saying this is a super cool idea and I applaud Route for it. Its something that in concept would be a dream for our company so thanks for dreaming this up Route!!! We started using this App October of 2020, to be honest it felt a bit like a good used car salesperson was selling this to us and everything seemed WAY To good to be true, but we were promised no this is for real. We signed up and it worked amazing for first 2.5 months as insurance. That being said the "used car salesperson" who sold us went dark after we set it up, when we finally located them they got very defensive and seemed hurt that we called them out for not helping us after they sold us the service, and we had 100 percent no support or anyone to reach out to till we continued to be a real squeaky wheel and then were assigned a "Customer Success Manager" "Customer Success Manager" felt a bit like going to the orthodontist where everyone is SOOOO Nice, and has the most amazing teeth you have ever seen and you are like Is this real??? Well like a really good yoga teacher our "Customer Success Manager" was great at platitudes and making it clear they were soooo sorry for the issue and would get it taken care of right away....then would be on vacation for long stretches and not take care of anything... once they returned they would forget our companies issue and we would spend considerable time bringing them back up to speed (mind you this is during a pandemic when our company is short staffed and stressed out trying to make outdoor gear safely in our workshop) And our CSM at Route would get very stressed out that we were frustrated with needing to invest MORE OF OUR VALUABLE time into something we had already told them about. The more we worked with Route the more it almost felt like a needy Child who we were needing to discipline and help shape but at the same time had to tread lightly as to not make them feel bad or to cause them to much work cause then it derailed the whole conversation and things we needed done would not be able to get done. We have been in E commerce 17 years. And as a Small business our customers expect responses from us fast, over the time we have been in business we have seen customers go from a 24 hour email response being seen as fast to them needing it instant through text or chats. When we were sold Route as a solution to our Shipping customer service issues (which to anyone in E commerce we can all agree are lots of the questions we all handle daily) we expected to have quick and reliable customer service from Route as well since they were selling an e commerce experience. Anyone reading this in e commerce can predict when the most shipping is going to be happening and hence the most Customer service needs : ) Well a very large issue for us with Route was Dec - Jan of 2020 much of the Route Team was out getting rad (skiing and doing great things with Family) that I would have loved to be doing myself albeit there was a pandemic and I was stuck triaging to my customers why their claims where not getting processed and my questions to Route where getting auto responses of being out on vacation. While I applaud work life Balance not being able to balance your staffing needs and that is unacceptable, especially for a company to be selling a product to take customer service stress from small businesses and then not really follow through. As I was told my the used car salesperson in our initial sales person "E commerce never sleeps" I could not agree more and as a company servicing that sphere you should structure your claims and customer service people so there is always someone available to help customers 24-7 Late in 2020 Route also changed their terms of use policy very discretely and stopped reimbursing the merchant for the cost of shipping which is very large on our products. This was never publicly addresses in any emails to clients and just processed by changing their website page where they have their terms of use, when I asked about this our rep got very angry and said it was our fault for not paying attention to their terms of use changing. On top of this they also changed how they processed the claims, prior they would sit on them until approved then someone would reorder from route, on their route credit card and we would see a new order with a route billing address to know it was a claim, then without any notice (Aside from the aforementioned change of use policy page on their site) they started putting every claim through as they were filed and we would see an order come in but sometimes paid for other times not paid for, our team would ship an item assuming it was a new order or had been approved as the old route claims worked only to see the claim denied and not paid a week later. To keep training our team to watch for the changes in Route became to much to handle for us. I was told in March of 2021 that this changed back perhaps again so they are reimbursing shipping but honest I don't know anymore and got tired trying to keep up with these folks. Last straw was when we uncovered a glitch in Route. As of March 2021 we have put 1.5 months into working with them on it to have a response that they don't know what is going on. This glitch will overcharge clients double or more in the insurance on occasional orders so we see a $389 Route on one order charges $4.95 for insurance and then a customer reorders and sees insurance of $10.95 or so. I run my business by honestly and while I understood there may be a glitch will say Route did nothing to fix it or address this or to publicly admit there was a glitch to their customers. In fact again they threw this back at us (Actually our customers) for going to fast through checkout and that this was the only way they could replicate the issue and had bigger problems to fix than this, Literally this is what our CSM told us! So apparently its never routes issue, always someone else's fault, and oops don't give them real life feedback or they get their feelings hurt, and they own this huge business but don't have to take the same stress the rest of us business owners do cause, they don't want to? In the days of big tech, VC Capital etc as a USA Manufacturer of High Quality goods perhaps I am just Old School but if I had this much investor Money I would be racing to address these glitches before I continued to push my Used car salespersons to keep collecting more and more accounts, clearly there is not enough roots behind the growing tree above and its becoming more and more unstable. Giving 1 stars instead of 0 only because I do really think Route is onto something but needs to grow up and learn customer service and hard work but then could be a super awesome product and I hope someone with time makes their own shipping insurance company as its a great idea if you have the backbone behind it to support it. In closing I want to note Route has given incentives for others to give them good reviews and this I find dishonest and did not do, instead this is our real life experience