ARKIVE Information Management

Sorry for the long review. Our experience with Arkive has been extremely unpleasant. We had originally signed contracts with another company that was bought out by Arkive. Since we just had an old office’s storage there – we never had to contact them until we were ready to get shred our documents and close the account. What happened after this can only be described as a joke.

We made our first contact to have items destroyed in July 2017 and I was told that I needed to go through my account rep at Arkive. After a few attempts of leaving messages, I had to go back through the client services. At this time I was told that I would not be able to request a destruction because I did not have the permissions and the Admin user would need to place the order– fair enough. So I had my boss make the order and Arkive then informed us that there were no users on our account because “We checked your account access users and it seems like Recall/Iron Mountain did not transfer any users over to us.” How is this even possible? Isn’t their job to keep everything secured? We had to fill out a form and an authorization on company letterhead and I had the keys to the kingdom – again, this did not feel very secure (anyone could have made the letterhead, etc.

I wish that my troubles had ended there. When we requested the destruction (after finally getting access) we were quoted 30-45 days for the destruction to be complete – are you kidding me?

In mid-August I started the process of cancelling our account and setting up for someone from my company to pick up the remaining cartons. Regarding the cartons – we had set up a time to pick up the cartons over the phone and I called in a few times to make sure it would be available and was told there would be no problems each time. However, I received an email from my ‘account rep’ the day before we were scheduled to travel up there telling me that we would not be pick up the cartons. I was frustrated since I had it all set up for someone to drive up there to get these items – I had to beg them to let me pick up OUR OWN items until they finally agreed. I would not have thought they had the ability to tell someone who was current on their account that they did not have access to their own items…

As for the cancellation process that was started in August 2017, it was still not completed by January 2018…. In September I had emailed and called my account rep to check on the status of the cancellation and asked why the destruction invoice I received was 3 times our contract rates. What proceeded was 2 months of calling Arkive and emailing them to try to talk to someone regarding this INSANE invoice with no one talking to me. I copied my rep, his boss, the client services email and no one would talk to me. I was able to talk on the phone to my rep finally during those 2 months and all he said was that the price increase did seem wrong and 300% increase was huge and that he would talk to his boss. After that conversation everything went silent again (I called multiple times a week and also emailed). Until late October when I finally sent them all an email letting them know that no one would resolve these issues or even talk to me and that I would pay what our contract rate was and we would be done.

After that we kept receiving invoices for monthly bills – which should have been cancelled since we no longer had a single item in their storage and also started to receive collection calls. Whenever we discussed this issue with the collection people we would send them the email issues we had and they would thank us for our time and say that they would bring it up to their boss. We were happy that someone might call to resolve the issue. Instead we just kept getting new collection people calling who knew nothing of pervious conversations and would give us the same answers. It was not until January that someone actually started to talk to us about the problem. Arkive was not willing to budge on the issue and we were told to “Consider it the cost of inflation” for the 300% price increase with no breakdown of the increases or any notices that our prices would be going up. They were willing to do us a “favor” by waiving the monthly bills that should have been cancelled in August or September which they kept billing us in error. When we told them that those were billed in error, we were told that until all bills were paid that the account would not be closed. I would be fine with this if ANYONE would have been able to talk to me to resolve the issue – however, it seems that it was no one’s problem and they just kept trying to pass the problem to someone else. We finally paid the bill because Arkive was threatening to report us as bad-payers through Dun & Bradstreet. This seemed absurd to me because we were in discussion and never ignored their phone calls or emails.

I just wanted to put this review out there to protect other companies who might have the same situation.