Is Triton's core business of ICP tests failing now as well?

[Want2BS8ed]

I have been a vocal and outspoken critic of Triton since November of last year. The lack of transparency, poor handling of leaking containers, production/logistics issues and penalty pricing outside of Europe have all been documented elsewhere. The recent silence on R2R from Triton on even the most mundane of questions has been deafening.


It is against that backdrop that I sit here utterly dumbfounded at Triton's latest failings:


On 26-January 2018, dual samples were mailed to Triton and ATI in California. On 5-February (~6 business days) results were received from ATI. Triton lost the sample and it was replaced. There were no results to compare.


On 27-February, again dual samples were mailed to Triton and ATI in California. On 6-March (~4 business days) results were received from ATI. There was no scan or notice from Triton in California. On 5-March an e-mail was received from Triton in Germany that the samples were received and results would be posted in 2-3 business days. It has now been 3 business days in Germany and no results have been received.


What are the chances you would fail an outspoken critic - twice?


It is indicative of much, much larger problems: lack of customer focus; lack of operational intuition; lack of business acumen...


...Triton is a company ripe to be acquired and run by an entity with sufficient knowledge to deftly handle all of those.


Bottom line, if you intend to charge premium prices, you had better deliver premium service. Especially if there are substitutes available in the market.

 

[Tim@Triton]

Ok, Michael

Let me preface this, we are a family business who wear our hearts on our sleeves growing rapidly into markets all around the world. We take criticism seriously and do listen to our customer's concerns and act upon them. We completely understand that when a new unique product is released into a market and then becomes unavailable it can be very frustrating.

However, I fear it is not quite a simple as that when a customer is insistent on single-mindedly trolling every post with negativity it becomes increasingly clear that there may be an agenda that goes past letting a company know that they are not happy with the service they have received. We have seen this type of behavior before in Europe especially since the advent of other companies trying to offer similar services or products.

Now to tackle your points individually...

I have been a vocal and outspoken critic of Triton since November of last year.

Something we can agree on, and yet you have insisted on continuing to use our products, can I ask why?

The lack of transparency, poor handling of leaking containers, production/logistics issues

Lack of transparency? What do you really feel we are hiding from you? We have explained in great detail on many occasions what the problem with the packaging was and how it was fixed. Production/logistics, please remember that we are a worldwide company that has customers all wanting products, and all wanting them yesterday. Increasing production when you make all the products yourself like us is not quite as simple as telling the production factory in China to churn out more products. It takes time. To give you an example we had to install new production water tanks which took several months of planning and applications before we were allowed to put them in. We are also currently taking on more storage facilities and building onto our existing site, these things don't happen overnight.

We did underestimate how big the demand would get, we openly admitted that. We became a victim of our own success as we did not expect the demand to rise so sharply in the rest of the world as well!

When it comes to leaks, one post a week or even one post a day on Facebook or a forum does not make a global ongoing issue. Occasional leaks will happen, that is just the nature of the beast. If we are producing over 25,000L of Core7 in a production run and we have a 0.1% failure rate then that is still 25 sets that may leak and that is not including any units that are mishandled. If any customer does have a problem then we will ALWAYS sort the problem.

Please look into the term self-affirmation & echo chambers and how they can seem to people with certain viewpoints to make problems seem a million times worse than they actually are, especially when they go into a situation with a predetermined notion of what is happening. Now I'm not referring to when the packaging problem was at it's worst but rather now. Even yesterday when on Facebook a customer put up a post stating that they had received their products safe and sound then who should turn up but you stating that "Unfortunately, not a 100% fixed. There are random reports of folks still receiving leaking containers over on R2R.” These random reports are for one or two unlucky customers who have received damaged goods whether that be down to the tiny percentage of products that got through the QA/QC process or mishandled during shipping, yet there is no mention of the 99.9% of the products that do not have issues.

Believe it or not, there are no 100% perfect will never leak containers, even the good old heavy duty plastic bottles used to leak from time to time if they were mishandled.

penalty pricing outside of Europe has all been documented elsewhere.

Now, this is something that you seem to have come up with completely by yourself. Penalty pricing would imply that a penalty has been added to the price of the products in a roundabout way of recouping some costs. When in fact the prices in the US market have not changed at all, yes the prices in Europe came down to reflect the reduced manufacturing and shipping costs and as stated many times the rest of the world will follow suit, it is not just the US that has not yet seen the price drop. We have said from the very beginning that the rest of the world will see the price reduction once we have built up the inventory in the US and we can reduce shipping costs which are one of the greatest expenses when exporting our products into the US. We cannot build up the inventory with air shipments as they are very expensive and are all sold before they land, the only way this can be solved is by the sea shipments which are currently on their way over.

The recent silence on R2R from Triton on even the most mundane of questions has been deafening.

I can only say the same things over and over again so many times, if you choose not to believe them then there is nothing else I can do for you. I apologize for missing all the other customer's "mundane" posts as you put it and will do our best to answer them.

Now in regard to your missing/delayed test. When your first sample goes missing in the post then that is not something that is our fault, however, we offer to replace the test kit for you free of charge. Now your second sample, which was not scanned at the hub (I will cover that shortly) arrived at the lab on the afternoon of the 5th. That makes the 3rd working day the 8th. Now we say on our email please allow 2-3 workings days for your report to be ready, it does not state that we guarantee that your report will be ready by that time, it means that if you have been waiting longer than this time then you should get in touch and we will see if there has been a delay, these delays could be due to sheer volume of tests all the way to equipment breakdown which does sometimes happen. We will never just rush your tests through to get them done in that timescale, we prefer to ensure that you are getting an accurate analysis.

Now I can see on my emails that you have indeed sent a message and I have looked into it for you and replied. In this case, it is down to sheer volume of tests that we are receiving and this is why we are investing in more machines and inventing new technologies to improve the service.

For the scanner or lack of it, when we opened the new facility in LA we had to decide whether to leave the scanner at Unique Corals or to take it over to the new hub. We decided to move it over to the new site and it will be installed as soon as possible. Now please remember as a company we need to prioritize and I shouldn't need to tell you that we deemed other more pressing issues of higher importance, it is on the to-do list though!

What are the chances you would fail an outspoken critic - twice?

To be clear, the postal service failed you on your first sample, and I have explained the status of your latest sample. Please try not to get all tin hat brigade on us as unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you see it we have not memorized all the 19000+ account details and we are not on a constant lookout for who is sending in what.

Bottom line, if you intend to charge premium prices, you had better deliver premium service. Especially if there are substitutes available in the market.

So to close this out, we understand your frustration as you seem to want our products and we see that there are no real alternatives, sure there are other ways to run a successful reef tank but none that can compare to the concentration, the purity, and pure simplicity of our innovative proven products. The same goes for lab testing, yes there are other “labs” claiming to provide similar services and yes they may be able to bang out the analysis in record time, we could too, but would you trust them? We could stop calibrating twice as much as the others, stop manually checking every single sample for anomalies, there are many things we could do to save time but as the inventors of this service, we are duty bound to provide the best service possible. Times can improve, but they will only improve by increased infrastructure or by inventing new technologies to improve efficiency, not by cutting corners.

Tim