Cisco offers hosted unified communications as a service.
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Fuze
Score 7.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Fuze is a cloud-based unified communications platform that includes IP PBX voice service, video conferencing, and collaboration tools such as content sharing and instant messaging capabilities. It also integrates with a wide range of popular CTI, CRM, and click-to-call solutions.
We chose Fuze over the other vendors based on the dependability of the system, excellent customer service record, and the company's continued focus on mobile technology. Their datacenter redundancy provided the fail-over capabilities we needed in our VoIP provider. The …
It is well suited for: Clients with call managers that want to continue using Cisco and want to minimize the new CAPEX. Clients that want to outsource the platform management and support. Clients that have a variation on the number of extensions. Although, Cisco HCS, is a solution that has a higher opex than the ones supported in ISP IP Centrex.
Fuze has way more capability than we need for our small office so it might be best suited for large installations, call centers, and complex environments. Our office is small and our needs [are] minimal, so when we need support we are challenged to understand the support person due to our lack of technical sophistication. We sometimes feel like we should switch to a solution more geared for consumers or SOHO. Nevertheless, Fuze provides reliable service at [a] reasonable cost that meets our needs, and because support is rarely needed we are happy with them most of the time, i.e. when support isn't needed.
Support Team - the best I have ever worked with. They help 24/7 on any issue I could come across. Usually it is an item I could fix myself and they fix it and show me how to fix the same issue if I have it in the future.
Contact Center - We do Commercial Collections involving Sales and Collections. We have 50 people on the phone at one time. Contact Center lets a Manager listen live and gives help if the rep needs help selling or collecting.
Pandemic 2020 - without Fuze we would have been unable to work for 3 months. They saved our "rears" since we already had all their services up and running for years.
Fuze is a solid application that is a great asset to the business for our sales staff to make daily calls to clients and candidates. Managers can monitor call data and times to keep up to date with team performance, as well as monitor calls for users on their team. The Fuze/MS Teams integration is an exciting prospect that would be very beneficial to us as a business, for seamless integration between the 2 platforms.
Fuze was built with the end-user in mind. It was built to have a common interface on mobile and desktop. Fuze Web is new, and it also has the exact same interface as the desktop and mobile, and they are still working on the ability to make phone calls from the browser itself, currently it can do meetings just fine. Everything about Fuze was built with the end-user in mind.
We've had a few outages over the past year. More than other vendors I've used. They usually have outages fixed within an hour. The downside is they do not provide root cause of outages. If they do at takes them at least a month to get it to you
Since Fuze runs across multiple devices and platforms they really strived to make a lightweight interface that is optimized for phone calls, chat, and collaboration. The web client loads fast, the chat is always up-to-date, phone calls arrive on-time. The desktop client is the most feature rich and basically it just adds desktop sharing functionality as well as VoIP for calling, and the mobile client doesn't consume a lot of battery, and it stays running to get phone calls, chats, and can do meetings over Wifi, Cellular Data, or Cellular voice.
Our experience with Fuze support has been overall very positive. Their technicians seem to be well trained and able to handle a variety of requests and issues without unnecessary delays or extensive troubleshooting. Fuze allows enough customer access to avoid the need to call support for every little issue but is ready to assist when issues are beyond our capabilities to resolve.
At many of our sites with more than 50 users, Fuze sent someone onsite to train. This worked surprisingly well, as the trainer allowed the users to set the pace and answered TONS of questions. Fuze has a very streamlined training process, their staff is very professional, very knowledgeable and very engaging.
Fuze has vast amounts of training videos and guides on how to use its products and services. There are literally endless-hours of training and I often point end-users to a particular video which addresses the specific needs of the user, for example: how to check voicemail. Or, how to share your desktop, etc.
Personally, I didn't have any trouble getting started with Fuze. It was installed on my computer on my first day and I was good to go! Little to no hiccups. I was not with the company when they first adapted Fuze so I can not speak to the implementation as a whole.
Cisco HCS platform is to be seen as a centralized UC platforms, that can be scalable as an IP Centrex solution and as rich in functionalities as a Cisco CUCM. If you're looking for a solution and your main focus is IM & P functionalities rather than voice, Lync is a good solution. If your focus is voice and telephony, Cisco is a better solution
Fuze was far more expensive and more complicated to set up. Our current platform took a few days to set up with SSO. Our contact center took a bit longer but works amazingly.
Fuze does have scalability limits but most of that is how many end-points they can put on a virtual PBX, or VCX as they call them, I THINK its limit is somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000, but we've not had issues with that because we have put users into various VCXs some by location, some by department or function. Either way, we have 7,000 currently deployed, and are going to end up with over 15,000 when we are done, Fuze is VERY scalable.
