Likelihood to Recommend For Insurance agencies, small practices, small call centers, anyone that need call forwarding or work with his number remotely while away from office. I can't list all the things I'm gaining as a Fonality customer. From the installation process, the configuration phase with the technicians, the account managers, every Fonality employee was professional and savvy. I was a contact center specialist for more than 10 years and I can tell you that I've never been this happy with a service! Never! Probably if you need a more complex solution and you have an enterprise level company having your own hardware gives you more control over your calls and how to manage them. But again, I think that Fonality can cover most scenarios without the need of a huge investment.
Read full review We have had great service with Nextiva Business Phone Service and it is reliable and reasonably priced for the offered features. User Friendly and minimal issues. We are able to control most of the set up for new users and or new phones when needed. Only would like to see the app - Nextiva One be enhanced with more features than it currently has.
Read full review Pros From an administrator's perspective, Fonality makes administering the company's phone system easy. Configuration menus and setup options are logically structured and easy to understand. Technical support has been very good. Early on in our deployment, we had some nagging voice quality issues which were network related. Fonality provided exceptional support even though it was not technically their issue. It is important to know ahead of time how well your vendors work with other vendors for integrated services like a VOIP telephone system. Fonality support demonstrated their patience and perseverance in helping us resolve our issues. Although we don't use remote office capabilities much, the ability to set up phones on the system in remote locations has been a significant help to several of our departments. Read full review Up-time, We've never had any sort of extended downtime because of Nextiva Business Phone Service, there services just work Provisioning of supported devices is very easy to do and is almost automatic, this makes new device roll out especially smooth The call flow functionality is especially smooth and intuitive to setup. Their customer service is very effective and I've never waited more than 2 days for a solution, that's for more complicated issues too. Read full review Cons Bugginess - Some things just really need some tweaking. I had to get very creative with my call routing and hold music, because the in-queue announcements don't work right at all. For example, even set to 'play once' it would loop the 'you are the first caller' announcement over and over, and cause call drops. Or my caller-name ID, which shows the registered user's name on each line on outgoing calls, even though it's not set to such anywhere in the CP settings. Support - I'll give them 50/50 on this. My experience with Verizon VCE was everyone playing hot potato with issues and saying it was the responsibility of another department, meaning several phone calls and lots of hold time. Fonality doesn't have that issue, I've never really been passed around or blown off. However, some of the 'offshore' CS reps are... wow. I spent about half a dozen emails back and forth with two of them, trying to figure out why queues I deleted from the CP randomly and consistently reappeared in the HUD. Most of those emails were spent trying to explain that no, my issue was NOT that I wanted to create those queues again in the CP. Read full review The use of two apps when you're a supervisor. We have to use Unity and the Nextiva app instead of one app. It can be cumbersome. Better integration with CRM's. We use Zendesk and it works ok as it does pull up customer records if we have their phone number on file. But it would be better if we could have more functionality from one place and have it write to the CRM directly. Accept higher quality audio for greeting recordings. We had to trim the file size down several times losing a lot of audio quality in the process. Mono is fine since callers will only need to hear the one channel. But the Hz limit and file size limit were rough. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We've already made a deep investment in the system hardware. We wouldn't be interested in another system at this point! And by the look of my colleagues faces when they see the HUD, I don't think we'd want to switch to a system that would limit us or take away any of these features! We may look at putting the server in the cloud, should internet outages prove to be such a common issue that it is preventing our other locations from functioning smoothly
Read full review Its user friendly, easy to use and has been very reliable. We have nothing but good things to say about our service with Nextiva Business Phone Service. When needed their support team has always resolved any and all issues one way or another. They have been helpful, knowledgeable and very friendly. The features vs the cost is wonderful compared to other service providers.
Read full review Usability Overall excellent usability, with a few adjustments I feel this is the absolute best VoIP system out there. Just a clarification on the licences and limit the interface to reflect what licence we have. There should be a back or redunancy feature to Fonality Server, If there was a mistake we should be able to resort back to a usable state asap. Before implementing changes to the server, there should be a trial or sample of the changes to make sure it behaves as intended before effecting customer experience. It would be nice to have a demo version of Fonality interface so possible clients can truly evauluate the system. Because of the quality, it would have made it easier to convince the owners to make the transition sooner
Read full review Nextiva Business Phone Service system is very usable. We have desk phones, that were included at no cost. The function just as one would expect from an office phone system. I can also answer my calls from my PC and even on my cell phone if I have to leave the office.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Fonality has been available to us 99% of the time. There have rarely been any lengthy outages. If any issues do occur, their support staff is available around the clock to help. This is important, since communication is a big part in our company and availability of the phone system is important in maintaining this reliability
Read full review We have not yet experienced any issues the Nextiva Business Phone Service availability. It has always worked as needed.
Read full review Performance Fonality's performance is excellent. The phones work flawlessly and the calls are clear. It is a well put-together system that does not need daily support. It is not complex from a user standpoint, as most of our staff are quick to learn how to use the phones. More systems should strive to work as well as Fonality's
Read full review Nextiva Business Phone Service performance is great. The call quality is much better than our old analog land lines at a fraction of the cost.
Read full review Support Rating Because of their customer support and their attention for details in our problems that we face during our initial stage. We simply love fonality just for the way we are treated when we reach them with our fonality issues - they take it seriously and resolve it as early as possible and the most important part is we dont need to keep on insisting them to do so.
Read full review Support is great. We usually get someone on the phone; they answer our questions and help us with our issues. They are responsive when we call, and there is also a wealth of information on their online help center, which will typically answer our question or send us in the right direction.
Read full review In-Person Training Training was provided by the in-house IT administrator. Fonality was able to provide support to the admin, who then assisted the users. It went smoothly and all the details and functions of the system were made available to the office staff. Any questions were answered promptly and if any issues did arise, Fonality was available to answer them
Read full review Online Training Training was excellent, but most of what they had was webinars and not real world situation for our company's need. It would be better to have them remote in my local computer and test my system using inbound / outbound calls. This would have made it easier to learn and more relevant
Read full review The training we received from Nextiva Business Phone Service was thorough, and detailed. It also did not take very long.
Read full review Implementation Rating Everything from the installation to the implementation has been great with Fonality, there is a lot of freedom to how the system will operate but the freedom comes at a cost of more technical experience to make sure it is configured correctly. The staff is very helpful can will make sure that the system is setup correctly and work perfectly.
Read full review No was done by Agency Owner and was done with the help of Nextiva Support and Sales team. Went very well and has been working great since then. Was originally only two phones and then we continue to add to that. We did not have any reported issues and was a great experience for our Agency and Small Business.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I have not used any other VoIP system that I have been paying for. I hope that Fonality proves itself enough to where I will not have to switch. So far, for the price and the functionality, this is my recommendation for small businesses. I might recommend going with a more high end phone to increase functionality, but other than that, the system is one I would definitely recommend.
Read full review We switched for better uptime, ease of use, and better tech support and got all that from Nextiva. We were constantly losing connection with our previous provider, a package service for internet and phone. The web portal is much easier to use, and the call center offers many more features.
Read full review Scalability It is easy to scale this system, as long as you have the proper technical staff available to support it. Adding users and phones is straightforward. The main work involves having the physical network in place and configuring the networking equipment. Overall, it is not that difficult as long as all of this is in place.
Read full review We have not yet needed top scale up our phone system yet, but I can tell that it will be very quick and effortless to do so when the need arises.
Read full review Return on Investment We are still new to Fonality, but having the flexability has proven quite successful thus far. The management of incoming calls and voicemail messages has really helped us to be able to follow up with potential clients. The service at Fonality helped our new business take a leap into 2017, and we expect much growth with the continued use of Fonality. Read full review ROI - we are saving money, a lot of money, and we have a MUCH better phone system Consolidation - we migrated 6 different phone systems in 6 different counties into one, and it's been wonderful! Management - managing this system is so much better than Mitel, Panasonic, and any other system I have used. We are able to assign rights to certain staff to also make changes, and it's user friendly and almost fool proof. Read full review ScreenShots