GoTo Connect

GoTo Connect is the phone system used by our case management department both with in house employees and at home employees. We also use it to conduct meetings and have training sessions. We have multiple lines that we assign users to based on skill, position, need etc. We also have a receptionist and customer service workers that field and reroute calls.

I heavily used the admin tools to measure a variety of statistics. With employees dedicated to specific functions and future in our office, we could easily control which employees had access to specific features required for their roles. We could track and monitor who was making/receiving calls and who was responsible for tracking and responding to emails and messages in real time.

It had made it much easier to measure and control call volume and make sure that we have always have enough staff on the phones during the peak call times of our business hours.

The chic user platform really stands out to me as compared to others. It is incredibly easy to navigate. The menus and windows in the application make it easy to find what you're looking for and makes accessing the features easy to do as well.

It is our primary telephone system. We also use it during the pandemic to work remotely. That function is completely transparent to our clients. We have 42 independent contractors. Each has a voice mail. They have the option of answering calls immediately or of getting their voice messages by e-mail.

It is all in one. We can work transparently from any location.

Clint transparent call handling

Yes, unlimited voice mail boxes for users without handsets at no charge

I would not

No, not necessary

No

GoToConnect was used in my organization as a way to keep up with day-to-day tasks between employees. The need stemmed from everyone working in separate office spaces, yet our work had some overlap. Corresponding through e-mail sometimes can get messy and it is important to keep administrative type work in a different "space" than typical services with clients. It's been easy to integrate new users and even a new office manager- which solves the problem of onboarding for our evolving team.

Having an all-in-one system is essential with the new hybrid workplace. It allows us to stay more connected to our colleagues over a distance. As a project manager it is also helpful in keeping track of and managing many employees, as the system holds information that otherwise would be scattered in multiple spaces.

Having all communications through one piece of software has been ideal for our hybrid workplace. It better helps to keep track of previous information sent through messaging and call logs. You have the ability to access these communications anywhere you happen to be, via mobile or desktop apps and with voicemails even going straight to your email for optimal workflow.

I have only seen additional features from competitors compared to the features list of GoTo Connect. It is the small things that other companies offer that begin to add up to something tangible. I have nto exhausted the list of features from this software, but it just does not have the aesthetics that other options have which sems to be it's biggest downfall in my opinion.

If looking for another meeting/talk/messaging software I would likely visit TrustRadius before making a decision. Hearing about firsthand experience of companies similar in size and function to our own would help in finding the best fit. I believe I would have had a better understanding of how GoTo Connect met the basics, but perhaps was better aligned with an older workforce than some of its more modern counterparts.

Premium was not needed at the time of use, but would need to upgrade if using today. Premium is not more expensive, but allows for many more users. Not many people would be okay with the 4 user limit of the basic version. Typically there are more people in the workplace or many more clients involved in a business so this seems to be an odd starting number to me.

I did not receive additional support outside of onboarding.

We use GoTo Connect (formerly Jive) for all our entire company's phone system. Although we are a smaller company, we have employees spread across the country and a VOIP service instead of a traditional landline service is incredibly valuable to us, particularly because of the central administration abilities of the Jive/GoTo Connect system.

Frankly, we have not used GoTo Connect to its fullest potential. We use separate services for messaging and video conferencing (Trillian and Zoom, respectively). I suppose our organization could transition to the GoTo Connect version of these services, but the staff's familiarity with the other tools, and their affordability, have made such a switch a low priority. Honestly, all we need are phones, and GoTo Connect handles that quite well.

Conference lines and phone conferencing are clearly the most important part of this service for us. It performs these tasks quite well. Few, if any, complaints in this area.

I find it unlikely that GoTo Connect would provide services any different than others who offer similar service. In fact, the add-ons can be a distraction from the product's main use - VOIP telephony.

We initially chose GoTo Connect (which, at the time was called "Jive") simply because they got OK reviews, had good online documentation, and were a little bit less expensive than the competition. Really, I'm sure a number of other services would have done the job just as well, but we settled on Jive, and have been quite happy since making that selection. The selection was a bit difficult because so much of the competition offered the same products. The comparisons were apples-to-apples. We just picked the one with good documentation and good pricing.

We did not purchase premium support. The standard support was sufficient and met our needs well.

I mentioned this in a previous comment, but I will expand on it. Our phones are Yealink T46G's. We have a few dozen of these throughout our office. The older firmware on these phones would not allow you to use a USB Wi-Fi dongle for communication. They had to be wired. We were moving to a new building that did not have ethernet strung throughout the facility, so we had to use wi-fi for our VOIP phone system. When you autoprovision these phones, GoTo Connect will check your phone's firmware version, and if it doesn't match theirs, it will make that change automatically. In any case, the version that GoTo Connect was pushing to our T46G's was an old version that did not support Wi-Fi. The manufacturer had issued some firmware updates that added this much needed feature, so I contacted support and asked them if they would replace the version they provisioned with the new one. They agreed to do so, and by doing that, they saved us thousands of dollars, preventing the need to either A: string ethernet throughout our new bulding, or B: buy new phones that had built-in Wi-Fi. It was a great solution.