NetFortris (discontinued)

Formerly Fonality

As stated, I inherited the Fonality on-premise server(s) I support. The organization's principals have requested staying with this system due to its low cost of ownership. Comparing to other on-premise systems, such as a generic Asterisk system, it offers some support (although I would probably choose community-based Asterisk support over the paid NetFortris support). Not listed, I do also have experience with GrandStream UCM IP PBX, which would be my go-to for an out of the box on-premise IP PBX, due to its low cost and simplicity. Overall though, I prefer cloud-hosted voice such as Vonage Business Cloud or RingCentral over any on-premise solution due to their simplicity, support, and low costs.

I'm a hardware guy, always had panasonic and siemens PBXs. You can't compare them to Fonality. It is so complex to program them and with less functionalities, it is a waste of money and time in my humble opinion. I've also installed my own Asterix servers and used to admin Avaya Enterprise level PBXs and I have a special part in my heart for them but when we started to search for a solution for our new building, Fonality rose among the other services like Vonage. Fonality is the perfect solution for any business that uses Telefone as a marketing and sales platform.

At the time, we were interested in a site-based solution and Fonality's hosted service was not available yet. Fonality was much more cost-effective than the other solutions we reviewed, while still providing the features we were interested in.

Intermedia was our old system set up by my predecessor. This system was crashing often during our high season which is what pushed us to look into a new phone system. For Intermedia, call quality was poor and the phone system was set up just like your old grandma's phone system. Regardless of time of day or year, calls ring 8 times then go to VM. Now we have a business schedule with Fonality that reads the appropriate message for better customer service. The other issue is we would be speaking with customers on the phone and when an inbound call comes in, we would have to put our call on hold to simply put another customer on hold. This interruption is unacceptable. Not only is Fonality $10 cheaper, but it provides much better reliability (selling point to the owners) but also provides great features for agents and their managers to improve productivity. This transition has been a major upgrade for our company's call center.

We selected Fonality for ease of use and the HUD portal. One of the partners in the business has used Fonality in the past and had great confidence in it's success for this new endeavor. It has proven to be successful thus far and I hope to be able to update this review in a year's time with continued excellent service!