Fonality, Low cost, good features
July 25, 2014
Fonality, Low cost, good features
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Fonality
We use Fonality for our on premise PBX, our whole organization uses the server and we have VPN tunnels going to Hyderbad, Puerto Rico, Texas and Canada with extensions in those locations. We use the HUD feature on many desktops and we use the HUD on a wall display to display info about call queues and agent extensions. We use the Polycom 550 phone at most desktops, we have the KIRK wireless phone at four other desktops. We have a on premise backup server also. We have one PRI and two SIP providers that connect to the Fonality PBX.
- HUD option is very useful, it alows you to transfer calls from your desktop
- Call fowarding has a lot of functions, I can route call to cell phones, extension, voicemail, even many destinations at the same time
- We use the call montioring and recoring functions, you can barge, wisper and just listen. Each options lets you choose how to interact with a call in progress
- The dial plan (call routing) alows you to route calls to a provider based on what the user dials at their phone
- The system is compatible with Polycom phones.
- The queue features are really good.
- System flexibility is pretty good as you can route calls pretty good.
- Technical support is a crap shoot. Technical support can go from great to totally awful. Some techs know their stuff while others can take your server off line.
- All call record does not come standard and you need to keep call recording going manually.
- We have calls drop from time to time and we still to this day do not have an answer as why this is happening.
- If you want to use phones you purchased on your own you will spend so much to have them provision the phone you will find yourself buying the over priced phones from them. Basically it cost more to buy your own phones than to buy the phones from them.
- If you have a lot of remote phones you will need a link server as remote phones will go unreachable and go off line if they can not communicate with the server in a timely fashion.
- Cost of ownership is low, we have looked at other phone systems and they seem to always cost more
- Dropped call is a big problem, we still have this issue and when a customer complains that the rep hung up you need to call Fonalty to get them to tell you how the call disconnected
- Allthough it is a manual process the call recording function is very useful as we can listen to a call to determine what really happened during that call that the customer is complaining about
- The call foward feature has a lot of choces and functions, like when to foward, where to foward
- ** Big negative ++ you can not use the foward function to answer calls in a queue, it must be a physical phone on the pbx to take queue calls. You can take other direct calls on a cell phone but no queue calls on a cell phone.
Fonality has the lowest cost of ownership and that is the main reason we stay with fonalty. The features are acceptable, as I said before some things could be better like the call recording is a manual process. I did not orginally choose fonality but whenever I tried to replace it the other PBX's cost more and I could not get the owner to agree to switch to another PBX