Fair and Balanced
December 14, 2016
Fair and Balanced
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Fonality
We use Fonality as our primary telephone system for the entire company. It also supports our helpdesk operations so we have a call queue configured to distribute support calls.
Pros
- The HUD application provides a great dashboard for seeing who is on the phone, who they are talking to as well as who is logged into the support queue.
- The cloud deployment has proven to be pretty reliable and trouble free for remote employees using a traditional handset.
- The administration console is pretty user friendly for managing the system.
Cons
- The softphone options have not proven particularly reliable. The HUDweb application has some potential as far as a visual tool, but has just proven way too unreliable for everyday use. Would not recommend it for use. With that being said, a new softphone application is to be released on 12/16/16, so that may render use of HUDweb obsolete. Am hopeful the dedicated softphone application will prove worthy.
- HUD Mobile is also less than an ideal solution. Not sure if the mobile OS is to blame for some of the disappointment, but having to run the mobile application in the foreground in order to receive calls is not really practical. Also, the design of the application is not very efficient as it's not obvious immediately how to get to the keypad and direct dialing an extension is not working for us. It does however make calls and can work, but it's more of a hassle than it's really worth. My remote sales team just uses their carrier minutes for calls.
- The click to call feature while it has worked for us in the past, it has also caused issues with adding extra characters and logos in random areas of email messages, so our users have pretty much turned that feature off.
- With the move to the cloud deployment our support costs have dropped considerably.
- On the negative side, our sales force has not been able to take advantage of the softphone and mobile app features, so management has lost some ability to monitor productivity.
- Not having a seamless integration of extensions between our internal and remote works has disrupted communications to some extent as well as decreased productivity a bit.
- 8x8 and RingCentral
We looked at 8x8 and RingCentral but ultimately opted to move our existing Fonality PBXtra installation to the Fonality cloud because the call queue monitoring features offered the most for the money. The HUD application is also a big selling point in favor of Fonality. Also, since we were only switching the underlying hardware deployment, we didn't have a learning curve to overcome with a new system. Pricewise, Fonality landed in between 8x8 and RingCentral for the basic services, but the other two didn't offer the same feature set we already had with the Call Center option so the price was actually the lowest with that factored in.
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