Fonality is better hosted VoIP
January 25, 2017
Fonality is better hosted VoIP
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Fonality
We are using Fonality for telecom for a 12-person sales floor. Fonality provides call routing and distribution options to evenly distribute our calls among 3-12 agents working at any time.
- Excellent pricing - the per-seat charge is about average, but many competitors are charging additional monthly fees to add additional call groups/queues. Verizon VCE wanted an additional $15/mo/call queue agent, which would've been an extra $180/mo for our small sales floor.
- Customization - I was able to set up call routing to support my company's rather unique desires. We had a key system for many years and users were entrenched in that manual call routing. I was able to set up pushbutton blind transfers and call queues for each person.
- The HUD system - I honestly thought it would go over like a fart in church given our employees' old-school-ness, but the entire sales floor uses the HUD even though we all have full-featured desk phones. We're able to redirect or steal calls as needed, log others in or out, see who is on the phone with whom, how many people are logged in, and how many calls are waiting to be answered.
- Reliability - We switched after Verizon VCE's 3-day recurring outage in October '16. I've only had the system functioning for about 60 days, but in that time Fonality has only had one brief partial outage, which I believe was caused by Level 3 Communications. I'm talking 15 minutes or less... less time than it took to find the right department at Verizon and be told that their regional outage was caused by my system.
- 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.
- Customers are able to directly reach the person they want to speak to, when they're trying to reach someone in particular, versus our old system of putting them on hold and yelling out which line. This has improved our customer service, and efficiency, tremendously.
- Fonality is several hundreds of dollars per month cheaper than Verizon VCE would've been to have the same core features, and VCE still would have been missing several key things, such as my ability to customize phone configurations.
- More evenly distributing the workload has allowed several employees, myself included, to direct more of their time to the other duties they already had, rather than waiting until after hours.
- Verizon
I think we've pretty well covered all the reasons I prefer Fonality over Verizon VCE in the other sections, and what Fonality does better. I will add that what led me to Fonality was a lot of searching out top-rated VoIP companies, and running down what features they offered at what prices. Fonality got me interested enough to call, and honestly, once the salesman showed me what they offered, their reliability ratings, and the price, I decided to stop shopping.