Item: Fuze
Rating: 8
Author: Howard Feist

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is being used in our corporate office, a satellite office, and a work from home office. We selected it to replace an outdated Centrex system that we did not have the ability to maintain or support. One unanticipated benefit was that when we were shut down during Covid employees could take their phones home and use them as if they were in the office.

Pros and Cons

Voice (call) quality
Network reliability
Communication of any network issues/outages
Capabilities way beyond our needs

Getting support, when necessary, can be challenging especially for a lay person
[The] life cycle of phones seems relatively short and once they are EOL they are no longer supported and customers have to replace them
Billing issues can be difficult to resolve
There does not seem to be a single point of contact/relationship manager any more

Implementation Rating

It was a long time ago and Thinking Phones (as Fuze was called then) did a good job customizing the system to meet our needs and behave somewhat like the PBX we were replacing. The overall onboarding process was efficient and went smoothly. More training would have been helpful, especially as it relates to system administration.

Alternatives Considered

We did not evaluate any other products for our phone service.

Key Insights

Do you think Fuze delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Fuze's feature set?

Yes

Did Fuze live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Fuze go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Fuze again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Excel, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)

Likelihood to Recommend

Fuze has way more capability than we need for our small office so it might be best suited for large installations, call centers, and complex environments. Our office is small and our needs [are] minimal, so when we need support we are challenged to understand the support person due to our lack of technical sophistication. We sometimes feel like we should switch to a solution more geared for consumers or SOHO. Nevertheless, Fuze provides reliable service at [a] reasonable cost that meets our needs, and because support is rarely needed we are happy with them most of the time, i.e. when support isn't needed.

Reliable with extensive capabilites

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Fuze