Item: Fuze
Rating: 9
Author: Jason Montville

Support Rating

Fuze pre-sales support from our sales rep and the regional sales manager was A+ / 100% and a large part of our choice to select them as our winning vendor in the RFP. Post sales / implementation support has been really good, but occasionally suffers from a feeling of being rushed. We have never failed to get their support folks to help us with what we required at any point, but sometimes have had a struggle to get them to understand our particular needs in some specific situations.

Implementation Rating

The implementation plan / process from Fuze has been outstanding. After going live at several of our 20+ sites already, I feel like we could handle most of the process ourselves from the amount of preparation and understanding they have passed onto us so far.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have a 3 phase migration to convert all of our 20+ locations from a mix of on-premise legacy PBX and other cloud hosted PBX solutions onto the Fuze UCaaS platform. The primary business problems it addresses are simplification (i.e. moving from multiple systems and tools to a single piece of software for all communication needs) as well as management (i.e. moving from utilizing a third party consultant for all move / add / change requests on varying disparate legacy PBX systems to self service and Fuze support)

Pros and Cons

Voice quality. Great hosted PBX features and top of class voice quality. We have not had any of the typical or expected VoIP quality issues that I've seen with other systems over many years in the industry.
User experience. Having a single application (Fuze Desktop) for voice, chat and video simplifies the user experience immensely. Being able to move away from the legacy PBX days of maintaining multiple phone extension lists for each site, and utilizing a single company directory for all communication needs has been great. This includes their support for Okta and AD integration / SSO.
Implementation support. Fuze has been great with both pre-sales and implementation support, for right-sizing the solution to our needs and specific organizational challenges. Their sales team was unique in our RFP process in that they showed to all levels of or IT team (from the service techs up through the CIO) that they were truly listening to us each time they came in for a meeting or demo.

Ease of support. The Fuze portal is powerful but complex, and does not necessarily make it easy to learn how to support their environment. Fuze tech support doe an admirable job of providing these move / add / change services for us, but easier self-service for our IT service center would be helpful.

Alternatives Considered

RingCentral, Skype for Business and 8x8

Our final selection came down to Fuze and RingCentral as the two vendors who met most of our organization's specific requirements. In the final selection it was a combination of Fuze's single user application format and their overall pre-sales handling of our account that won us over. Fuze has a single application for all of their services where RingCentral had multiple applications. Fuze also did a much better job of showing our company that they were listening to what we said and wanted out of a solution, where RingCentral seemed to be more about just 'phoning it in' on the presentation and demo side of pre-sales.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 365, Slack, MS SharePoint

Likelihood to Recommend

Any environment where you have multiple modes of communication and relate tools (i.e. phone, chat, video, etc) would benefit greatly from the single UI / App experience of Fuze. Additionally businesses looking for a solid VoIP hosted solution would see a significant benefit from Fuze.

Fuze UCaaS Review

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Fuze Voice