It works alright, but could use some improvements in interface, UX/UI, and support
August 14, 2017

It works alright, but could use some improvements in interface, UX/UI, and support

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Voice

Overall Satisfaction with Fuze Voice

I can answer this question with a recent experience in mind, so I am fresh with feedback that is unfortunately a poor rating for Fuze. Overall, I have received some support, but it is frequently slow response time, not fully comprehensive, and not all technicians know how to answer questions about their own product.

I will explain the experience below:
I called in on a Wednesday afternoon, had to sit through a hold period, then was asked a lot of questions (name, email, phone number, type of issue in detail), after which I was told someone would get back to me with a ticket number and reply to my issue. After discussing further, we escalated the ticket number to a P4, which requires quick attention of 2-12 hours (instead of 48 hours). After 20 hours go by unanswered, I decided to call Fuze again, and the same support person answered the phone, but denied that my ticket was a P4, and that was why I never got a response. I finally did get a response to one of my two questions. My second question was not answered. I emailed back and after some email tag, Fuze called me (at this point, a full 26 hours after my initial call for support.).

I wish I was kidding when I say that I spent 1 hour 45 minutes on the phone with Fuze support!~ That is not good at all. First I had to re-explain my question, which was more about finding which features of the Fuze meeting online would best meet our needs for an upcoming webinar. The problem is two-fold. First, you have different labels and different interfaces between your computer application of Fuze, and your in-browser Fuze client. You should not have differences between the functionalities or the wording of your products. One says "Open, Private, Large meetings" The other says "webinars". The UX/UI is horrible on the drop-down menu of the "Meetings button. It is not intuitive that "Meeting List" is clickable and expands if it is grayed out text. Just take a look at the colorings of your text as it makes a big difference to intuitively understand if something is clickable or not. If I have missed calls, I should be able to do a one-click "mark all as read" so that I don't have red notifications every time I open this on my phone or in the app. Furthermore, please make a developer change that "Chat" function on a meeting can be turned on or off. Sometimes it is not something we want or need and should be an option available but not permanently on by default.

Secondly, Your Fuze support staff should know your product inside and out. Why did we spend ONE HOUR 45 minutes on the phone together? Because your support person did not directly know that there are different functionalities between the Open and Large Meetings, that it also appears different when you use Chrome vs Firefox vs the Computer application. We spent all of that time creating sample meetings and testing them on different browsers and permissions. Did you also know that an attendee can be promoted to presenter but cannot share their screen (what is the point of having a "presenter" status then?!) These functionalities and features should be presented in a more simple way when I choose how I want my webinar to perform. A simple On/Off switch for all of them (especially chat-for-all, vs private chat) would be fine without confusing us with "Open/Large/Webinar" jargon. The fact that the support technician and I had to define all of this was absurd!

On the plus side, everyone I have spoken to with Fuze is very professional. I have spoken with Dez, Jesse, Atul, and Sando in the past 2 months, and they are all good listeners and understand my issues. But it is not enough. If there are features that your users (your customers!) are having problems with, then escalate it to remedy with your designers and coding to make these functions easier! Please!
I am writing as a common user; I am not an IT person who has implemented this on all computers in our organization) Initially, when we were given new phones, I liked that the directory popped up with one-touch. However after a month, that feature went away. We found that it went away/disappeared. Maybe it was a trial use and we were not supposed to have full directory access, but the feature was missed.
We all had to go through a bit of painful learning with our new phones and features understanding how to retrieve voicemails, why sometimes Fuze worked from our personal phones and sometimes it didn't. If we use personal phones, we had to take the extra step to verify and route the Fuze voice to the app. Now that it is installed, I do enjoy using it.
The entire organization uses Fuze. It was pushed onto our phones and computers with SSO (Single Sign On) for the computer application. Prior to this I am not sure what problems we were having with making phone calls through our phones, but I do know that various departments were using different applications to host online chats/webinars (sometimes Goole Hangouts, sometimes GoToMeeting, Blue Jeans, AnyMeeting, etc, etc). Now that it is a connected feature on all of our desktops, we can host webinars to outside people, presumably with ease. Internally, I don't think anyone uses Fuze desktop webinars/meetings, because it is not intuitive or easy. I only use Fuze meetings for things like hosting a webinar for people not in our organization to plan an event and show PowerPoint [presentations]. Members of my team still use Google Hangouts for these types of external meetings as well. Other departments are also not exclusively using Fuze for collaborative meetings.

As far as the phone voice, I think it works fine, but there are some issues that I find irritating. I have used the conference call feature only a handful of times because sometimes it is easier to do it via Google Hangout (with internal departments).
  • Set up large "conference calls".
  • Voicemail that goes directly to email.
  • Fuze voice app that pushes to a connected personal phone.
  • Arranging large virtual meetings with the exact features important to the meeting -- for example Chat on/off; Presentation style, Buttons are really confusing for a first time user.
  • The phone interface is awful. I would like to get to the directory faster. I also can't find the menu for setting my voicemail away message.
  • The support system is a flawed in the sense that almost each of my calls into the system takes over 5 minutes, just to be put on a ticket, and then have to wait for someone to reach out, which is not in the response time period that was quoted.
It is a phone system suitable for a large organization, however I believe it still requires improvement in areas such as support, interface design, and ease of use for virtual online meetings (what other people would call webinars). Unfortunately, off the top of my head, I cannot name another phone service that I would highly recommend over Fuze, but as I have had many frustrating "support" calls, I have to knock my rating down a few notches.

Fuze Feature Ratings

Hosted PBX
Not Rated
Multi-level Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Not Rated
User templates
Not Rated
Call reports
Not Rated
Directory of employee names
3
Answering rules
4
Call recording
7
Call park
7
Message alerts
7
Video conferencing
6
Audio conferencing
6
Mobile app for iOS
7
Mobile app for Android
Not Rated