Broadvoice | GoContact vs. NetFortris (discontinued)

I would recommend Broadvoice if a business needs a variety of options for inbound and outbound communication. Examples would be insurance agencies, car dealerships -- just about any business that makes a lot of customer contacts per day. A small retail shop or dry cleaner would not experience the same level of customer engagement. In their case, a regular landline or a designated cell number would work just fine.

Incentivized

Following up with leads and prospects with its Click to Dial feature makes Fonality an effective tool to a sales organization. Misdials and wrong numbers are virtually eradicated by this feature. In addition to saving a few seconds for every call, you add time to your day and are able to conduct more business throughout the year. The Polycom phones are a little basic and finding missed calls is a little difficult. Also, the HUD is a little confusing. Depending on how you dial or how the call comes into the office, the call log may only show your extension instead of the external number being contacted.

Incentivized

• Broadvoice is excellent for customizing/tailoring to a business's specific needs.
• Tech Support is easy to reach, and provides consistent help.
• Onboarding new customers is very thorough and supportive. Changing phone systems is overwhelming and time-consuming. Broadvoice makes it as easy as possible with clear expectations and fantastic training.

Incentivized

• Customer service is outstanding! They were quick to solve any issue we had.
• During set up the Fonality staff member did not close out our set up ticket until we were completely satisfied and ready to use the system on our own.
• We needed a cordless system to use in our small office and it works great!
• I love being able to keep the Fonality line at my desk and then pass it off to an attorney when my work day ends. It has just been a perfect set up.

Incentivized

• When changing users on the URL page there are some steps that can be a bit clunky based on the type of phone you're using.
• Separating users devices into multiple locations inside the URL is nice but you're not able to move those users around if they do change spots in the company.
• For some reason within the b-hive mobile app if I miss a call and then go into the app to check the call and exit the app I still show a notification icon constantly. It seems to be related to the the Chat portion of the app. If you go to that part of the app and refresh when you exit the app the notification icon is gone.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Our last phone system was very outdated and we were left not getting calls that we needed nor having a seamless way to change voicemail or to get voicemail if we were out of the office for longer periods of time. Broadvoice has erased these issues and has really made our agency more responsive.

We've already made a deep investment in the system hardware. We wouldn't be interested in another system at this point! And by the look of my colleagues faces when they see the HUD, I don't think we'd want to switch to a system that would limit us or take away any of these features! We may look at putting the server in the cloud, should internet outages prove to be such a common issue that it is preventing our other locations from functioning smoothly

Incentivized

Broadvoice has been a great investment so far! Its system allows you to easily handle multiple lines & provides you with many useful, easy-to-use, features. It delivers faxes right to your email inbox, how much easier can it get? Through their app, it enables you to easily determine if the call is business or personal related. And you are able to answer calls no matter where you are

Incentivized

When the system works it is wonderful. But I feel the sluggish UI and web interface really kill most of what is good about this product. Other than that the system works like a charm and is very easy to learn the administrative portion of the platform.

Incentivized

AWAYS available to assist when I call. I could not be happier about that!

Incentivized

Fonality has been available to us 99% of the time. There have rarely been any lengthy outages. If any issues do occur, their support staff is available around the clock to help. This is important, since communication is a big part in our company and availability of the phone system is important in maintaining this reliability

Incentivized

Any issues are usually overcome fairly quickly. We don't utilize reports offered by the system - we are a small company and the monitoring that would provide is just not something we would utilize.

Incentivized

Fonality's performance is excellent. The phones work flawlessly and the calls are clear. It is a well put-together system that does not need daily support. It is not complex from a user standpoint, as most of our staff are quick to learn how to use the phones. More systems should strive to work as well as Fonality's

Incentivized

Laura H. our Service Coordinator was exceptionally helpful when the inevitable hiccups occurred along the way. She calmly sought out solutions that kept the project moving so that we could meet our move-out/move-in deadlines. Also, their 24/7 Business Support line is staffed with knowledgeable people that answer my questions quickly and accurately.

Incentivized

Because of their customer support and their attention for details in our problems that we face during our initial stage. We simply love fonality just for the way we are treated when we reach them with our fonality issues - they take it seriously and resolve it as early as possible and the most important part is we dont need to keep on insisting them to do so.

Incentivized

The in-person was done by phone and was GREAT!

Incentivized

Training was provided by the in-house IT administrator. Fonality was able to provide support to the admin, who then assisted the users. It went smoothly and all the details and functions of the system were made available to the office staff. Any questions were answered promptly and if any issues did arise, Fonality was available to answer them

Incentivized

Overcame obstacles of everyone being in different places. Trainer was excellent (do not remember her name!). Open to all questions no matter how technical. The feedback from my colleagues were they were happy

Incentivized

Training was excellent, but most of what they had was webinars and not real world situation for our company's need. It would be better to have them remote in my local computer and test my system using inbound / outbound calls. This would have made it easier to learn and more relevant

Incentivized

It was straightforward to set up. The phone was delivered prior to installation. The script and routing of calls were established prior to installation as well. The on-site technician installed each phone and offered training to anyone who asked. The main setup for hours, calls, and extensions was already set up via online meeting, making the phone install on-site a seamless experience.

Incentivized

Everything from the installation to the implementation has been great with Fonality, there is a lot of freedom to how the system will operate but the freedom comes at a cost of more technical experience to make sure it is configured correctly. The staff is very helpful can will make sure that the system is setup correctly and work perfectly.

Incentivized

There was no comparison for me. Google Voice annoyed anyone calling in, was delayed in relaying missed calls and texts, and was not user friendly in my opinion. Broadvoice is leaps and bounds ahead for business purposes. It addresses each of those concerns and provides a solution that even an entry level professional could use.

I'm a hardware guy, always had panasonic and siemens PBXs. You can't compare them to Fonality. It is so complex to program them and with less functionalities, it is a waste of money and time in my humble opinion. I've also installed my own Asterix servers and used to admin Avaya Enterprise level PBXs and I have a special part in my heart for them but when we started to search for a solution for our new building, Fonality rose among the other services like Vonage. Fonality is the perfect solution for any business that uses Telefone as a marketing and sales platform.

Incentivized

Giving a neutral answer as this is something we do not need and therefore do not utilize.

Incentivized

It is easy to scale this system, as long as you have the proper technical staff available to support it. Adding users and phones is straightforward. The main work involves having the physical network in place and configuring the networking equipment. Overall, it is not that difficult as long as all of this is in place.

Incentivized

• Sadly I can't quite gather any hard numbers since my use of the product don't extend into the admin level where I can see everything. I can say that since installing the phone at my desk though, I've been more reachable by other staff and therefore more present with current happenings in the workplace.
• It took a while to get a line for my desk, so I can compare the before and after very clearly. Communication is like night and day, and any questions or problems other coworkers had that in the past they may have had to deal with themselves, they can now reliably reach me and have a convenient option to. This has improved the relationships between me and others at the workplace.

• Fonality - VOIP features have allowed our staff to be more effective in communicating with their constituents both within and outside the organization
• Fonality resolved a bunch of call restriction issues with student calling capabilities we were having with our previous phone service
• Fonality has enabled us to use much cheaper carrier services.

Incentivized