Fuze vs. Google Voice

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.

Incentivized

[Google Voice is] great if you have a workforce that needs to make calls for business purposes from their personal mobile device, while keeping their personal phone number private. If you have a large company with its own telecom system, it probably won't be necessary if employees already have their own landlines or separate work phones.

Incentivized

• Availability to use your work number anytime anywhere. Our recruiters make themselves available as much as they can. Being able to answer calls from their worklines while not in the office and make calls from their work numbers is a big deal.
• Setting up new phones and numbers is very easy with their hub. I don't always have to go directly to their support team to setup new users. As long as I have the mac address of the phone and we have free numbers I can set a new user up in minutes.
• Their support team is great as well. If I do need to get help with an issue their support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable about their systems. Their team is also able to fix most support cases within the same day.

Incentivized

• Google Voice has been great for setting up additional phone lines and numbers.
• The voicemail inbox is a great feature and you can see when messages come in online and listen to the messages from your computer.
• Google Voice allows us to have multiple phone numbers and lines for specific business purposes.

Incentivized

• Desktop application stability and compatibility with certain hardware.
• Better installation - Per-user and per-computer installs sometimes compete with one another and/or upgrades fail to install.
• [The] desktop app is not best for touchscreen-enabled devices due to lack of ability to scroll through messages using a finger or stylus.

Incentivized

• It can be tricky to configure exactly how you want it. If you are particular about which voicemail greeting goes to which number, and how it appears when it rings through to the phone - it can take a good amount of work to set it up properly.

Incentivized

Cost and support and the primary driving factors. The management team has been extremely responsive and assisting even with the obstacles and hurdles we experienced during implementation. We are still learning how best to manage the solution and comfort and pleasure with the solution will increase as our knowledge and skillsets improve.

Incentivized

It's user friendly, how to use it is self explanatory, they support all their own options while someone like Phone Booth uses a third party. I can cancel Google Voice anytime and I choose how much I spend with Google Voice

For most user, Fuze is very user friendly and easy to get use to. When it comes to the admin portal, it can be a little more challenging. There are also a lot of feature you unable to do as an admin that would normally be accessible. This cause the admin to have to rely on Fuze support, which could delay the resolution of a problem

Incentivized

I haven't had problems with dropped calls, bad reception, lost recordings - everything works the way it should. The iOS app is easy to use, and the process is easy to explain to other people. It's also the cheapest way I've found to call internationally - I've used it to interview people from London and Austraila.

Incentivized

We've had a few outages over the past year. More than other vendors I've used. They usually have outages fixed within an hour. The downside is they do not provide root cause of outages. If they do at takes them at least a month to get it to you

Incentivized

Since Fuze runs across multiple devices and platforms they really strived to make a lightweight interface that is optimized for phone calls, chat, and collaboration. The web client loads fast, the chat is always up-to-date, phone calls arrive on-time. The desktop client is the most feature rich and basically it just adds desktop sharing functionality as well as VoIP for calling, and the mobile client doesn't consume a lot of battery, and it stays running to get phone calls, chats, and can do meetings over Wifi, Cellular Data, or Cellular voice.

Incentivized

Our experience with Fuze support has been overall very positive. Their technicians seem to be well trained and able to handle a variety of requests and issues without unnecessary delays or extensive troubleshooting. Fuze allows enough customer access to avoid the need to call support for every little issue but is ready to assist when issues are beyond our capabilities to resolve.

Incentivized

They do not offer support unless you have the Business account for Google Voice under G Suite. This is tough, because Google doesn't really have a customer support team for this service, so when it gets shut down for a few hours, we have no choice but to wait it out. But this doesn't happen that often, which is great.

Incentivized

At many of our sites with more than 50 users, Fuze sent someone onsite to train. This worked surprisingly well, as the trainer allowed the users to set the pace and answered TONS of questions. Fuze has a very streamlined training process, their staff is very professional, very knowledgeable and very engaging.

Incentivized

Fuze has vast amounts of training videos and guides on how to use its products and services. There are literally endless-hours of training and I often point end-users to a particular video which addresses the specific needs of the user, for example: how to check voicemail. Or, how to share your desktop, etc.

Incentivized

Personally, I didn't have any trouble getting started with Fuze. It was installed on my computer on my first day and I was good to go! Little to no hiccups. I was not with the company when they first adapted Fuze so I can not speak to the implementation as a whole.

Incentivized

It is a pretty seamless program to transfer to, even for people who either have little experience with these programs or people who were stuck on Skype

Incentivized

We have had several vendors try to get our phone business, and I have always given my opinion to management why we need to stay with Fuze. Customer service is wonderful and the support staff puts up with me and they are very helpful. We use another company to do our dialing campaigns. Not sure why, but I think the reason was Fuze didn't offer that service. Fuze from the beginning appealed to our business due to the fact that it seemed so easy to use and manage.

Incentivized

Google Voice at the peak of its adoption did serve as a very real and effective solution. However bugs persisted, and innovation lacked, and support for the product soon declined. However, there are several other solutions provided that focus on making one product as best as it could be. Google made it clear to me as a customer, that this was a backup for a backup. When you look at the simplicity on its own, it appears to be fantastic, however as you dive deeper, and experience its lack of smooth edges, you find that it's been built by engineers who were given a scope, rather than solving for a use case and listening to customer feedback. Many of the other solutions available on the market, see this opportunity. This is why voice communication is a growing SaaS vertical, albeit competitive. Understanding the customer here is key, and Google understands what drives value to the larger organization. As a business owner, I understand, that when a business has to allocate resources, another department, or service suffers. Unfortunately this product feels to be the one that has met that fate

Incentivized

Fuze does have scalability limits but most of that is how many end-points they can put on a virtual PBX, or VCX as they call them, I THINK its limit is somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000, but we've not had issues with that because we have put users into various VCXs some by location, some by department or function. Either way, we have 7,000 currently deployed, and are going to end up with over 15,000 when we are done, Fuze is VERY scalable.

Incentivized

• We receive constant negative feedback from mangers about the system not functioning correctly. (This is mainly due to lack of support from Fuze)
• This has had a positive impact in that the system is cheaper and we are missing less calls due to the functionality of the system.

Incentivized

• Google Voice has saved us a lot of time in regards to overall productivity.
• Google Voice allows us to operate at a greater scale than without it.
• Google voice allows us to track which advertisements are working best.
• Google Voice allows us to spend less time listening to voicemails.

Incentivized