GoTo Connect vs. Lumen Next-Gen Voice

I would give it a 10 out of 10 rating just because of the service and easiness it has offered us, which made our work effortless and stress-free. I do recall an instance where one of our clients' medical conditions suddenly deteriorated while he was traveling overseas. The doctors there could not understand his situation at that time. He asked them to connect with our team, and our team guided them with his medical records, and his life was saved

[CenturyLink Enterprise Voice SIP is] good for environments that require tried and true SIP services, where high-quality voice is a requirement, and backed by a large, global company, with global footprint. CenturyLink voice is also well-suited to environments that want to use MPLS to interconnect their offices, as the same voice circuits can be used for data as well; however, the circuits are relatively expensive, even as far as MPLS goes, and watch out for Lumen's "fees" that often aren't included when you see their quote. Also beware if you require a rapid turn-up or have a very small or inexperienced staff, as MPLS with BGP deployments are great once they're up and running, but can be complex to design and implement.

Incentivized

• GoTo Connect is a much more cost-effective solution rather than separate phone lines and video conferencing tools.
• I conduct daily team meetings and project brainstorming sessions using video conferencing using GoTo Connect.
• It integrates smoothly with our regularly used tools like Google Drive and has become very easy to share the documents we use.

Incentivized

• Reliable service
• Supports wide range of key features
• They do have high levels of support where you can receive real answers

Incentivized

• Making a dedicated button for "mute all" (other than yourself) for when someone "walks off before they mute"/has to quickly leave their computer....and FORGOT to Mute. Particularly when dogs are barking when someone working from home has a visitor at the door
• I'd like to see some of the functionality from GoTo Webinar enabled for GoTo Connect: see who's "actively watching" vs has their computer screen on another application

Incentivized

• Lumen-Centurylink has suffered from many noticeable outages in the last few years - this is a blow to their reputation that they still have to recover from.
• Lumen-CenturyLink does not peer well enough with OTHER carriers - they depend on their own network to give you SIP, which means less true redundancy.
• Lumen-CenturyLink needs a better customer portal/interface to handle failover, see the real-time status, etc.

Incentivized

They are knocking it out of the park on all fronts. I love the service and support I am receiving and have no complaints. If they raised their prices substantially I would reconsider but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. They would have to mess up something consistently moving forward to make me want to move

Incentivized

Overall, it's a decent product for the price. It has the basic features our company needed when it was brand new and was not overly difficult to set up. As we've grown, it's become increasingly difficult to build out the features we want to implement within the PBX, and customer support can be less than helpful. Many of the more advanced features (dial plans, queues, etc.) take a lot of research to understand how to implement. Some of the features we paid for weren't even available when we were attempting to set them up.

Incentivized

I have never experienced or heard of unplanned outages when it comes to GoTo Connect. Most of the time the unplanned outage is always local power at a site or internet service provider having an unplanned outage. GoTo's service has never failed any of our orgs yet that I know of.

Incentivized

There is no lag in phone calls. There is no background noise or static/fuzz. Calls are crystal clear. With other dialers and phone systems, I have experienced delays between dialogue or delays with the caller picking up the phone and then being able to hear you. We do not experience this with Go To Connect.

Incentivized

Support used to be great when it was Jive support out of Utah. Now that they've offshored support it can be difficult to get a response. Our most common issues are least cost routing, and we run into support pushing back in stead of just figuring out which upstream carrier is having an issue like they used to. We often have to get our account manager involved, who is pretty strong.

SIP service support is definitely improving. A few years ago I would have rated them a 2. Now a 7. But, Lumen still needs a better portal experience to report and see a real-time status. Also to manage SIP failover functions in a WYSIWIG/GUI interface. When Lumen's network breaks in a larger outage, there are long hold times and support is not good.

Incentivized

The training videos could be more in-depth. This would help our user base so that they can feel impowered to look up information that they need without having to ask our admins every time they have a question about the system. Online training videos are also inferior to an actual person explaining systems.

Incentivized

The biggest challenge from implementation was deconstructing the mess that was our old system's config. After doing so, I believe there were primarily some methods that have worked better in the long run to implement up front, such as separating menus into separate dial plans for simpler updates, routing/re-routing.

Incentivized

I have nothing personal against Broadvoice and found their team pleasant to work with. The greatest difference has been the administrative portals. Where Broadvoice was confusing and I still hadn't really been able to figure it out over a period of years past some basic functions, I still had to call to get support just to provision or update phones. With GoTo, I had a functional understanding within a week and a couple years in, it is smooth sailing and no angst when needing to update or troubleshoot an issue and I have access to everything without a phone call. It is true freedom to meet my company's needs.

Incentivized

I have found a better solution is to run two different carriers through SD-WAN (such as Bigleaf or Velocloud MSR) and use a provider like BCMOne (formerly NexVortex) to manage the SIP. BCMOne/Nexvortex is an AWESOME SIP provider with better planning, deployment, and technical support. When paired with redundant internet paths on SD-WAN (BigLeaf or Velocloud) a very resilient solution is created.

Incentivized

Its not readily apparent to me, other than cost, where you would run into any issues with larger scale deployments. When we went live on the product, the Jive team was always willing to do mass updates for us on our extensions, users, etc. in the system, so we didn't have to do too much manual one-by-one updates.

• We stopped losing calls due to poor routing or not being able to make them.
• It has helped us to be able to answer calls at any time or place, even outside of company hours.
• We have the possibility to access these conversations from our CRM system.

Incentivized

• Faster learning
• Increased numbers of calls
• Organization of calls

Incentivized