GoTo Connect vs. Vonage Business Communications

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

Vonage Business Communications excels in scenarios requiring seamless remote work, such as virtual teams and remote workers. It's also ideal for businesses needing reliable disaster recovery solutions. However, it may be less appropriate for very small businesses with minimal communication needs or those with limited budgets, as the comprehensive features might be more than necessary.

• 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

• Eliminates physical phone consoles that can be pricey and unnecessary for staff.
• Has a companion app that allows you to use your personal cell phone to check messages or make calls.
• The desktop application is easy to use and has a number of customizable settings so that the app can be minimized but alert you of incoming calls.

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

• Relies on internet connectivity (no separate trunk like an on-prem system).
• Phones can be on the expensive side if you purchase through the Vonage store, especially conference phones. Thankfully Vonage is so flexible and is compatible with phones purchased from other places.

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

I think it will be renewed as overall it is a midrange product that mostly does what we need it to

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 thought it had very practical and useful usability. It has a clean and simple interface with large fonts that make it easy to read. It isn't particularly difficult, although figuring out some operations may be a bit challenging. For the most part though, it isn't very difficult to use

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.

Sometimes there is a disconnect between support and customer success. We had an issue where the support team was automatically assigning numbers to our extensions without informing us. This was something that was not communicated to our account manager. I would just recommend to pay attention to your account when changes are made.

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 haven't used anything else too closely related but Skype for Business has a lot of the same issues. Vonage's abilities and pros way outweigh the cons. I don't think I have heard of more viable software to fit our needs in the market right now. It has become essential to my workflow.

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

• Cut down phone hardware expense since the soft phone is free and easier to use.
• Text is becoming a more important and effective way to reach clients. Some will not answer a call or accept voicemail but respond quickly to text messages.
• Allows me to work from anywhere with smart phone app saving hours at work.