Evolve IP Unified Communications vs. Google Voice

For small locations, it's perfect but maybe not for larger locations with more then 50 people. It would depend on your bandwidth availability and what type of redundancy you have in place.

[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

• Unified Communications
• Centralized management of a distributed phone system
• Training

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

• There are so many ways they need to improve. I can't list them all.
• First off, their tech support is the worst I've ever seen. They generally break something on at least half the tickets we submit. New accounts always have some kind of issue and it is amazing when one works 100%. Response times were terrible too. It could take 2-8 days just to get a new account setup.
• Reporting is inaccurate. Even trying to get it configured with their support team was a hassle and didn't work and wasn't even our data.
• Billing had mistakes often and there could be 3 SKUs for the same item. Same item number, description has the same words in a different order.
• Admin features are lacking. We can't even change the physical phone on an account. We can't create new accounts. Very limited options.
• The admin portal info is inaccurate. Some accounts show no phone associated even though they have one that is working on their account.
• There are times that randomly something stops working and not even the tier 1 support can fix it - a checkbox could "uncheck" itself magically and neither we nor the tier 1 tech can check the box again.
• When we ask to have licenses removed, they don't remove all the licenses. Then, when we re-use that DID (which is what the account is tied to) for a new user, the license applies to them - for instance, call recording. And we didn't ask for call recording on that new user.
• UC-One crashes all the time. It frustrates our users and has a few commonly seen issues.

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

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

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

Support? If I could do everything myself with the time I don't have, I would do it better than their support. I don't like saying it that way, but it is the truth. We hired someone from another company that also used Evolve IP and when they found out that is what we used here, he expressed all of the same complaints and stories that we had.

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

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

Evolve is worse than Dialpad, Vonage, RingCentral, Genesys, MS Teams, 8x8, and any other system I've dealt with. These mentioned all have better features, work well, are simple to use and admin, and some of them cost less.

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

• Cost and time savings over supporting and maintaining on-premise PBX equipment.
• Increased flexibility for employees to stay connected from a variety of locations.
• Increased productivity in our phone room by allowing the use of a soft-client that can integrate into our workflows via features such as click-to-dial.

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