Google Voice vs. GoTo Connect

[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

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

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 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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

• 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

• 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