GoTo Connect vs. NetFortris (discontinued)

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

Following up with leads and prospects with its Click to Dial feature makes Fonality an effective tool to a sales organization. Misdials and wrong numbers are virtually eradicated by this feature. In addition to saving a few seconds for every call, you add time to your day and are able to conduct more business throughout the year. The Polycom phones are a little basic and finding missed calls is a little difficult. Also, the HUD is a little confusing. Depending on how you dial or how the call comes into the office, the call log may only show your extension instead of the external number being contacted.

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

• Customer service is outstanding! They were quick to solve any issue we had.
• During set up the Fonality staff member did not close out our set up ticket until we were completely satisfied and ready to use the system on our own.
• We needed a cordless system to use in our small office and it works great!
• I love being able to keep the Fonality line at my desk and then pass it off to an attorney when my work day ends. It has just been a perfect set up.

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

• Bugginess - Some things just really need some tweaking. I had to get very creative with my call routing and hold music, because the in-queue announcements don't work right at all. For example, even set to 'play once' it would loop the 'you are the first caller' announcement over and over, and cause call drops. Or my caller-name ID, which shows the registered user's name on each line on outgoing calls, even though it's not set to such anywhere in the CP settings.
• Support - I'll give them 50/50 on this. My experience with Verizon VCE was everyone playing hot potato with issues and saying it was the responsibility of another department, meaning several phone calls and lots of hold time. Fonality doesn't have that issue, I've never really been passed around or blown off. However, some of the 'offshore' CS reps are... wow. I spent about half a dozen emails back and forth with two of them, trying to figure out why queues I deleted from the CP randomly and consistently reappeared in the HUD. Most of those emails were spent trying to explain that no, my issue was NOT that I wanted to create those queues again in the CP.

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

We've already made a deep investment in the system hardware. We wouldn't be interested in another system at this point! And by the look of my colleagues faces when they see the HUD, I don't think we'd want to switch to a system that would limit us or take away any of these features! We may look at putting the server in the cloud, should internet outages prove to be such a common issue that it is preventing our other locations from functioning smoothly

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

When the system works it is wonderful. But I feel the sluggish UI and web interface really kill most of what is good about this product. Other than that the system works like a charm and is very easy to learn the administrative portion of the platform.

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

Fonality has been available to us 99% of the time. There have rarely been any lengthy outages. If any issues do occur, their support staff is available around the clock to help. This is important, since communication is a big part in our company and availability of the phone system is important in maintaining this reliability

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

Fonality's performance is excellent. The phones work flawlessly and the calls are clear. It is a well put-together system that does not need daily support. It is not complex from a user standpoint, as most of our staff are quick to learn how to use the phones. More systems should strive to work as well as Fonality's

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.

Because of their customer support and their attention for details in our problems that we face during our initial stage. We simply love fonality just for the way we are treated when we reach them with our fonality issues - they take it seriously and resolve it as early as possible and the most important part is we dont need to keep on insisting them to do so.

Incentivized

Training was provided by the in-house IT administrator. Fonality was able to provide support to the admin, who then assisted the users. It went smoothly and all the details and functions of the system were made available to the office staff. Any questions were answered promptly and if any issues did arise, Fonality was available to answer them

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

Training was excellent, but most of what they had was webinars and not real world situation for our company's need. It would be better to have them remote in my local computer and test my system using inbound / outbound calls. This would have made it easier to learn and more relevant

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

Everything from the installation to the implementation has been great with Fonality, there is a lot of freedom to how the system will operate but the freedom comes at a cost of more technical experience to make sure it is configured correctly. The staff is very helpful can will make sure that the system is setup correctly and work perfectly.

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'm a hardware guy, always had panasonic and siemens PBXs. You can't compare them to Fonality. It is so complex to program them and with less functionalities, it is a waste of money and time in my humble opinion. I've also installed my own Asterix servers and used to admin Avaya Enterprise level PBXs and I have a special part in my heart for them but when we started to search for a solution for our new building, Fonality rose among the other services like Vonage. Fonality is the perfect solution for any business that uses Telefone as a marketing and sales platform.

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.

It is easy to scale this system, as long as you have the proper technical staff available to support it. Adding users and phones is straightforward. The main work involves having the physical network in place and configuring the networking equipment. Overall, it is not that difficult as long as all of this is in place.

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

• Fonality - VOIP features have allowed our staff to be more effective in communicating with their constituents both within and outside the organization
• Fonality resolved a bunch of call restriction issues with student calling capabilities we were having with our previous phone service
• Fonality has enabled us to use much cheaper carrier services.

Incentivized