Phone.com Review
Editor’s Rating:
Avg. User Rating:
| Overall |   |
Phone.com Review Summary
Phone.com Pros
- Unlimited Extensions
- Mobile Office(Android) & Mobile VoIP
- Multiple Incoming Lines on most plans
- International Virtual Numbers
- Voicemail to Text Translation
- Inbound & Outbound Internet Faxing
- Plans for Home and Business
- TRUE Unlimited Minute Plans on local, long distance & toll free
- NEW – Highly customizable bundled plans
Phone.com Cons
- Recent Issues with Call Quality
- Recent Issues with Support
- No True ACD Queuing
Bottomline
Phone.com has come out with all new bundled plans that are easily customized to meet any home office or business’s needs – with great cutting edge features, unlimited extensions, unlimited minutes, and multiple phone lines per plan. Create a plan that suites your business rather than fitting your business into a plan!
Phone.com Features/Benefits
Phone.com was founded in 2006 in Livingston, NJ to bring innovative home and business phone services to the Virtual PBX market. With Phone.com you can select an 800 Toll Free Number, a Local US Number, an International Number, Vanity Toll Free Numbers, or even Transfer an existing Local or 800 Number. Phone.com is committed to providing outstanding customer service and listening to what their customers are asking for. This is evident in the features and functionality improvements you see released on a regular basis.
| Pricing: | Home Office 1 User: $29.88/mo* ($34.88/monthly) each addt’l: $21.88/mo/user Enterprise 4+ Users: $94.88/mo* ($99.88/monthly) Phone.com Virtual Office: Phone.com Home Phone Plus: |
| Setup/Installation Fee: | No |
| Disconnect/Cancellation Fee: | No |
| Free Trial: | Yes – 30 Day Phone.com Free Trial |
| Customer Service: | 24/7 Great, In-House (provided by company employees) |
| Included Minutes: | Virtual Office 300: 300 Virtual Office 600: 600 Virtual Office 1000: 1,000 Virtual Office 2500: 2,500 Home Office: 300 floating/1 unlimited minutes extension (additional plans available) Enterprise: 600 floating/4 unlimited minutes extensions Home Phone Plus: 300 floating/1 unlimited minutes extension |
| Overage Minutes: | Virtual Office: 4.9¢ Home Office: 4.9¢ Enterprise: 4.9¢ Home Phone Plus: 4.9¢ |
| Incoming Lines: | Virtual Office: 2 Home Office: 2 Enterprise: 6 Home Phone Plus: 1 |
| Extensions: | Virtual Office: unlimited Home Office: unlimited Enterprise: unlimited Home Phone Plus: N/A |
| Local & 800 Transfer Fee: | |
| 800 Vanity Number Fee: | |
| True 800 Number Setup Fee: |
Likes
More for the Money: Phone.com provides more value for the price. With their new Home Office and Enterprise plans aimed at everyone from the Very Small Business and Small Business spaces, to larger businesses they have plans that are easily customized to meet any business or home office need.
Mobile Office: is the first app to extend office phone capabilities to Android powered phones, and is available for both Phone.com Virtual Office and Home Phone users and extends all of the features of both systems down to the mobile device. So mobile users now get full office phone features like free (or relatively cheap) international calling, call logs, call blocking from both unwanted and unidentified numbers, multiple call routing options, professionally recorded voices for messages, background music during hold times, and integration of voice calls(and transcribed voice calls) with faxes and SMS text messages in a single mailbox.
New, Innovative, Nimble, Deep VOIP/Telecom background: As mentioned above this company launched in December of 2007, after a 3 month public beta. This is impressive for any company, but when you look at their website, their offerings and services, and combine that with the fact that they provide all their own customer service, development and operations in-house, it becomes very impressive. This is a small, but deeply knowledgeable, technically capable, and nimble company. I think we can expect great things to come.
Click to Call/Ring Me Web buttons: Phone.com and RingCentral are the only two vendors that offer this functionality. You can add a button to your website to easily allow your visitors to call you directly from their PC.
New voicemail to text email transcription: Now not only can you get the standard .wav file of your voicemail delivered to your email, but you can get a text version as well. This allows you to read your email quietly in noisy places, or sneak a peak at your voicemail’s during meetings without having to find a quiet place to use your phone. You can also easily forward emails to co-workers without worrying about what exactly was said in the voicemail.
The feature is easily enabled and disabled. The first 4 voicemail transcriptions are Free, then it’s only 25¢ per voicemail after that.
Outbound faxing: is now available via an easy "Send Fax" button, available on your extension page in the control panel. Phone.com and RingCental are the only two in this space to provide this. We feel this is a big deal as it eliminates the need and additional cost of a traditional fax machine.
Optional professional greetings service: that allows you to provide greeting options about anything you want to communicate to your Customers or Sales Prospects. Possible Examples might be: Voicemail and Main Greetings, After-Hours Greetings, Special Services, New Events, Infomercial’s & Promotions.
Unlimited Extensions: on all plans. Combine this with the multiple incoming phone lines with Phone.com’s plans and this makes them a very affordable and attractive provider for small businesses. Get both a local number as well as a toll free number and unlimited extensions(future growth ability) at no additional costs.
Conference Calling: Currently you get a local area code but calls do NOT go towards your virtual office minute. You can of course obtain a toll free number and forward the local number that you get with the conference calling (you can’t control what area code that local number is) but then Virtual Office minutes apply (but no other charges). I’m told that in phase 2 they will add toll free numbers integrated into the conference service.
International Virtual Numbers: Phone.com offers local numbers in other countries! Say you have a large customer base in the UK, well that’s not problem, add a local UK phone line for only $4.88/month. No international calling rates! Now your customers in the UK can call you without additional charges to them, and reach any of your locations. Let’s say you have an office or employees in the UK that you need to communicate with on a regular basis, well now you can do it without charging up a huge international phone bill.
Call Screening w/Call Tagging With Call Voice Tagging you can assign a voice tag to either a phone.com phone number or extension. This can be truly useful in circumstances where you may have multiple departments at your company, that are forwarded to the same extension or mobile number. In these cases, it would be extremely helpful to know which department the customer was attempting to contact, prior to you answering the call. This would insure that you are able answer the call with the appropriate greeting – “Hello, ABC Company, this is Tim in Sales, How can I help you?”. When you tag a particular extension or phone number with a voice tag, you will hear that voice tag announced, in this case “Sales”, and you can answer the call with the appropriate greeting. If you have Call Screening turned on with Call Tagging, you will hear the following when you answer a call: “You have a call from [Customer's Number] to [Your Voice Tag here]. Press 1 to Accept. Press 2 to Reject.” . With just Call Screening you will hear the following: “You have received a call to [Your Phone.com number] from [the caller's true number]. Press 1 to accept. Press 2 to reject.”
Dislikes
Poor Call Quality: We recently(Dec/2011) ported a local number over to phone.com, and unfortunately we have had some issues. The quality of the calls is very poor at times, with the audio cutting in and out, or being so full of static that it’s impossible to use the line. As of the writing of this review, Phone.com has been unable to resolve the on-going issues and appears to deal with them on a call-by-call basis, which we find a bit confusing. What we mean by this is that they will trace a call that has poor call quality through to one of their carriers and then direct their system to not use that carrier for the number we just called. This solves the problem for one particular number we call, but not the larger on-going call quaility issue. We have upgraded our cable modem, router and had our ISP test our connection speeds, and all is well on that front. When we test our VoIP connection using Phone.com’s own VoIP Test we get a 4.1 MOS score, with a jitter of 1.1ms, and a packet loss of 0.0%. We have the second fastest connection offered by the ISP in our area, and when testing our speeds we are consistantly getting between 10mbs and 20mbs upload speeds. We will keep you posted on our progress!
Dropped Calls, Bizarre Caller ID & Odd Ring Behavior: Again this is related to our own porting of a local number and started the week of 2/25/2012. What will happen is that we will initiate a call which will then take slightly longer to connect to the calling party and when it does rather than get a normal "ringing" tone on our end, we hear a long "beep" noise. It then sounds as if a person picks up the phone, but in most cases we can’t hear anyone, and they can’t hear us. One time the call appeared to be dropped, and reinitiated without us doing anything at all. We then called the person back using our cell phone because this happened multiple times, and when we did we were told that our caller id was showing up as totally different numbers, one of which was a political "spammer" and the other was an international number originating in Argentina. This raised major concerns on my end so I immediately emailed phone.com support with detailed information from the call logs and what was going on. Unfortunately they did not get back to me until 2pm that following Monday afternoon, and again only dealt with re-routing one of the numbers we called to a different carrier on their end. Again, I’m not sure how this solves the problem for any of the other numbers we called that day. We are hoping that this issue is just a matter of working with Phone.com to resolve potential security or routing issues. Again, we will keep you posted on progress.
No true ACD Queuing: This, I doubt will be a big issue to the Very Small Business/Home Office/Professional or Small Business space, because Phone.com does provide Hunt group Queuing. This is where a call is routed to a group of people and it will "hunt" through the group until it finds a person who answers the call, or if unanswered for a specified period of time send to a designated voicemail. ACD Queuing on the other hand will allow for different variables(like time of day), prioritization of staff, and real time intervention by a supervisor.
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Summary
Phone.com’s new highly customizable bundled plans make it easy for any home office, traveling professional or business to create the plan that best suites their specific needs, rather than fitting their business into a plan. With these new bundled plans it is not only easy to see what you are getting, but easy to understand for the new virtual pbx shopper.
Additional Resources
Before making a final decision be sure to compare our top picks side by side and read their reviews.
Reviewed by: Lynn Rockwell
Last Updated: February 2012
About 
My experience with phone.com was very shaky with dropped calls, and some very strange billing. I was concerned when they said I must do Autopay on a credit card, and then was charge overage when I had their unlimited plan! But the worst part was attempting to cancel when I moved and no longer needed the service. As stated in other reviews I had to call “customer service” and wait about 20 minutes. I was given no confirmation letter, but the service was terminated immediately. That was 10 days before my billing cycle. Yesterday my credit card was charged an amazing $101.26 for the month following my termination. This was for a service that cost $22.81 normally. I was charged $64.65 for overage. Again I had an unlimited plan. Even after calling today (another wait for customer service) the website for my account says “Your account has been billed through 06/04/2012 and is set to bill monthly”. The invoice:
Charges Total: $101.26
04/24/2012 – 05/04/2012 Virtual extension: 500 – Linksys SPA-2102 $0.00
05/05/2012 – 06/04/2012 Home Phone Plus unlimited plan $19.88
05/05/2012 – 06/04/2012 Virtual extension: 500 – Linksys SPA-2102 $0.00
05/05/2012 – 06/04/2012 Telephone number: (740) 881-9026 $0.00
04/04/2012 – 05/03/2012 Additional usage $68.65
05/06/2012 – 05/06/2012 Regulatory recovery fee $2.22
05/05/2012 – 05/06/2012 FUSF (VoIP) $10.27
05/05/2012 – 05/06/2012 FCC regulatory fee (VoIP) $0.24
Again, I cancelled on 4/23 and have an e-mail dated Mon 4/23/2012 11:34 PM.
I also was told today that “something didn’t seem right” Duh! However, I got an e-mail which says “Thank you for your patience in this matter. We have determined that your issue requires the assistance of someone from our technical team and therefore I am escalating this ticket. We will continue to communicate with you as we have updates.” This is not a technical issue; it is a billing and honesty issue.
Bottom line, I highly recommend you go elsewhere, as I have no idea where this will end – and they have my credit card to charge whatever they want! I agree with the previous reviews that think this company is a rip-off.
Jim:
I was informed of your post and wanted to respond personally. I spoke to our customer service team and I understand there indeed was a problem with your billing. I was also informed that you were contacted and that you were refunded the wrong charges. I also know this was done before you wrote your post.
We understand your frustration but feel free to contact me personally if you have any concerns
Ari Rabban
CEO
Phone.com
Actually Ari, I feel I was contacted in response to my review, definitely not before!
“Wed 5/9/2012 1:57 PM
I just called and left you a message and wanted to also respond personally. I see that we are encountering the same issue here that we encountered a couple months ago on your account and agree that this is unacceptable. I have been assured that the bug in our system is going to be fixed soon but am waiting for our engineers to make the proper adjustments to your billing.
In the meantime, I have refunded the entire $101.26 charge back to your credit card and am willing to offer you 2 more free months of service if you would consider staying with Phone.com. If you still wish to cancel, I will cancel your account immediately and you do NOT need to return the ATA. Please feel free to call me at 858-633-0163 if you would like to discuss further.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Watkin
Phone.com Customer Care”
I wrote the review on May 8th at 10:56 PM after talking with your customer service. Later Jeremy further checked out my issues and found that I had, indeed, cancelled on April 23rd, fully 13 days BEFORE the billing. I trust Jeremy has this straighten out at this point, but I haven’t seen the credit hit my card as yet. Hopefully tomorrow!
Thank you Jeremy
Yes *9 blocking feature is working. It started to work on Monday morning. It is wonderful.
I have used it each day a few times per day. I used it just this morning when
a person called us threatening and swearing because he had received our leaflet “advertisement”.
It is sad that people need to call when asked not too, or try and to harass when shouldn’t.
but they do and I use the *9 a few times per day.
The blocking feature and filtering calls are one of the most important part of my phone
system, Thank you for working with us. I will continue to use Phone.com. Your customer
service is the greatest that I have experienced, always friendly and ready to help.
Sincerely kelly from Utah
I signed up with phone.com for a couple of reasons. To filter out unwanted calls. “Blocking Features”.
I am a new customer of phone.com as of Feb 28, 2012. been with the company about 3 months
I have phone.com to filter out unwanted calls for my business to my cell phone.
It was working fine. Until last Thursday when I went to block someone. The blocking feature *9 from my cell phone went out and does not work as of March 28 2012. It has been working just fine since the beginning of the service and now it stopped working and their is nothing when pressing *9 from my cell.
I was getting a recording that said “this caller has been blocked” Now nothing. I called phone.com to see what was up and they said they would fixed on Thursday end of day. That was 4 days ago and still nothing fixed. I called back on Friday and they said the tech just got the email and they are going home and they won’t be working on it until Monday of next week. Really I reported the issue on Thursday.
What the heck happened to fixing it end of day on Thursday. “What a let down” Now I have to log on to a computer to block a call. My phone number is in millions of homes for business and I get freaky people and solicitors all day long that call me all the time with the intent to harass our company.
I need that quick blocking feature as soon as possible. If it is not fixed soon I will have to take my service some place else.
Before phone.com I had spent months building a phone blocking computer inside my business land lines that forwarded to my cell and I was able to block instantly through Quest communications. I was not let down one time in two years of service.
I then researched phone.com and made several calls to customer service before forwarding my business lines to phone.com. They seemed to be satisfactory in every way…
I feel as Phone.com has let us down and failed our expectations of reliability of service. I understand things break and need to be fixed. I don’t understand why it was not fixed same day Thursday, or why The techs at phone.com didn’t work on the issue starting on Thursday when I first reported the issue. Phone.com customer service said they were starting to see others reporting the same issue.. Then when I called on Friday they said the techs were going home and won’t be back until Monday. Leaving me and my business with out *9 blocking feature over the week end. What the heck is with that?
At first I was very satisfied with the service phone.com has provided to us. I used the service through the month of march and it all worked just fine. Just before phone.com *9 failed and let us down. I asked my Secretary to get the phone bills to transfer my four main business phone numbers to phone.com.
I am not going to forward my main business phone number to phone.com now. I am going to test
their service to see if it is ever going to happen again.
I will keep my main business phone numbers at another company and forward them to phone.com and if they continues to fail us or have problems with phone.com I will have to take my business to another company and I don’t want to do that. I need *9 to work with out fail each time every time.
If phone.com would had gotten on the problem and fixed it as soon as possible would have been nice.
Now it is Sunday and phone.com techs have gone home for the weekend leaving me hanging with an open phone line for any person to call with out the control to block.
On Monday I am going out giving estimates all day and not near a computer to block anyone and I will be getting calls from unwanted callers that need to be blocked. Can you say “HELP”
I must say Customer service has been great since the beginning, they are all ways nice and they try to be as helpful as possible. I find a lot of customer service reps don’t know their own features built into the program at phone.com such as how to *9 block or *7 record 8*music *2 transfer a call and other things. That is a small problems that they will learn as they go.
I have studied/learned the service and played with the online account for days and day, hours and hours until 4am in the morning calling and calling and testing and listening to recordings and so on.
I was very happy with everything phone.com has to offer until my most important feature went out
*9 blocking. “Now I am frustrated as: “well lets just say its not good” I would be very happy to see
the features work again. I would recommend this company any day of the week.
Mr Kelly
I’ve been using their small office service for about 3 years, and i have only good things. I switched to them from Vonage, with a small stop at my ISP’s service. My service includes several phone numbers, 3 unlimited extensions and 5 active and virtual extensions. I’ve setup several audio menus and they change behavior based on a schedule I defined (work hours and off-hours). I also used professional recording for outgoing messages, on-hold music and from time to time their text-to-speech generator for audio prompts.
Advantages:
- Easy setup of advanced functionality, allows me to create voice menus, routing based on schedule and many more great features allowing my small business to strengthen image.
- I’ve used the add-on services they provide to connect many numbers and extensions.
- Excellent customer support
- Great up-time. In the last year I had only one major down-time. Better than my experience with Vonage and my ISP.
I’ve recommended the service to all my family and friends. Most of them joined and have also a very good experience. My wife recently added a service. Though she gets a service from her employer, she travels a lot and phone.com has great solutions for the mobile workforce. Since then she’s always reachable and can communicate with her global teams in every timezone.
Bottom line, try their service without prejudice, and you’d love it. I’m very surprised from some of the comments here, you could almost think they’re talking about another service.
Mr. Beeri, you and Mr. Arbel have posted very positive comments only one day apart just today. I note the negative posts dating from last July until yesterday seem to be conjured up defensively. Did someone at phone.com ask you to do this?
I have service with Vocalocity that is overcharging me and I want to move to a more cost effective VPBX but am leery about phone.com, although it promises to save me money. I would like to know what prompted you to make this post. Thanks.
If you’re suggesting that I’m paid for posting my comments, then… no… Let me ask you back, do you have any other interest (try not to take it personally , as I did)…?
The truth is that I pay them more than $1,500/year for my small company and another $500 a year for my personal account (wife), my parents and brothers (whom I referred). I actually referred many good friends, and they are all VERY happy with the service. I’ll ask them to add a comment too, if you’d like. One of those friends, whom I recently suggested them, commented that he noticed bad reviews on this site and I got a little mad (made me look bad), and posted what i posted. It’s natural that angry people are the ones posting comments and as a consumer, I naturally tend to read them and give them a higher degree of credibility (especially if I see a statistical significance). Having said that, I can also imagine other market players, “playing” into this negative comments game for a competitor. I suggest in this case is to check before you make a decision. I’m genuinely happy with their service, and I truly believe people should try them.
If I misinterpreted your question, and it’s indeed genuine, I truly apologize. However, if you’re looking for cheep service, as your sole criteria… you should maybe look elsewhere. If you’re looking on ease of use and flexibility in creating your own voice solution and an overall value for your buck, then consider them. In any case, I suggest you make “trial” calls to customer support with the different contenders, before making your decision, and see who provides you with a professional advice and who routes you to an oversees call center that you can hardly understand (I won’t name names but people know whom I’m talking about). Don’t forget to compare the feature list, they’re not the same… ask each company, they’ll be happy to provide you with that.
I see that people complain about the service… Let me share a personal story with you. Outages are part of the VoIP game (I had them in Vonage and my ISP), most of the time it’s your router, or your local ISP service, and sequential boot of both modem and router solves the problem. I had a situation where I had too many of those in my home office. The customer support person walked me through, until we could pinpoint to a problem with signal coming into my router. And indeed my ISP found that my cable line, leading to the modem was creating noise (my contractor stapled them inside the walls… and apparently it erodes the coating of the cables)… It was a major crisis for me, but I have a very good impression on the way my ticket was handled and escalated (until it got stuck at the ISP level).
Bottom line, as of now I’m very happy with their service, and if it changes, I promise to post an update
Thank you for your explanation. I decided to try to reduce my telecom costs today and ran across these posts that seemed a little too coincidental…. glad you didn’t take it personal. It appeared to me that the posts were prompted… I did not assume financial reasons were afoot, just that I wanted to know the motivation.
As it turns out, I signed up for Ring Central moments before I saw your reply, and am leaving Vocalocity. I am saving a little on the monthly charges and getting some additional neat features I didn’t have with V.
I guess there were just too many negative comments for me to feel comfortable with phone.com. I found out they have a history back into the ’90s and re-emerged in 2007. I may reconsider them if Ring Central doesn’t work out.
Wow… you’re fast then, I posted my reply as soon as I saw yours…
So what service did you sign up for (how many extensions and numbers) and how much are you paying…? I posted my details… time to tell yours
Although I have to admit that the numbers could be a little misleading, for instance, I use a lot of international calls including a lot to mobile phones to foreign countries which are more expensive (I chose them also after reviewing their international rates, after seeing they cover in the free level most of western Europe).
I didn’t know they date back for so long, where did you find this info? .. and how do you manage to do so much research just on one contender?
… I wish I could…
When I signed up with them they did have a different service, and they upgraded my system (replaced my box) some 2+ years ago, it actually became a better service, with much more functions, so whatever happened in the background, seems to have worked in their favor…
E. Jennings, you did the right thing! I posted my review September 2011 after giving Phone.com an honest opportunity. Phone.com is an unreliable company with the same type of service. We purchased all high end computer hardware, modem, router and system. We started out with the fastest DSL available and our lag time was horrible! Phone.com told me it was our IPO. We cancelled the DSL and had cable (the fastest available) installed. It still didn’t make any difference. As suggested by Z Beeri, we did reboot our hardware several times. It didn’t make a bit of difference. When I called Phone.com, they actually told me to take my Phone.come system to a neighbors or relative house and try it! Unbelievable! I knew then I wasn’t dealing with a reputable company. I honestly don’t understand the “few” positive reviews. The service Phone.com provides is beyond horrible and how they stay in business is also beyond me!
Looks like replies may be limited…. don’t know if this will be posted. @Beeri: As to how I got this info, Google is your friend…. as to my signup with Ring Central, they quoted me about $46 including fees and taxes, as opposed to $60 with Vocalocity. Additionally, Ring Central has more features that Vocalocity charges extra for. Finally, Ring Central’s customer management interface is more modern than Vocalocity’s. Vocalocity’s customer portal has a 60′s look, and that goes along with their apparent Enterprise focus. I am just a small guy (one-man shop), and they appear not to be all that interested in me.
@Lorie: Thanks for the info. I have DSL also, and Vocalocity tried at least once to blame my connection speed until I explained to them that my connection was about 20 mbps, more than enough bandwidth for several VoIP accounts. I guess they don’t expect users to be savvy enough not to be b.s.’d. Looks like phone.com will throw that out there, too.
I’ve been using phone.com services since 2006 for both my home and business. I’ve been using the system since the first versions were shaping up and not always perfect at the beginning. Saying that, after the system stabilized, i enjoyed a service which provides a superb audio and call quality, a rich and flexible feature set and for an excellent price.
over the years I always got fast response in the few times I needed any questions answered if technical or billing related, and if there was any issue that even half-justified a refund or credit i got it. I used the online chat a couple of times and found it excellent.
Since the system provides so many options and features, some are not trivial at first, but this is understandable and if a user would like to keep it simple, the default settings are working great, and you can always get assistance if needed to go through the initial setup of the service.
When purchasing equipment from phone.com, the equipment arrives pre-configured, so all you need to do is plug it in, and you’re up and running.
I would recommend ordering the HD voice equipment, but a fair warning would be that you’ll get spoiled fast as you get used to the sound quality…
Needless to say that if your internet service is down or real bad it will affect the service, though you see less and less issues with connectivity these days. I can’t remember when was the last time I had an issue that effected my phone service.
I use it a lot for international calls, and sometime the quality is not perfect, but I had similar experience with traditional phones with Verizon/ATT (not even mentioning cell phones…), so I would assume it can be also the far side service that affects the call. International rates are great.
By now I’m using the service for my home and Virtual Office at 3 different services, over Optimum and FIOS, and I used to have it over DSL year ago – all worked/work great. I recommend it to everyone.
I did try FIOS phone service for a little while when I got connectivity from them, and I canceled withing a month as from the call quality to the price phone.com gave me a much better answer. One of the business I’m involved in was using Vonage for a year, switched over and happier ever after (disconnecting Vonage was a nightmare BTW). Customer service with Vonage? or Verizon? ha…..
The voicemail features are also excellent – getting alerts on new messages or getting the message via email and txt messages is working great and I hardly every use my phone to listen now. I guess I can go on and on about the features, as by now I learned to use so many of them to my benefit.
I’m not clear about the negative reviews here – my experience is excellent, and I’m a heavy user of the system (hours/day) for many years, with some lines set up to do some complex functions.
So to sum up, though I can go on and on, I’m very happy with phone.com service and find it an excellent solution for both my home and business needs, and way better in all aspects I can think of. if you have an issue with the initial setup, as the system does offer so many option, ask them for assistance, and you’ll never regret it.
Enjoy your calls!
My marketing is entirely dependent upon the 800 number. It is down all the time, and customer service either lies about it being down or claims to have solved the problem.
(Although we are allowing this review, it has been edited by our staff – which per our rules we reserve the right to do. We will not allow reviews threatening lawsuits and/or encouraging people to signup for them on this site. That can be done elsewhere if people are so inclined to pursue it. Please limit your reviews to your personal experiences with the particular merchants services.)
Roger:
I am sorry you are having problems with your toll free number. We also reached out to you personally. There is no known problem and your number should work and our agents would be glad to help address any questions you might have.
We pride ourselves with excellent, friendly customer service. We are growing and we indeed have been caught unprepared with call volume and needed to react and play catch up and add more customer service agents. We are working on it and improving both the response time and the the network infrastructure as well.
Please feel free to contact us – i have provided my personal email address as well.
Sincerely
Ari
Ari Rabban
CEO
Phone.com, inc.
Phone.com does not offer an online cancellation. I tried to cancel my account using their online message system which did not have a subject heading for account cancellation. When I was billed for another month of service I realized that they did not cancel my service. I was then forced to call the support center and wait 25 minutes for the call to be answered. When I finally reached customer support, I was told she could not cancel the account but would have to call some one at corporate to cancel it. I then had to wait for her to cancel the account. She did not give me any confirmation but told me that I would get an email about the cancellation. It is amazing that companies follow such an unethical practice. Phone.com makes it extremely easy to sign up on-ine but they make it difficult to cancel hoping you will just give up. I am writing to insure others are aware of this practice and consider this before signing up for the service.
Mark:
We indeed do not offer an online cancellation option and neither do most companies (including big ones like Verizon or small start-ups), fraud and other privacy concerns are the main reason for that.
As opposed to some companies, Phone.com does not have a “force retention” policy. We honor any customer who wishes to cancel their service with us. We will ask for feedback but not make it hard to cancel.
We also do not bill for an extra month even if the cancellation occurred after the next billing cycle has arrived (which means we are contractually allowed to bill).
I checked your account as well and you were refunded as well after you canceled your account.
However, I do admit that recently (the past 3 months) we have had our fair challenge with customer support phone call wait time. We have grown and caught unprepared with the number of trained customer support agents needed. We have been adding agents and addressing the changes required to reduce wait time. It may have been the case that an agent who supported you was not authorized to cancel an account (perhaps in training or other reasons) yet we would still not charge you for an extra day or two or three even if officially the account is cancelled later.
We understand your frustration but I hope this note is somewhat helpful to explain and clarify what happened.
We pride ourselves with professional, friendly and ETHICAL customer service. We welcome your feedback and any customer feedback.
Sincerely
Ari
Ari Rabban
CEO
Phone.com, Inc.
I feel very strongly that this company is a RIP-OFF!!
I used their service for a period of time and it is marginal at best. Their Customer Service is atrocious, especially if you have a complaint or wish to cancel the service.
The 800 # they provide, Option 2 (Customer Service) puts you on hold for what seems an eternity (easily over 15-20 minutes), and they don’t even bother to come on the line to let you know that you’re still on hold… just piped in music over and over. What I finally did was, instead of choosing Option 2, I hung up, and called back & selected Option 1 (Sales) instead, and I got someone on the line immediately.
As soon as they figure out you’re an existing customer, their friendly manner dissolves into a bland, matter-of-fact attitude. And you can tell they’re trying to finish talking to you as soon as possible.
I have no real complaints about their product, such as it is. But the awful Customer Service (if you can call it that) is reason enough to STAY AWAY from PHONE.COM if you possibly can.
If you chose them (and I don’t recommend it!) –Beware! They are definitely NOT a customer friendly business. Their Customer Service (if and when you do finally reach them) just quote P&P, and do not seem to care about you as a customer. *** Avoid this business, at ALL COSTS! ***
Phone.com is a RIP-OFF!! I used their service for 1 year and its marginal at best. Customer Service is also terrible, if you have a question or complaint. Expect to be on external hold if you call them and your placed on hold for periods of 15-25 minutes or more at a minimum. After I had an initial year of service with them, I was auto-renewed for another year without talking to me (auto-pilot effect). There will be no communication asking you to continue your account. When I cancelled a day after the next year started, I was charged 40% of the money they originally took form a much higher new account they chose. If you chose them – Buyer Beware! Do not list your payment on file, and watch your account, as they are not a customer friendly business. Their Customer Service (when you can reach them) just quote rules, and do not care. Avoid this business, and read the fine print if you decide to use them, as they will follow every rule and keep your $$ if they can. I will never go back to Phone.com
Phone.com has a rich set of features, but their system is rather unreliable. I have had several times when either the system was not allowing my clients to leave voicemail, or the vmails were not coming through. I’ve been with them for almost a year and at least once a month we have had a technical issue. Missed calls and voicemail are a major issue with my business b/c missed voicemail means missed money. Today we are having the issue and have tried to contact Phone.com and they are not even picking up at their customer service center. I think I have given them long enough, and now it’s time for me to change services.
I have been trying to cancel this service for 6 months. I just spent another 18.38 minutes on hold trying to cancel when I was disconnected. I have sent emails to Phone.com customer service contact section on their website to no avail. I guess I have no choice but to cancel my credit card to stop these never ending monthly charges.
You would think a company that works with phone service would have a clue what “service” means.
I was so excited when I saw an affordable option for my business start up that I jumped on Phone.com for service. Not only did I get it for my business, but also replaced our AT&T land line for them. I am so sorry that I did. We replaced our DSL with cable broad band hoping that it was going to correct the lag time issues. We contacted Phone.com SEVERAL times and stressed how important it was to get this issue resolved. They wanted me to hook up the system (again) with another internet provider to determine if it was our IP service. We advised them that we only have cable and they told us to go to a friends or family’s home and connect it up to see if it is working properly…SERIOUSLY!
I am in sales and I rely on my phone connection to work in order for me to make appointments. But the lag is so bad (and the Phone.com service really isn’t any better) that when you speak, it takes about 5 seconds for the other party to hear what you are saying. No kidding! It is that bad. After this experience, I am very hesitant to go with another VOiP, however I think it is just Phone.com service. When I call over Skype, with a headset, the sound quality is great. I am giving them one last time to resolve our issues. If they cannot, I will be cancelling my service.
***I would be very cautious, initially with the service, until you know that it is a good fit for you and your business.
This is an update from my Sept 2, 2011. I did cancel the service and I am glad that I did! No issues with my current provider.
Hey Lorie, we are having similar lag issues with Phone.com. What service provider did you switch to?
Phone.com’s technical service is horrible. We have spent HOURS on the phone trying to get our lag resolved and they keep blaming our ISP or router. We have tried on other ISP’s and routers and still get the same issues so obviously it is Phone.com’s network problem. We are ready to switch!!!
JD, they did the same thing to us! We went with Time Warner Cable. They have a great business plan (it is very inexpensive for all that you get) and you can get some really good rates if you bundle an air card with their new “turbo” internet service. We have been extremely pleased and would highly recommend. Hope this helps, but the best advise I can give you, is to dump Phone.com! Good Luck!
These guys have an awesome product. I’ve used a hodge podge of services from analog to Vonage but for my small business I’m very happy I finally came across Phone.com.
They have a great selection of support phones I can use, as opposed to other companies who force me to buy really expensive IP phones.
And adding features and managing my call routing is super easy with Phone.com’s control panel. It looks a little old school but ALL the features I could ever want are there. Best part is I don’t have to pay per feature and their rates seem to be extremely reasonable. So yeah, I’m very happy with Phone.com.
I tried 3 companies: Grasshopper, VrtualPBX and Phones.com.
I believe that I’ll stick with Phones.com, because of the quality of their set-up.
Yes, it’s complex, but it’s also complete. It is really versatile. After a few minutes, I grasped it, and I found it very intuitive. Very little is preset for you; instead, you have the freedom to organize the menu tree, and the sequence of call forwarding, in any way you can imagine.
Of the 3 companies I tried, this is the only one that supports a menu tree that can end up with an announcement, a plain voice mail, or calling an extension.
So far so good. If I find anything of concern, I’ll come back and add a new review.
I own a small business with five employees and I signed up for onebox for my business http://ImageFreedom.com. The OneBox system failed to forward calls to my mobile phone without first playing a greeting, and I called their 24 hour outsourced to God knows where tech support. After three calls, I was so frustrated that I Googled “OneBox Phone Reviews” and came across this site. I canceled with OneBox and signed up with Phone.com after reading the above review and seeing the phone.com CEO chiming in.
So far I am impressed by the site, everything was setup in minutes, and I was able to get everything I wanted within ten or so minutes of processing my order. What I did notice though was that the “FreeVanity” coupon code does not work and I was charged the $25 setup for for the (800) number with my Phone 300 plan from phone.com.
I tried to call their 24 hour support and what I got was someones voicemail. Their live chat was also offline. So that was a little frustrating, but I was still able to get everything I needed setup and 100% functional within minutes. I may write an e-mail about a credit or something for the advertised “FreeVanity” coupon code.
I’m excited, thank you for offering up this review, it 100% influenced my decision to leave OneBox and try phone.com.
Matthew,
I would definitely contact Phone.com about the FreeVanity coupon not working. It should have worked. If you need Ari’s contact information, please let me know via our “contact us” form and I will put you in contact with him directly! I want you to get credit for that! We, and as well as Phone.com advertise it, and you should have gotten it! I am sure it will get taken care of in no time at all. I will be contacting them as well to find out what is up.
I am not sure why the support was not up and working.. again it should have been. Again, please let Ari know this! I don’t think the east coast is getting hit with the winter storm we are yet, so don’t think that should be an issue. Here in the midwest we are getting hit with a massive winter storm right now! 15-18inches of snow today and tomorrow! Mother Nature’s one last laugh at us, I guess!
Any way, even with a few “hiccups”, I’m glad we were able to help.
Best Regards,
Lynn and the Virtual Phone System Reviews Team!
This is by far the worst service a VPBX company could provide.
Many of my customers are complaining that they are unable to get through to us by phone. I have tested and verified this problem myself on numerous occasions. When the occasions when the PBX actually answers a call, then the main greeting is cutoff. After that the menu options don’t work or do something strange (repeat the menu, transfer to the wrong extension, play an unrelated message) instead of forward the calls to the assigned extensions.
To top all this, I have to spend at least 45 minutes on hold every time I call the PHONE.COM support line. Actually, this is better service than what I can claim, considering that my customers can’t even get through my PHONE.COM service.
My recommendation is to avoid PHONE.COM like the plague if reliable phone service is important to your business.
Dear Massis,
I was informed of your post and wanted to reply personally by first stating that I and the entire team here at Phone.com is sorry for what you experienced. Second, I want to assure you and all our customers that your incident is not representative of what we are about nor of our customer service and not of our network!
I would be happy to follow up (you can email me at ari @ phone .com ) and understand why your call rule set up is not working properly, why a greeting message is cut off or why a transfer is not working properly. These are all basic functions on our service and work extremely well!
I would also like to follow up and see why the support agent you spoke with could not assist you with these issues.
As for the wait time you experienced: our average wait time is one of the shortest in the industry although we do have some longer wait periods. We offer several options in such a scenario including a call back option, online chat and email request for support. I am not making excuses for the time you waited but do want to mention what the norm is.
We welcome your comments, want to make sure you will be satisfied and are getting what you expect and more!
Sincerely,
Ari
Ari Rabban
CEO
Phone.com
Just signed up today. We have a business with five of us working at different locations. Previous system is just our cell phones. Spent all day setting up, downloading a very good manual and setting the system up and practicing. So far it is working perfectly and is everything that is advertised. And the price is certainly right.
I’ll be the first to post a not so good review if it doesn’t work as advertised.
So far, perfect for us.
Worst service ever! We always have dropped calls and then we have phone lines down … we get every excuse in the book/ at least 2 times a week we experience problems
Phone.com offers many features, however, many of the features are not properly or fully implemnted. For example, their Queue feature cannot forward calls to existing extensions. Furthermore, the rules configuraions do not contain any looping structures. I have also encountred some problems with forwarded calls rolling over to cell phone voicemail systems as opposed to the PBX extension voicemail. Finally, at one point, I was direclty told that I am asking too many questions and Phone.com has a limited number of support staff.
We have been using phone.com for about 6 months now. Initially, the service seemed to be pretty reliable and reasonably good quality, but lately it’s gotten pretty bad. The frequency of dropped calls has continued to escalate and I’m writing this today after not being able to maintain a single phone conversation for more than 2 minutes (so I’m pretty frustrated).
Overall, the features are good and the pricing is very competitive. None of this matters when phone calls can’t be made reliably. I can only hope that they adjust to their growing pains soon and service regains its’ stability.
I think that they have also seen a decline in customer service quality since we started where the reps that I talked to initially were far more knowledgeable than the ones I’ve worked with recently… I assume this is also part of growing quickly and struggling to train and motivate their new staff.
They will get another 2-3 months with us and we’ll see if they improve. I wouldn’t write them off just yet, but if you are looking for new service I’d be a bit cautious. You may be happier spending a little more money… but then again, you might not. Most of these VOIP companies are dealing with similar growth problems.
We run a small growing business and we depend on phone communication to keep our business running. We have a toll-free number plus a VOIP phone so far with Phone.com. We also went thru them to record some professional greetings. We could NOT be happier with their service. Bottom line for us is that Phone.com has been critical to our success!
We switched to VOIP with phone.com about 2 months ago and have had nothing but trouble with dropped calls, service outages, and bad customer service support. We are told that dropped calls are often caused by their service upgrades — which they do during regular US business hours.
We are on the phone with their customer service department at least 2-3 times per week.
We are very unhappy with the service.
I’ve been a customer for a bit over a year and generally I’m very happy with Phone.com. I use both their Virtual Office and VOIP (Home Phone) services for a small business (2 extensions plus fax).
Pros: the biggest plus is their knowledgeable, available, and honest support staff. I’ve dealt with other companies over the years (AT&T, Verizon, and briefly Vonage) and Phone.com’s support is heads and shoulders above anything I’ve seen before. I also like receiving voicemails as email attachments.
Cons: you need to call customer support before you can call internationally; this is mentioned nowhere in the documentation–you need to discover it on your own. More generally, their product documentation is skimpy, though most feature controls are intuitive. Also, they recently sent new phone adapters (on their own initiative) and asked me to send back the old ones, and I had to pay for return shipping–a minor annoyance not in keeping with their general customer-friendly attitude.
Overall, I’ve been very happy with their service. I wish other companies valued their customer service reps in the same way.
Although the features are pretty good, the lack of knowledgeable support reps completely ruins the service altogether. Configuration of the system was quite confusing and, again, the support team was unable to offer much guidance. While Phone.com offers a call queuing feature it is not intelligent like those provided at RingCentral, which is who we decided to ultimately go with.
Overall I will give Phone.com 5 stars for effort and 4.5 stars for execution. Have used their VirtualOffice (business) and HomePhone services for 3 months.
Awful service from start to finish; sent a broken devise; not shipped when promised; inept customer service. AVOID THIS COMPANY.
They claim 24/7 tech support. My account is down and I tried their web chat to get help – after waiting five minutes of waiting for a response I receive a message that “chat is not available”. Then I telephone their 800 number and wait on hold 35 minutes with NO response at all. I have emailed them…no response.
They do not offer 24/7 support and my business is now interrupted. An error like this over-rides months of flawless service.
we sent this comment to both Ari and Alon at Phone.com and within 5 minutes of sending the email we received a response from Ari stating they would check into it, and then 50 minutes later we received an email stating the problem had been resolved. A simple typo in the account name when the account was set up was the issue.
If we are online(which we are most of the time!
) we will do our best to help you resolve your issues with any of the merchants.
Best,
The VirtualPhoneSystemReviews Team
Tried their Virtual Number service for the reason that according to their website it supports “Phone.comâ„¢ Mobility”. But as it seems this is just a lie, it does not support any Softphone or IP phone on that type of service, all they want you to do is to upgrade to their virtual office product, which I just don’t need, sad.. it all looked good op paper..
Switched from Vonage recently and am EXTREMELY happy with the service, was suffering from dropped calls and no dial tone with vonage which they blamed on my ISP but offered no real fix, until I got tired and switched to Phone.Com and to this day not a single drop call or no dial tone with same isp I had with Vonage, and the price is unbelievable, I am saving $15 a month now.
We migrated to phone.com service on June 2009 and since then we saved thousands of dollars on our communications expense. The service works great and I highly recommend it.
Great phone service and amazing tech support. I had some questions and they patiently walked me through it till I was satisfied. Service has been running for few months with no issues. I would definitely recommend Phone.com.
I’ve been a customer for more than a year.
I remember that the first time I had to call customer support, I was amazed from the cordial and very efficient service. Finally a company that has an appreciation for my time and doesn’t keep me on hold for very long, and in the end treats me as dust. The support was efficient and very pleasant and the matter (which was my lack of understanding of their bill) was resolved smoothly and fast.
I’ve recommended them to friends of mine, and many subscribed to the service, and appreciate it very much. Their international rates are outstanding and actually you get free calls to some European countries, which is important for my business.
I have a bundle that includes a phone and business fax, and I pay more than 60% less than what I paid before… and I was always frugal with the old companies…
Best SOHO business phone deal in town!!
“Phone.com has passed all of our expectations. Our leadership staff believes this is definitely one of the best business decisions we’ve made. A lot of our client contact relies on telephone service and our Phone.com service has really helped improve our client relations and professionalism. Among out favorite features are the scheduling flexibility and multiple call routing options. The control panel is very easy to use, making setup a painless process. We have also been very happy with the Tech Support, the chat agents have always been professional and helpful and go above and beyond to make sure our service is working for us. I would highly recommend Phone.com to our clients and colleagues.â€
I was asked by my new boss to find a reasonable carrier to put an 800# in my home to be used for both incoming and outgoing calls as we expand into the SouthEast. I did some research and even found the vanity # I wanted. I tried to get signed up, but had a couple of important questions. I typed my questions into chat….waited….got a message that Juan was busy with other questions and would be with me soon…..waiting….finally while waiting for Juan, I called and waited. Was told i was #2…waiting…recording, then DIAL TONE! I was hung up on! Juan never came back either….I let Juan know I was hung up on and needed help – he never came back on. I called back again and had the same HANG UP experience. VERY UNIMPRESSED – disappointed!
Hi Melisa
I want to apologize for your bad experience, this shouldn’t have happened. We do however offer 24×7 phone support 1-800-998-7087 and e-mail support support@phone.com. On top of that most of our users just go an order as it is relatively simple to do on the web, and we give one month free any way.
If it is still possible to get you back, we appreciate if you call us and try again, you can write to me at support@phone.com and ask for Alon and I will be happy to personally help you in the process.
Alon Cohen
EVP/CTO
Phone.com
I just want to write about my experience as a new customer of Phone.com. While my company will likely stay with the service, the experience in setup — if vastly improved — could retain more good will beyond the signup. At this moment, I give Phone.com just 3 of 5 stars and those 3 are only for what I believe to be its potential.
Our company situation may be a bit unusual for Phone.com. We are not a small organization wanting to appear bigger. We are an international team with staff in 16 locations in Asia, the Americas and Europe, and an eye toward practical solutions for having our clients reach us. Because we have clients in the U.S., a U.S. number that can be forwarded to those offices based on their working hours and department offerings means that we can be “always on” when our clients call. Phone.com came well reviewed and, past setup, may be all of that.
However, the setup with Phone.com is not intuitive for more than a few extensions. There’s no way of creating multiple extensions in one go — with say a .CSV upload. And while other services have made possible click-to-record for outgoing messages, Phone.com offers either an audio upload, a text-to-voice conversion, or a convoluted “it calls your number to record you via phone” system. While these services may be nice additions for small offices, it is the least intuitive and the most maddening for anyone setting up a system of more than 5. No recording from your PC mic? No calling a number and going through key strokes to record? These seem like basics to me.
This would not be so problematic if it were not for the gross lack of setup documentation. Basic phones come with basic manuals; complex phones come with complex manuals. That this phone system does not have either means that Phone.com is relying on its customer service personnel for even basic questions.
Which brings me to my final point: I did not have the customer service experience that the reviews suggested I would.
After spending a full day trying to setup the system and finally reaching the end of my rope, I tried calling customer support. I was using Skype from home and, after problems remaining connected with phone staff, asked if I could receive a call back to my landline. Nope: no international calls from Phone.com support staff.
Going to their PHP Chat system, I got one question answered quickly: how does one forward to international numbers? You have to place a support request for that. Okkkkkkk. On to my next question… except that I then found that the staff were very frank about their limits. Here are actual quotes from the chat screen:
“Please note I’m on multiple chats, so it sometimes might take a little while to respond.” (This after a wee bit of absence.)
“I am currently assisting other customers right now, and I will be with you in a few moments. Thank you for your patience!” (This after a longer absence.)
Mind you, these are the messages I received *after* I was connected to a customer service rep and still in the middle of a conversation. Nothing quite like knowing (1) that support is really busy with many other problems and (2) that your problem is not so important that you can’t be placed on hold. I presume there were others who, like me, got tha message.
Since the interrupted chat request was for an instruction manual by which I could learn the system on my own, I am going to presume that such a step-by-step guide does not exist. That’s a shame, because it’s ease of installation that creates the first best impressions about a tool. I am, sorry to say, less than impressed at the moment.
After waiting quite some time for the rep to return, I sent a chat note requesting that support staff call me again at a U.S. relay number so I could again feel like I was No. 1 rather than No 1 of 10. “Ok,” came the chat reply. I am still awaiting that call.
Appending my reply:
I received an email from staff with a link to the downloadable PDF manual. While much appreciated, perhaps it could be integrated into the control panel? According to page 7 of the manual, the support panel *could* include that information, but it’s not.
Garumph!
I received a follow up call from Alon Cohen, Phone.com’s CTO. I have upgraded my star rating accordingly.
Phone.com needs a quick start guide or basic “how-to” videos on their system. I appreciated both that Alon heard me on this matter and that he welcomed my own made-on-the-spur-out-of-frustration quick start guide for my colleagues.
We acknowledged that there are challenges to any phone system setup — physical or virtual. So what a company like ours is buying into is customer support. I am happy to say that Phone.com has proven to be the type of company that takes its customers’ concerns very seriously.
My best to their development and our time with them as a customer!
A few months ago, I moved my company’s phone system to phone.com. It has been smooth sailing ever since. My previous provider would get my phone messages and not even timestamp them much less forward them to my email. Phone.com does all that and A LOT more. The ability to set up phone conferences, extensions, and menus with phone.com has been invaluable to my company. I evaluated nearly every provider and none of them had the feature set provided by phone.com. Furthermore, phone.com was hands-down the easiest to use. And when it comes to support, phone.com out-does every other company, not just in the virtual phone space.
I was so impressed with phone.com for my company, that I cancelled my AT&T CallVantage home phone service and ported my home number to phone.com. The service has been just as reliable for home use.
I highly recommend phone.com to anyone. i have used them for 9 months now, and have been very happy. They have a 24/7 live chat button so that anytime i have the slightest question someone is there to answer it for me immediately. (without waiting on hold for ever) Phone.com has given me the feeling that i am their most important customer, and when speaking to their staff, you are speaking to a real red blooded American on US soil. not someone that has had six months worth of English training in Pakistan. I started out with just one test line and since then I have been so impressed that I have moved/ported all 12 of my business lines over to phone.com’s virtual office. (and am saving hundreds of dollars per month!) I will be recommending phone.com to all my business contacts as a way to save revenue in these tough economic times, and simplify their PBX phone systems
Have being using Phone.com for a while after a bad experience with Broadvoice. Everything works great for me. Customer service is fantastic which is rare these days. They have lots of really good features and their virtual office product seems perfect for SMBs. I recommend it to any SMB that looks for aVsuper affordable yet top of the line PBX solution.
I have used this service for more than a year now, including an additional phone for my parents. In the 2 times I had an inquiry with customer support, the service was prompt and efficient.
I’ve just signed for the new home service they have and thus will move all of my communications services to phone.com. I suggest to compare their international rates to any of the competing services, as this is usually the main revenue generator for those services, while taking a note that even for US/Canada unlimited the have the best rate.
I recommend this service to anyone who wants a good alternative to excessive bills from your cable VOIP services, or lack of service plaguing Vonage.
I have had nothing but a positive experience with Phone.com. Everything works as advertised and is very easy to use. Even my wife is able to use it without my help (a big plus!!). I highly recommend the service.
Here is what I sent to them:
This email is regarding ticket number: 1605892. I am extremely angry at the service in which I receive from this company. Since 9:40am PST my phone has not accepted one phone call, not to mention the number that shows on outgoing calls is a number I have never heard of. If you look at our call volume everyday, especially Wednesdays, we take a high volume of calls. These calls are a result of VERY costly marketing. So, in other words when our phone does not ring, we are obviously NOT able to do business. We have four different accounts with your company. We were looking forward to a long relationship with Phone.com but the way this is headed it is going to be cut short. If I were to send you our daily sales, you would maybe realize how much MONEY, time, and extreme aggravation you have caused. I expect a call from a decision maker to discuss reimbursement for this. I have 7 business acquaintances who have lines with your company, and you can rest assured that they will follow in the same direction if we are not satisfied with your response.
Michael Schultz
Pinnacle Health Solutions LLC
3651 Lindell Rd. Suite D173
Las Vegas, NV 89103
http://www.Pinnaclehealthsavings.com
Office: 1-800-506-9768
Fax: 1-800-901-7204
I use to have Verizon VoiceWing which is terminating their service March 31st. Verizon has FIOS and is dropping their VoiceWing VOIP service in order to force their customers to sign up with either their DSL or FIOS internet service.
I did a lot of shopping around and eventually decided on Phone.com. They not only had a great price their customer service was always there and courteous. Something that seems to be rare these days. I didn’t receive any installation instructions but I was directed to their web page were PDFs were available for all needs. The set up took no more than 5 minutes. I did have to re-power the phone adapter due to a dull sound quality which was fixed. I did find the voicemail setup a little hard to navigate through but that may have been me. Other than that every time I had to call Phone.com they were right there (very little wait time to none) and helped me through my problem. Compared to Verizon Phone.com’s home page set Phone.com is very simplistic without a lot of bells and buzzers which make this service very simple to have.
Not the best support in the world….
Product works as advertised but when problems arise they are slow at fixing them….not something a SMB can afford to have happen.
I run a small business and its a great convenience to be able to have their virtual office features. Instead of getting calls on my cellphone or office line when I may not be available, I can use one number to route calls to my location, and actively control greetings, voicemail, and extensions. My customers see a more professional image and best of all, its cheaper than the voice services I used previously. They also have great customer service line and very knowledgable staff.
I signed up for service on wednesday morning and my vanity 800 number was still not hooked up by monday. This might be understandable, but they told me 24 hours and then by the end of the weekend. I cancled because my phone system is to important to allow this misinformation to effect my business. Other than that it seems like they have many features that most people would want at a reasonable price.
Hello,
This is Ari from Phone.com. Yes we had a problem with Mike’s phone adapter. It was an individual account problem and did not affect any other customers. We are happy to say it was fixed the next morning.
Here is what Mike wrote to us, and gave us the permission to publish:
“Ari, I want to thank your team and you for your attention to this matter. The issue was solved promptly. I can tell you run a tight ship. I understand that sometimes people want things done right away when it is not always possible. Your company did a fantastic jobâ€
At Phone.com we believe service is not only the high quality of our network but also how we work with our customers, help them and solve their problems or fix anything that goes wrong because of any mistakes on our side. We are happy to say that Mike is still a happy paying customer and endorsing our service!
Thanks,
Ari
The service at Phone,com has been top notch — and the value simply can’t be beat! Give it a Try … you’ll be glad you did!
Great service! Phone.com has been great and they continue to develop their offering with functions we need. Most importantly, the service is dependable and CHEAP! It’s truly cheap as opposed to being a false promise.
Phone.com has a great web interface. I find it very easy to manage voicemail boxes for my company, create an automated answering system that can forward to phone numbers in multiple countries, and upload voice-over greetings. I was very impressed with all of the things I was able to do after getting my 800 number.
I’ve used phone.com for over a year now, with great results. THe interface is super-easy to use, and I can filter my incoming calls based on issue, which has significantly increased my productivity. I recommend this service to all my clients.
mickey
Phone.com does a great job for our company. It is very flexible and configurable. It is much more robust than a traditional PBX and is infinitely easier to set up. I would highly recommend trying their service.
We use phone.com services for Chocolate.com. They are reliable, feature-rich and easy to use. Highly recommended.
Steve,
I’d be interested in knowing what kind of issues you’ve been having? We recently ported a local number and have had some quality issues, but have been working with Phone.com in an attempt to resolve them. It would be interesting to see if you are having similar issues.
Best,
Lynn and the VirtualPhoneSystemReviews Team
Steve:
Please email me – ari@phone.com. I would like to understand your issues. We have thousands of satisfied customers. We also have customers with problems. Lynn Rockwell who operates this site has an account with us and here account has problems. It is unique to individual accounts and usually due to certain IP network problems and not Phone.com specific.
We appreciate constructive comments and whether we can help you or learn from your issues and help other customers we would appreciate it and reward you for supporting us
Sincerely,
Ari Rabban
CEO
Phone.com
General comment from Phone.com:
We appreciate constructive feedback on this site and others. We do find that in some instances comments are based on an emotional immediate reaction. It is human nature. but we also think there needs to be some accountability to commenting.
Most comments regarding “issues” are actually isolated incidents. Many times have to do with broadband coming to the home or other home networking issues. These issues don’t affect any customer using our “virtual” service. We will work with any customer to address such issues and with customer’s permission gladly share it publicly.
We also know that negative feedback comes out much faster than the positive (mostly silent) feedback. We all do that, whether with phone service, TV service or our airline. Visit our testimonial pages to read ONLY unsolicited customer feedback:
http://www.phone.com/products/virtual-office/testimonials/
- We are not perfect. We are growing fast and with that adding more and more upgrades to improve stability and improve customer service. We have open public communication lines on Twitter, Facebook and review sites like this one. Our customer service mantra is to always be transparent and work openly with all customers. Anyone who is not satisfied with the customer service they received will get management attention.
Sincerely,
Ari Rabban
CEO
Phone.com, Inc.