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
- Top Notch Customer Service
- Plans for Home and Business
- TRUE Unlimited Minute Plans on local, long distance & toll free
- NEW – Highly customizable bundled plans
Phone.com Cons
- 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.
Responsive: In preparing the comparisons and reviews for this site, we have had questions that we have needed to go to the various companies to get answers to. This company has been extremely responsive in answering our questions, with accurate and precise answers – or in other words… NO run-around or fast talking. As the CEO, Ari Rabban, states it.. "we are always on".
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.
Support: Their support is 24/7 – 365 days a year, provided by in-house trained employees. They are responsive, and basically top notch in an industry where this can be problematic at best, and extremely frustrating and costly(in time wasted and potential downtime) at worst. We all have our horror stories dealing with out-sourced help desks – well not with Phone.com.
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
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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Sign Up for Phone.com Home Office Today and Get Your First Month Free!
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Try Phone.com Today and Get 10% Off for the next 6 months!
Use Coupon Code: Tenoff
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Search For and Get Your Free Vanity Number with Phone.com!
Use Coupon Code: FreeVanity
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. Phone.com is a progressive, forward thinking company that’s definitely responsive to their customer’s needs – and we give them kudos for the new website design and plan changes.
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.
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.