Vonage - Customer Support and other issues

If you've been here before, you know that we believe Vonage is the best VoIP option going for general all-around service. We've been with them for over a year, and overall things work well.

There have been a few glitches, however. We have not pulled our punches when talking about the company's shortcomings, especially in the area of support. Yesterday my list had gotten to about 5 items, so I decided it was time to call. As is typical for most companies today, the Interactive Voice Responce (IVR) greetings are very much designed to convince you to go back to the website to solve your problems. After pressing a lot of numbers, I arrived at a queue which took about 25 minutes waiting time before a support rep came on line.

We easily dispached most problems in the first 5 minutes, but it took a few minutes longer to explain my major issue. I have to say that the rep stayed with me and finally understood the problem. We were on the phone for almost an hour, and during that time he ran several tests. I appreciated the time he took to help me solve a problem about which BellSouth had simply told me to "buzz off". Overall, though lenghty, the call ended with a resolution to 3 of my (minor) issues, a less than satisfying answer to one and a ticket to 2nd level support for the last one.

So, what are the outstanding issues? Not biggies, but it's a bit of the finesse we should expect for such a widely disseminated service and are surprised not to find:

1. Caller ID name display on outgoing calls - This is a "known issue" which has been the subject of many complaints, according to our support rep. The problem is that when you place a call, the person on the other end can only see your number - not your name. The rep called me back a few times during our testing, and on some calls "Vonage" appeared in the name field but on others it simply said "Out of Area". The rep stated that this is happening on all Vonage-supplied telephone numbers. If you transfer an existing "landline" number to them, and if you check the appropriate box on the Letter of Authorization, the caller ID should continue to transmit whatever it did when your local operating telephone company had provided the line. (In my case it was not, so this is being looked into.)

2. Call transfer problems to hunt groups - If you have multiple Vonage lines, it is possible to set up a "hunt group" which tells the system to transfer to the 2nd line if the first is busy, and so on, until finally ending at voice mail. This is a great feature; it is easy to administer and it works fine. Except...if you have kept a local telco-supplied number and simply transfer that to the first line of your hunt group, for some reason the proper signalling is not worked out between the two. The result is that when you are on the first line of the hunt group and you call your telco-suppplied number, you get a busy signal instead of transferring on to line 2, etc. This problem had been upgraded to 2nd level support. We'll let you know the answers.

In summary, all the VoIP compaines have their positives and negatives, but we still believe that Vonage provides the best blend of service. Their main negative, in our opinion, is that they are still not balancing their capital expenditures properly. At some point one must take a little money off the marketing table and put it over into servicing customers properly. It's hard to imagine that they haven't heard about the old addage that your best new customers are the ones you keep from leaving!