| NetFortris | Fonality: Good price/features
05/23/2012 - 05:18 | | Good price/features value, users love HUD, very flexible configuration and programming. | Fonality has had trouble with support and customer service recently. I think they have addressed this, but they are working to regain customer trust. | I bought my first Fonality system in late 2006 and it was up and running in early 2007. We picked it because we just didn’t see anything else out there that had the features. We knew we were taking a chance on a fairly young company, but they did not disappoint. There were some minor installation issues, but their support was some of the best I have every experienced - a team of experienced guys that really seemed to like helping and fixing problems.
Over the past 5 years I have installed two more at other offices, and linked them to the HQ server. And I also provide support for another Fonality server at a very large church nearby.
I am very aware of the growing pains that Fonality has had over the past couple of years. They have built a support office in the Philippines and also moved some of their offices from Los Angeles to somewhere in Texas. Some of these changes were supposed to improve support and service, but they were late in coming and had a rough start. I have made my dissatisfaction known over this period and Fonality has been very receptive and have done a good job in communicating to me what they are doing to fix these issues. I do see some significant improvements. They know they have a lot of work to do to restore the trust from their customer base.
Regarding the system itself, I have had only one significant outage of the years on all the systems I manage. And Fonality support was able to restore service within the hour for that event.
The system has been quite reliable, and the biggest issues we have faced have been regarding better network management. We have a call center in the Philippines with 30 people and have had to make some changes in our bandwidth management and internet provider to achieve reliable results.
Users love the features, and how accessible these features are, mostly using the HUD interface. I train new users on the phone system and they usually are stunned at how intuitive and easy it is to understand and learn.
The control panel is sometimes slow to respond, but it has never kept me from getting things done.
All in all, I think Fonality is a good company, and they make a good product. I would (and have on several occasions) recommend Fonality to friends. |
