Fonality Review – MUST READ
Fonality Review
Fonality Review from a customer of theirs.
Fonality should stick with just doing software development rather than experimenting with phone service. It is something that is 101% out their business model and something that they are incapabale of doing successfull. This is not an OPINION, its our story with them thus making it a FACT.
We decided to try Fonality based on a few things:
1. Their services at the time seemed reasonable but then we found out that cheap = downtime and excuses for lack of proper service.
2. Their sales person “(name removed as per person’s kind request)” make a lot of promises that sounded so promising but in the end turned up to be half lies. Even the part about referral payments for clients referred to them. From our experience, their sales people who make false promises as to say “refer us some people to take advantage of our ‘expiring offer’ and we will give you “x amount of $$ per referral”. We are still waiting for the check in the mail since then. When we contacted this person about “keeping their word” they came up with some lame excuse as “hey I got promoted and you have to ask someone else about that”.
3. Their billing department was available during the beginning, then NO ONE was available for about 3 weeks. You had to leave them voicemails or send emails to discuss a billing issue. It seems that their billing department has about 2 – 3 people working in it but they boast about have over 5,000 clients. The question is, how can such a small billing department handle all the billing request of that many customers. Keep in mind as per one of their billing person recently, they just hire more people 🙂 due to the overwhelming new boom in business????????
4. We were told by their sales people that some of their support personel left companies like “Packet 8” and other companies to work for Fonality. But, when you call these support people, 90% of the time you CAN NOT get them on the phone.
5. We ported a number in to them, but when the port finally went through, they DID NOT set it up in their system which resulted in over 1 week loss of important calls and business. (Name Removed) from their porting department came up with excuses saying that it was our job to call them and that it was our responsibility. If this were so, why is it that they are the first ones as a ‘wannah be’ phone company that ever came up with this excuse? We’ve even done business with smaller VOIP companies before and never got a lamer excuse than that. Obviously they clearly don’t believe in “the customer is always right” even when Fonality was clearly wrong and tried blaming us for their crap. The person from the porting department also never even apologized for their lack of. She then started to blame the support department and asked me to call them to resolve the issue. She was also  blaming the support department saying that they were responsible for setting up the number in their system.
6. Their call quality sounded good at first but then even that started to go down the drain. They tried blaming the ISP (changed it 2 times), and they blamed the routers (changed that too). The real secret that is hidden is we found out after making a phone call to an Associate that Fonality is using Broadvoice as a backbone provider. For those of you who don’t know of Broadvoice, they are a company like Vonage, BUT their call quality is horrible and their customer service is worst than their service. They also have issues with porting away numbers from them. They actually deny ports and we have proof of that too since we were once Broadvoice customers and had a rumble with them.  Just to further inform you, GNAPS (The carrier) and Broadvoice have the same owners. (We will write a review on broadvoice soon)
7. They seemed organized and had it together at first (all sales talk) BUT, when we started to face issues we started to get the run around. From sales, to billing, to support, to porting. We did have a big issue when we got some new numbers at first from them and found out the next day that the numbers stopped working. This happened several times with different phone numbers issued by them. It took about 3 days for them to fix something as simple as giving WORKING NUMBERS to use for doing business. We got so frustrated that we almost called their carrier (because they made a big mistake and forwarded us an email with the carrier information – which is to show you how dis-organized they are). They were using Inphonex or Varphonex for the DID’s (phone numbers).
To top things off. Not long ago they had a NON WORKING NUMBER on their site (keep in mind this was the number we used to contact them all the time) and when we called it, it was giving some bogus messages. How can a phone company have a none working phone number? A phone number (DID) only costs about $1 or less plus trunk or minute usage.
Overall we rank them as a 1/10 due to all these issues. As mentioned above, they are better offer sticking to software development (which they are good at) as they are the developers for Trixbox which is used for VOIP Phone servers. Fonality seems to want to put other VOIP companies out of business (as per the proud sale talk), but the way they are going now is down a road of putting themselves out of business and possible some of their customers. We lost business due to their lack of.
For now Fonality’s business phone service is more bark than bite and we would like people to learn from our experience before jumping to a company based on only price and nice sales talk. At the end of the day, when you have a business to run or operate, you need your phones.