We have a lot of different offices at USWeb, and I really wanted a shared phone system. It seemed like a VoIP telephony system was the way to go. With many of these systems you can have a shared main number with people in other states, have extensions as well as direct dial, voice mail to email, three digit dialing to other extensions, etc… Basically all the amenities you would have in a normal enterprise office line. Plus, VoIP offers great deals like unlimited long distance and incoming toll free calls.

I shopped around quite a bit, and I found a lot of different services. Many want you to purchase a VoIP router that will sit in a data center. That didn’t work for us. We needed a hosted solution. We didn’t want to support a server box with something as foreign as VoIP technology, especially for something as vital as our telephony needs. So, I searched more for a hosted solution.

I went pretty far down the road with a company call Bandwidth.com. They seemed to have everything we needed, although their salespeople didn’t seem to understand that. And we started to move forward. But then cam one of the longest contracts I have ever seen. And, they seemed to want to take weeks to get this set up. To top it off, I couldn’t get anyone there to return a phone call, and almost every email went unanswered. So, we nixed them from the fold. If you can’t get sales calls returned, imagine trying to get support.

The company we finally went with is Zivva Office. Their Website is less than impressive, and honestly smells of a bad re-seller, but they seemed to have the services we needed, the pricing was better than expected, and the time frame to set up was about 1 week. It looked like we had a winner. I tried to get some references, but they appeared to be light on that. So, we moved forward on a very small scale. Only myself and one other person would start of using their phones.

We purchased the recommended Polycom phones (although I really wanted the cool Cisco phone with the color screen, which they offer but at twice the price), and got everything hooked up.

Set up was incredibly easy. I just plugged in the RJ-45 cable to the router, and the standard power cord, and I was off an running.

But that was the last easy thing. i have never been able to properly set up my voicemail (I can’t get it to play my voice for outbound messages), and I have never been able to set the clock, which appears to require a degree in physics to get into. And Zivva support is as bad as you get. Most of my emails go unanswered, telephone calls usually go to voicemail, and go equally unanswered. The company appears to be only a few people, and when I did finally get ahold of the support person, he was your typical rude tech geek who is offended that you don’t know how to access your Polycom menu through an IP address. Every question is followed by his mocking, overly exasperated sighs, which is really the last thing you want to hear when you can’t get their phone system to work.

As for downtime, we have experienced some issues. Most of them appear to be when i go to make a change. Things were progressing well for a couple months, so I decided to add a couple phones to the system for other people. But when I sent an email asking for the new phones, they shut off my service. From what I understand, they made some error in processing my request. So, I stopped the order.

In the end, the system works enough time that I can’t legitimize getting rid of it, but is down enough to make me remember every time it has gone down, and it seems to add up. Zivva’s total lack of concern and support is the main problem I have. I still can’t get my clock set right, and my voicemail still doesn’t work properly, and i simply don’t have the time to set with their annoyed engineer to get these things done. So, I will spend some time in the next month researching more alternatives. Maybe in the last six months there has been some changes in the space. I’m hoping that a bigger company, with an actual support staff, has started offering business service.

If you are looking for VoIP business solutions, I would suggest a few things. First, make sure you have a back up line, even if it’s a cell phone. Second, make sure you have a good business Internet connection from your broadband provider. Third, set up your router to prioritize your phone, this makes sure that your calls don’t lose bandwidth when you’re surfing the Web.

As for providers, I really can’t recommend any. Bandwidth.com wastes time, and Zivva stops caring as soon as you become a customer. I would suggest doing some thorough research and reference checks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 3:32 pmand is filed under Internet Marketing(t) . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.