Should I stay or should I go?

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 16, 2004 Posts: 7

I have had Vonage for 3 years now. However while reading peoples post over the last 6 months I am concerned. I have not had any outages so I have not had to call customer service. However I am considering switching to Time Warner's Voip service due to the number of post about horrible customer service when someone is needing help. Is there any hope that Vonage will improve their customer service or would I be better off switching to another company. I do have the wife approval factor riding on this. She is a very heavy telephone user. So if something does go wrong and I can't have it fixed within a couple hours she might start getting edgy. Thanks for your help. Smile

TITLE EDITED TOO VAGUE

Posts: 230 · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 7:29 pm Post subject:

If you are not having any issues I would with what is working. As far as Time Warner is concerned let me just say that I have gotten many referrals from people switching to Vonage. What do you think that tells you?

Posts: 28 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Mar 07, 2005 Posts: 28

Three years and no problems? I've only been here 2 months and had had little or no problems. The way I look at it, if you have had no problems why would you ever need customer service? And how do you know the other Voip cs is any better? I'm staying and counting the $40 savings month after month.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 16, 2004 Posts: 7

Thanks for the advice. I hope to never need customer service but we all know that someday you just have to call. Here is hoping Vonage pulls it's act together. I like Vonage and the service saves me a bundle. My wife's mom lives out of town and it saves me hundreds per year.

Posts: 492 · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 11:26 pm Post subject:

You can always go with Comcast. They plan to come out with their own version of Voip by the end of the year. A real great buy too, only $40/month.

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 17, 2005 Posts: 6

badhutx wrote:

.....However I am considering switching to Time Warner's Voip service due to the number of post about horrible customer service when someone is needing help. .....

Time Warner's Voip service is at least $20 more per month than Vonage. That doesn't even include voicemail. If you want voicemail, that would be like $24 more. No way in hell I would switch and pay an extra $288 per year.

Posts: 50 · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2005 5:04 pm Post subject:

Vonage now has 600,000 subscribers, and most must be pretty satisfied or they'd leave. You should remember that, in general, the folks who come here are the ones who have problems -- we seldom hear from that majority who're happy.

Three years with no problems and you're thinking about changing? To me, that sounds like a fix for something that isn't broken!

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 03, 2005 Posts: 4

Man, that's an odd to leave with no problems, or any benefit from another service. I agree, Alot of happy customers dont post on here. Once i got my parents a linksys WRT54G with QoS support + Vonage, they have been extremely happy campers ever since. Of course they learned to mimick my decisions on things related to stuff for the house, simply for the fact that Im good at finding cost saving solutions. Vonage is great, assuming you got QoS support.

In terms of customer support, i have no idea how vonage's customer support is. I have never used customer support relating to technology whatsoever, but that's me. Typically, once things are up and running, what's the point of customer service. If the service goes down, it'll eventually come back up just like Sat Tv/Cable/normal phone/Internet.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 16, 2004 Posts: 7

I haven't used them for sometime. The last time I had to use tech support was over a year ago (I had trouble with my virtual number). I still have the Motorola box and I have it placed behind my Linksys BEFW11S4v.2 wireless router and I really don't have any QOS issues. I have thought about upgrading to the all in one wireless G router but that means I would have to call support to change my mac address and I fear that part of it. So I just stay with what I have. When and if it breaks I will replace it. I guess this is one of those times were if it isn't broke don't fix it.

Posts: 134 · Vonage Representative Joined: Apr 15, 2005 Posts: 134

As far as "horrible customer service" 90% of the people are probably referring to "long hold times" or "emails that never get answered". It's not that we "ignore" or "don't care", its that our customer base has grown at such a rapid rate, it takes time to build a sufficient workforce and bring everyone up to speed knowledgewise. We are actively adding 50+ agents a week and will continue to do so until hold times are virtually non-existant and e-mails are same day answered. I can tell you this though, things will only get better, in the last month alone i've seen hold times drop significantly. This year alone we plan on adding at least 1,000+ customer service/tech people. So my advice, is to stick it out , you'll see. Cool