RingCentral issues in March – 03312012

I do not usual just tell people to buy something unless we feel confident in the products or parts inside. So for the past few months I have been running my business with RingCentral and we are resellers for both RingCentral and OnSIp. In December we chose RC over the OnSip because of minute related charges, as we use almost 3000 minutes a month for service calls.

As we wrote in an earlier blog OnSip has a great product very flexible for adding phones with out increasing base cost.  However, in our case two features of RC is why we chose it for our office 1st no minute charges, 2nd centralized fax.

So here is our March Update and some of our disappointments:

1. Features seem to change on the fly with no warning. Up until a week or so ago we could set up internal forward rules between extensions. Example my virtual extension 1001 is supposed to ring 1002 if I am not logged in or do not answer my extension. I was forwarding my calls to (xxx)xxx-xxxx * 1002.  This just stopped functioning.

2. My customer support calls seem to always be non-US based, maybe they always were but communications seem to be getting difficult.

3. Customer service seems to be ill-informed. I am having an issue of not being able to direct Faxes to specific extensions which may or may have been working when I first signed up.

We rarely accept faxes, but recently I was testing the idea of directing faxes to specific extensions. Also I was losing faxes because they were not going to the extension I expected.  I contacted the Help Desk on 3/31/2012 around 11:30 and was told after a little investigation that this feature did not exist.

I thought OK, I never tested this and maybe it never worked. I gave up but while surfing RC site I noticed they has a blog so I started reading a few of the recent blogs and a tip suggestion popped up. The tip said something to the affect of do you want to send faxes to specific extensions so that they can be ready be the extensions call controller.  Wow I thougt the web site was reading my mind, but remember 2 minutes ago the help desk said we could not do this.  Check out  “Send Your Faxes Directly to Those Who Need to See Them” seems to be an exact reverse of what the Help Desk told me today and this blog was dated 2/21/2012. 

I hope to get these kinks in the system worked out as they have some direct effects on my selling strategy as well as my own usage.

4. I have had issues when using a Call Controller and calling into companies with Automated answering systems like Intel and  Bank of America to mention a few of my vendors.  I seem to get as far as the greeting I press an option and the automated system on the other side hangs up. Or in the case of BoA I get an invalid phone number was dialed but if I use Ringout for the same number and send it to a landline the call goes through every time.

5. Last issue for this month random disconnects and VoIP not syncing (in english my caller hears me and I do not hear them). This is happening more this month than in the past, I have contacted RC and made some minor changes on my Call Controller. Some improvement but not perfect. 

To help everyone understand my current test scenario, I have no VoIP phones and I am not using a VoIP converter to Analog. I use RC Call Controllers on several computers, a dedicated backup phone, a home phone (FIOS) and cell phones.  In the next few months I will test a handset from Cisco most likely (expensive but I like the wireless model for flexibility).

This post is not intended to diminish the value of RC as we are still marketing and using the system. It is intended for clients to see that we understand their pains, as well as for them to see we are invested in the product and not just pushing bottles of snake oil.  Experts no but we are becoming weathered users and that is part of what we are able to wear on our sleeve when we sell and help set up VoIP for our clients.

Another update from the techies at www.end2endsupport.com.

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