Fonality, Inc.

Fonality Review
Up until recently the Becker Law firm (BLF) had been a loyal customer of Fonality 鈥?Netfortis. We were leasing our phones through Fonality, paying $22.00 a month per phone since 2016. Over the course of four years, we paid $5,280 for these phones. However, when something happened to the phone or the phone quality was reduced, it was BLF鈥檚 problem and Fonality would not pay to them fixed. This is one of the reasons we ultimately chose to cancel our service with this company. After cancelation of the service we are required to return the phones which was not unusual.
During the four years that these phones were in use one of the phone鈥檚 was damaged, but it was still in working condition. Fonality/Netfortis wanted us to pay $375.00 for that phone. Not only was it four years old but, also that we had paid $1,056 for that phone over the course of its lifespan. After some research, the value of the telephone was less than $100.00. I called and spoke with a manager at Fonality/Netfortis. While she was pleasant to talk too it still took her days to try to get the matter resolved. When I told them that since I was going to have to buy the telephone, I wanted it returned they charged me to ship it back after I had to pay to ship the telephones to them.
During one of my phone calls with Fonality/Netfortis they left me on hold for over an hour, which is unacceptable by any standard. After being left on hold for that amount of time they denied my request to have the phone shipped back to me at cost to them.
The primary reason I cancelled my service with Fonality/Netfortis was cost. Our firm was their customer for over four (4) years and when I compared costs, I discovered that not only had the cost of this service declined over that period, but their new customers were paying significantly less than we were. When I inquired of my account representative if they could do something to bring my firm in line with what others in the industry were charging or what they charged new customers, I was told that if I were to go out and get a quote for a comparable service and submit it to them and they agreed that it was comparable, they would match that price. If I did not want to do that work, then they would give me a minimal price reduction but lock me into a long-term contract.
I found both of these options unsatisfactory. I did the research they suggested, found a different service provider with more features than Fonality/Netfortis and at a significantly lower cost. I then switched my service to this provider and have been happy. Overall, I am not happy with my service with Fonality/Netfortis and I will not recommend them to anyone.

They have horrible customer service. They absolutely could not get us up and running. They even acknowledged they were providing horrible care to us. Yet they are coming after our Agency for liquidated damages because our Agency owner was forced to cancel the service. He lost pay with employees. Missed business opportunities because they could not do there job. Also 99% of customer service agents can't speak English. Made it very challenging to communicate

They are so behind the curve on what features of VOIP are available in the marketplace today. Their system is clunky and not very user friendly and the only feature they really brought to the table we don't use with our current provider anyway. We decided based on a recommendation of another agent to try them out. During the set up process we found that almost all of the important items that we use currently are not even in the works with Fonality. Creating call campaigns, auto dialer, IVR prerecorded voicemail drops, easy reviewing of recorded calls, caller id customization, easy reviewing of previous call history are all set up with our current provider but were not available with fonality. So because we use these items so often we chose to not complete our port to them and stay where we were. We never used their system at all however they are choosing to force us to honor a contract that was never completed and are making our office pay 1/2 of the 18months to change our minds. Buyer BEWARE!

Switched from them after yet another service outage. Best part? They wanted me to pay an exorbitant amount to get away from the services they said they would provide my agency but were unable to.

Don't even start with then. Hidden fees, all their features aren't included, and the customer service is non-existent.

To whom it many concern; I had a fonality phone system for over 5 years. During that time, the phone system would fail on an average of 5 times/week. It was often blamed on the "HUD". The customer service was inadequate. We would have to manually reboot the system sometimes as many as 3 times a day.
After five years, I notified Fonality that I was switching to a new company. I notified them over 2 months in advance. They claimed that the notification occurred within 30 days of the contract renewal date. They insisted I pay another year of service. My service was switched 2 months earlier. They did not recognize the service change as notification of service termination. They repeatedly tried to bill my credit card. After several failed attempts (I had to change the number to stop them), they relented.

I would never recommend this company to anyone. Do not use fonality. The product is poor. The service is poor. The corporate behavior is terrible. One of the worse companies I have worked with.

Fonality phone systems has totally changed the way we do business in my insurance agency. Being able to tie all 12 locations together by utilizing HUD was a true game changer for us. Before we switched we had to have more staff in each office to handle the call volume. Now all 12 offices can help answer our incoming calls.

The cost savings were also incredible….we were able to cut staffing due to the usage of the IVR. The IVR redirects over 2,000 calls per month to our 24/7 service center. We also saved over $250 per month off our phone bill by switching to VOIP.

Fonality has been a fantastic partner and easy to do business with as well. I highly recommend taking a look into Fonality as you look to improve your phone technology.

I have used Fonality in my own company as well as now providing their services to my clients. Fonality has made the installation of their product, porting of my existings numbers, and training of users a smooth flowing process. Fonality's customer support has been exceptional and kept downtime to a minimum.

Fonality is the first company that I recommend when I am asked for advice on a phone system.

We didn't have a phone system before so I don't have much to compare it to. We did our research and this seemed like the fit. It works great and we haven't had any problems. The only reason it doesn't get 5 stars is because their website is not very user friendly.

Update: Beware with trying to leave them because they have your soul. You have a 30-day window to cancel your contract every year with Fonality so we have to pay a ton to cancel and pay some stupid cancellation fee. Since I left the review above the market has changed. There is by far better software out there. We switched to Toky.co over a year ago and it is so much better. I would also looking into Zoom's new phone system that can link up with physical phones. Stay

I work for a multi-national cloud based software solution company, and we utilize Fonality as our primary PBX with Fonality being the Hosted Server. We recently eclipsed the 100+ users plateau with Fonality. With features like Desktop HUD (Heads Up Display), HUD Web, HUD Mobile, and their Administrative Interface, the functionality is second to None! I can literally run the phone system from the Beach, which I have had to do in the past. It's really a tragedy living in Florida! But Seriously, the Account Management Team, Support Staff, System Engineers, Marketing Team, and Corporate Sales are all Great people deal with…

I have read all the reviews about Fonality, and many other PBXtra systems in our quest to stay ahead of the technology curve, and it's clear to me that we have made the right choice.

Take the system for a test-drive, and I think you will see for yourself how incredibly versatile it is. I'm completely happy with the system, and I think you will be too.

We have rolled this cloud based service to 4 of 17 locations so far with plans on more. At times there can be challenges but the 24×7 support has been responsive and very helpful – even on weekends.

Like any other VIOP system with lot's of capabilities there is a learning curve but the staff is helpful and the knowledge base deep. Make sure you have proper bandwidth and determine a compatible router.

Overall – A+

We have an on-premise PBX and use a local SIP carrier here in Canada. The hardware has been rock solid and we have tied 9 remote offices on to 1 phone system. The admin interface is well laid out and the Auto attendant is the most powerfully versatile design I have seen or used. The only reason I did not give 5 stars, is that there is always room for improvement.

1. Customer support is terrific but sometimes you must demand to speak to a higher tier to get an issue fixed. I have been working with the system long enough that I have gone through all the tier1 support stuff before calling.

2. It would be nice if you had 1 or 2 licensing streams as apposed to having to purchase add-ons. I purchased a 5 year contract and don't have access to new features, that were not available when we signed the contract.

That being said, after working with this system for the past 3 years I would recommend it to anyone. It just works.

The portable phones for this system did not hold up

Terrible to have a separate contract for customer service/tech support. Will definitely NOT renew this contract due to Fonality attempting to generate more revenue by separating a service which should be standard, since we are paying monthly for it. You would rather make short term money than to keep a long term client. Will make sure all my friends/family know NOT to use Fonality or any of their products/services.

I purchased a PBX server 10 years ago and I believe they no longer sell servers, but I had to trouble shoot things myself to get the system up and running. Due to a technical glitch with their software, I had to purchase support which was like $750 to sign up and $360 annually, just so they can answer my question about the initial setup.

I will not do any business with them and I would not recommend them to others.

I no longer use their server. There are many affordable open source alternatives for PBX servers. I got a grandstream which works pretty good. I can't speak about their hosted service.

…. My 2 cents.

We had a copier company "throw in" this Fonality phone system in with our copier lease. It was supposed to be for free but as the old saying goes, NOTHING is EVER free. Soon after we signed the contract we started getting hit with the "maintenance" contract invoices. That's how this company can get away with saying it's inexpensive or "free". Fraudulent business practice if you really want to boil it down to ethics but unfortunately not illegal.
To top it off, Fonality sent some rep here to help set us up and what a joke he was! We had to call him back a few months later with another issue and again his professionalism was sorely lacking. We have since gone online and figured out what we need to survive until this awful lease is up and then we can get a system that actually fits what we need.

When we moved into a new building, our then-IT guy chose Fonality because it was a free tool and supported the functionality that we needed. However, we have since outsourced its management to a Fonality specialist at a third-party IT companhy and spent thousands of dollars on its maintenance, because our current IT person, our CTO, our SysAdmin, and our Head of Product — all who are highly technical and understand database structures, etc. — found the interface to update the system too confusing and frustrating to use. If we did not have sub-tenants who relied on its functionality, our company would move off of Fonality onto another provider stat.

Best voip phone system out there!!! Great service & awesome features!!!

Fonality is easy to use and provides functionality that is not available in any other system on the market.

If your system are working fine, way yo need to pay 1,200 or more dollars on a maintenance. It does not work good for remote extensions, there is a lot of Ghost calls and in some countries could not use the service because it only speak english

We probably move to another system if this fails.
We didn't do it because of the phones but this next time we will definitely do it.

Horrible vendor that would blame everyone one else for problems. Installation nightmare where I had to replace 50% of my network equipment after I was told my existing equipment would work and still didn't resolve my problems. Awful support where the support people were very friendly but didn't have any idea how to fix problems. Support cases that remained open and untouched for years. Phones breaking, servers disconnecting from each other, complete chaos. I would have given less stars if there was that option. Thanks for contacting me yet again so that I was reminded how much I hate Fonality.

Great system and solid tech support.

Fonality is an excellent system that is intuitive to use and manage, even for non-technical people, and integrates very well with Salesforce to act as your call center.

Their customer service is great, available 24/7. Their staff, when you reach them, are very helpful.

This is the best VOIP phone company I've found, and I've used several.

The phone system we were replacing was on a Windows Server 2003 server. The same company was offering a new server with Windows Server 2008 as its OS but with no upgrade path to Windows Server 2016. This was a big concern for us as the server OS would be eight years old out of the box.

The Fonality server is on a Linux box that isn鈥檛 hardware dependent. We鈥檇 only have to update the pieces of the OS we need to keep the Linux OS compatible with the phone software, and Fonality handles all that remotely, so we鈥檒l never have to worry about the OS being out of spec or having the buy new hardware if the OS or the phone software is upgraded. We'll never *have to* buy another phone server due to OS obsolescence.

The feature set between the solutions we looked at were identical: Auto Attendant; IVR; VM; DID routing; Call Center; Reporting; VoIP Phones; Chat Tool (internal); Remote Phone Connectivity; Find-Me / Follow-Me;
Smartphone app; Conference Bridges.

Fonality was clearly the less expensive upfront, over $8K less, and annually, over $3K less. This really pushed the business decision over the top towards Fonality. Thanks to Grant Bowman for selling us the right solution!

The server installation took a less than an hour and we were able to place an international phone call with the Fonality system immediately. Since all the phones use VoIP getting them installed at each desk was just a matter of plugging in the power and the Ethernet cable. If we had known were were going to replace the phone system when we were purchasing routers, we would have purchased POE routers, eliminating the need for power cables for each phone.

Configuring the system was also a breeze. It's easy to understand and very straight forward. The only complaint is that it can be time consuming due to the response time of the Admin Panel due to the hybrid configuration, but since you only set up a phone system once it isn't an issue when making minor infrequent changes later.

The onsite installation (which was included in the price) was also painless. Christian Avila and Christopher Canchola were very professional and punctual. Christopher Canchola was onsite for a week to help configure, test and train. Everything went like clockwork.

No installation is without issues. Ours were few and quickly fixed, and not worth mentioning as they had nothing to do with Fonality yet were fixed with help from their support team.

The one feature that I really wanted everyone to use is HUD. I can't say enough good things about it. The chat tool is invaluable and I use it daily. Placing phone calls via HUD is also very helpful for me. I can copy and past phone numbers so I don't have to try multiple times to call someone (I am dyslexic with numbers so punching in numbers on a phone is always a challenge). Monitoring the call center has become a far easier task for our Customer Service Manager due to HUD's feature that shows her whose on a call, for how long, and what kind.

The list of why we love this phone system goes on: the Admin and User panels can be access from any browser anywhere (I used my smartphone just last week); "Find Me/Follow Me"; vm to email; conference bridges; multiple queues; easily configurable call trees; live backup server; easily replaceable Dell servers (which Fonality will configure for a reasonable fee); great phones; excellent sound quality; ease of reporting; excellent and timely support; and on and on.

I would recommend this phone system to any business, big or small.

Fonality has received awards and they are well deserved. The many products solutions as well as great customer service is what makes me recommend Fonality to associates and friends. My transition to was smooth because friendly smart people were available when I needed them. Special thanks to Grant Bowman, Chi Chang and Kassie Graziano. These people made the difference.

For 10 years, we had used a local company to manage our phone systems with great disappointment. So when time came to make a change, we looked at all of our options. We fell in love with Fonality's software and appreciated the diligence of their biz guy guy, Grant Bowman. We also liked many of their features–especially the free conference calling, which saves us about $1,200 a month. Their pricing was very good, and we opted for the most advanced Polycom phones. Our previous vendor made the transition very difficult. Fonality worked hard to help us through the process. Now, we're set up and firing on all cylinders. As we suspected, HUD has become a major part of our firm's internal communications platform. We love the inter-office chatting. In the future, we plan to allow for more work from home flexibility and Fonality will play a major role in that. Overall, we are very high on Fonality. It's become more than a phone service, it's a productivity tool that comes with a great price and strong service delivery.