We have just finished a disastrous six month flirtation with Vonage, the voice over IP (VOIP) telephony provider. VOIP providers offer a great solution for a fast-growing business. You can run your own exchange software – Asterisk – create conference call dial-ins, allow staff in different countries to share your switchboard – all very useful. Sadly Vonage has all the characteristics of old style telephony businesses: poor quality of service, an inflexible billing structure, hidden charges (they even charge you for the privilege of closing your account) and the appearance but not the reality of good customer service. Their customer service folk are (wearily) polite but all work to a script and know too little about their business to be helpful. They mimic, but don’t replicate the experience of dealing with human beings. Welcome to the revolution, intones the announcement as you reach the automated switchboard. The announcement – a taped British voice – sounds flat, perfunctory. You are talking to a machine with a human voice. And that’s what you get.
Unlike (e.g.) the excellent and reliable Zen Internet, Vonage have no “cancel account” functionality on the web interface. (Why not?) You have to call the company. As the billing lady tried to talk me through a script designed to find out why I was leaving I felt sorry for her. Customer service, I kept saying. Price, I kept saying. She started talking about new packages that were on offer. After five minutes of this I had to cut her off. Cheez! Trying to keep a customer from quitting by making it difficult to quit! I thought this sort of thing was on the way out …
Unless they change their ways the real revolution will do damage to Vonage. This ain’t the way to grow a business.
I started with Vonage, just like anyone, with the excitement of a new age phone company that treats their customers very well, and doesn’t rip them off.
skip forward in time to present day…
I just got told by Vonage customer service that I couldn’t get 13 months of back billing from them that they charged me for a phone I hadn’t been using since may of 2007.
I lived in Seattle at the time with my wife who was in the military, she was moved to Louisiana due to a change of station, so I cancelled my account prior to leaving… being that we knew we were going to move around a lot we didn’t start online service so seeing any charges to our checking account was difficult, being that we moved we didn’t receive our account info until November of 2007 (in Bulk I might add) and still really didn’t notice due to so much happening in our lives at the time, then in February/March of 08 I see charges from Vonage on our account, I call them and they told me that it’s no problem sir you can get all of that money back being that we can see you didn’t use your phone, BUT you will have to talk to our cancellation dept to cancel your account… needless to say, I had a horrible time working around their hours, being mine are so long, that it took me till June to call to cancel, but I wasn’t worried “I could get all of my money back, being that they could see that I didn’t use their phone for over a year”…
Nope… instead I got an offer to receive 10 dollars off service for a year, ooooooo I get 120 dollars of my hard earned money back. Vonage blows and is a major rip off, and I will see to it that everyone knows about it.
William A Carpenter
Yeah Vonage is a ripoff. They advertise no contract but when I cancel they charged another 40 dollars. Also the number they gave me was most frequently called by acquaintances of the former user as 90% of the calls I got for the last year and a half were wrong numbers. I’m sticking with cell phone only.