Hello All,
This may be a basic and opinionated question, but I am a little confused. I tried to search here for something similar but couldn't find any posts.
So a little backstory.... When I started here we were in a terrible contract with our local IT/Phone company who provided us an on prem Zultys solution which worked great and had all the features we needed. Due to the contract, we were paying insane money for something we would never own in the end. Essentially we could have paid off the service over three times. So we ended up buying out of that contract. While on that system we had mostly desktop phones for every user. We had maybe 3 softphones in the building and they would randomly malfunction. Not a QoS type of malfunction but they would randomly mute, lose connection to the dongle, not be recognized by the PC, etc. As we were courting new Voip solutions, our local IT/Phone company told us to stay away from softphones as they are generally more hassle then they are worth. We ended up moving to 8x8 Voip and the owner decided to de-clutter all the desks for everyone except IT, and everyone received new softphones. 8x8's software was terrible and so was their support but the softphones were probably 50% of the issue. That experiment lasted a year and we moved on to RingCentral but with the entire company still on softphones, sans IT. RingCentral has way better software and support and works great, for the most part but we do still have softphone issues but not nearly as bad as with 8x8.
I guess my basic question is are softphones a giant pain in the ass? IT didn't have a ton of issues with 8x8 with our desktop phones but we did have some. Since moving to RingCentral we have had zero issues with the desktop phones but since the rest of the company is on softphones we do still have some physical seeming issues. So since the owner has a softphone she is determined that RingCentral is the issue and we are shopping for a new Voip provider again. I tried telling everyone that we could fix almost everything by going back to desktop phones but after shelling out about 10k on new softphones, it seems to fall on deaf ears. Essentially I was hoping you fine people here would validate that softphones are terrible and to stay away from them. It is possible that it is the brand we use I suppose but they are not cheap. We use Plantronics Voyager B235-M and Plantronics Savy W440s and both seem to have some issues.
Let me know what you guys think and if there is a better softphone out there that you have used which has little or no issues, please let me know. Have heard Jabra is the way to go....
Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.
This may be a basic and opinionated question, but I am a little confused. I tried to search here for something similar but couldn't find any posts.
So a little backstory.... When I started here we were in a terrible contract with our local IT/Phone company who provided us an on prem Zultys solution which worked great and had all the features we needed. Due to the contract, we were paying insane money for something we would never own in the end. Essentially we could have paid off the service over three times. So we ended up buying out of that contract. While on that system we had mostly desktop phones for every user. We had maybe 3 softphones in the building and they would randomly malfunction. Not a QoS type of malfunction but they would randomly mute, lose connection to the dongle, not be recognized by the PC, etc. As we were courting new Voip solutions, our local IT/Phone company told us to stay away from softphones as they are generally more hassle then they are worth. We ended up moving to 8x8 Voip and the owner decided to de-clutter all the desks for everyone except IT, and everyone received new softphones. 8x8's software was terrible and so was their support but the softphones were probably 50% of the issue. That experiment lasted a year and we moved on to RingCentral but with the entire company still on softphones, sans IT. RingCentral has way better software and support and works great, for the most part but we do still have softphone issues but not nearly as bad as with 8x8.
I guess my basic question is are softphones a giant pain in the ass? IT didn't have a ton of issues with 8x8 with our desktop phones but we did have some. Since moving to RingCentral we have had zero issues with the desktop phones but since the rest of the company is on softphones we do still have some physical seeming issues. So since the owner has a softphone she is determined that RingCentral is the issue and we are shopping for a new Voip provider again. I tried telling everyone that we could fix almost everything by going back to desktop phones but after shelling out about 10k on new softphones, it seems to fall on deaf ears. Essentially I was hoping you fine people here would validate that softphones are terrible and to stay away from them. It is possible that it is the brand we use I suppose but they are not cheap. We use Plantronics Voyager B235-M and Plantronics Savy W440s and both seem to have some issues.
Let me know what you guys think and if there is a better softphone out there that you have used which has little or no issues, please let me know. Have heard Jabra is the way to go....
Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.
