Vonage Faces User Complaints As IPO Looms
Shawn Young and Li Yuan write in The Wall Street Journal:
Vonage, one of the leading providers of Internet phone service, continues to be bedeviled by service problems as it plans to move forward with its $494 million initial public offering, which could come as soon as next week. Message boards and consumer forums are filled with complaints of poor sound quality, dropped calls and other glitches.More here.
Customers who try to leave are complaining of bureaucratic hassles and snafus, particularly when they seek to switch services and take their numbers with them. Ironically, Vonage has long complained that local phone giants drag their feet in releasing the phone numbers of customers who want to leave.
posted by Fergie @ 5/18/2006 10:02:00 PM
2 Comments:
I have two Vonage numbers in my house. One for voice and one for a FAX machine. Everything was working fine until we had Time Warner come in to switch a verizon land line over to VOIP. We wanted to get the All in one package (Digital cable, roadrunner and a phone). They inadvertently switched our main Vonage number to TW. We realized that and had them reverse the process. All well and good, we can make outgoing calls. Unfortunately anyone calling in from a land line gets an Out of Service message.
We've been working with Vonage for more than a week to resolve this problem with no luck. four times so far the tech support person on the other end has said it will be fixed in 24-48 hours. No such luck! And I have to say, Vonage tech support is annoying as hell. Everytime you call the ask for your account number, billing address, UserID, and email address. To make matters worse every time they transfer you to another person, that person asks for all of the same information. And let me warn you, never, EVER, let them put you on hold! If they do you go back into the wait queue until someone else picks up and . . . asks you all of the questions again. And then you start over explaining to them everything you just explained o the previous person. I just spent 20 minutes waiting to be transferred to a supervisor only to have him put me on hold for 5 minutes while he "checked" something. That landed me back in the queue and a level 1 support person picked up and I went through the whole process again. And she told me so sweetly that they are working on it and these things take time (It's been over a week now! How long should I wait?). She said if it's not fixed by Monday (it's Friday right now) I should call back and go through this aggravating process all over again!
As soon as they rectify this problem I'm going to switch to a new service or go back to a land line.
I really don't need this shit from Vonage!
When I moved down to Colorado from Minnesota, my then roommate and I decided to go with Vonage to not only save $$ on calling my 2 sons up in MN but we liked what they had to offer. We started service (which I paid for and was in her name) March 2005 and it was good, we actually got to keep the same #!!! But a few months into having the service, we started to have bad reception, dropped calls and connection problems. I called the support center (I swear Vonage must out-source their support centers over seas..) and then the tech support person treated me like I had no idea what I was talking about and started to talk down to me like a little kid. Once the problem(s) were fixed, all was well and good. Then we started to have the same problem that another person has posted here, we were able to call out but there were a lot of times that when people tried to call us, they got and Out Of Sevice message at times (when I called them they blamed the ISP and told me to call them and they said it was Vonage...)I was also ticked that I could not change my due date--I live on a fixed income and only get paid once per month and I could never get it changed to another day that I knew would be shortly after I got paid. I explained this to them and they said it could not be done, even w/ a suppervisor--who just happened to be out of the office (along with all of the other supervisors!)
Then in May of 2006, my roommate and I moved into seperate places and the account was under her name (my name and cc were on the acct to pay the bills) and they claimed (or refused ) to let me keep the # but just switch the names. Now, I was talking on my cell phone as we had discontinued the service that day--did not want to be kicked out when I was on the phone w/ them--and they said it was going to take an entire hour (this is the accounting dept now) just to switch names and all of the simple things that can be done with anyone else in about 20min! I had forgotten that I recently switched to a cheaper rate plan w/ my cell service and had 600 min per month and figured I would be covered. Well, the transfer took almost 2 hours--what the hell?? I then received my cell bill the following mo. and it was over $300.00...I think Vonage should have taken care of their time on my phone..
I am now getting ready to leave Vonage and switch to Comcast and have it all bundled--the cost for service with Comcast (phone) is only going to be 39.99 per month after the 1 yr special of $35 per month--that is with tax! I figured it will be about an over all $7.00 increase for the same service (plus more) and I know that I will be talking to someone locally (he even gave me his extension #!!) When I called Vonage regarding closing my acct and wanting to keep the same #, they said it was possible but in order to do that they would have Comcast give me a bunch of forms to fill out before it can transfer. They did not even ask me as to why I was leaving!! They also said I will be charged a penalty of $39.99 for leaving since the acct was not over 1 year but assured me that I am paid up through Feb and I will not be charged extra---I did get his name, though ;) I called Comcast after talking to my husband and he told me to go for it. The rep I had been dealing with (the nice one) listened to what we were going through with Vonage and thought the way we were being treated was horrid. So, he set me up for installation for this Friday and their usual install fee is normally $47.00 but he knocked it down to $25.
VONAGE IS A COMPLETE CROCK OF CRAP!!! I am going onto all of the other consumer complaint sites and add to everybody elses complaints.
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