What IT Pros Like & Dislike about Their Company’s Hosted VoIP Service

In a previous blog, I wrote about which hosted VoIP service providers are receiving the most reviews on our site and which are rated the highest.

What do you think is the most commonly mentioned attribute of the reviews of 4 brains or higher? In other words, what does it take to make you happy?

…and the negative reviews?

Common Threads of the Positive Hosted VoIP Reviews:
What are these providers typically doing right? We analyzed this question by looking at the reviews with a 4.0 or higher rating, reading each of them, writing down the compliments given and tallying how many times each compliment is mentioned across all relatively positive reviews.

In this data set, happy Hosted VoIP buyers most frequently mentioned “Good Ongoing Customer Support” and “Features/Functionality,” which were both tied at being mentioned 24% of the time. “Good Customer Support During Installation” and “Good Call Quality” were tied for second, each being mentioned approx. 16% of the time.

User Mark Zanders elaborates on his 5 Brain Review of Jive:

“We’re beginning our 4th year on Jive Communications. Very happy and it just keeps getting better and better. You are not nickeled and dimed for every feature you may need. It is all included. Need more auto-attendants? It’s included. Need custom call queues? Included. Conference calling? Included. Internet faxing? Included. Call from any device? Got it. …”

Shockingly, pricing was mentioned fairly infrequently on positive reviews and not a single time in negative reviews.

What are the commonalities in the negative reviews?
When IT buyers are displeased with their Hosted VoIP provider, are there any common reasons that repeatedly pop up? To drill into this question, we isolated all of the negative reviews (of 3.5 or lower), and then analyzed them in the same way that we had done with the positive reviews.

By far, the most commonly mentioned complaint was “Poor Customer Support During Installation,” which was voiced 43% of the time (which is more than twice as much as the next most common complaint). “Poor Call Quality,” “Downtime” and “Other Technical Problems” were all tied for 2nd place, each being mentioned 13% of the time.

User “Jabos” on his 3 Brains experience: “It is not easy to install but If you can get it configured correctly and fully, it’s a great system. Customer services is not that great . Some times you have to wait ages to get connected. i have…”

Take note service providers… invest in the installation process!

Anything surprising about those commonalities? They seemed normal to me but how much time do you think providers spend on pricing vs. service installation process? Obviously for some providers, not enough.

What were your thoughts on these findings? What else are you wondering?