Full-featured phone system at a reasonable price

My customers are still telling me how impressed they are with the new system. We've had it for just over a year now, and some of the aches and pains of the old system have faded in my mind. Even so, I can tell you it's leaps and bounds above the last system we had. It takes around 10% of the time I used to spend setting up old extensions, and causes almost none of the aggravation and worry I had with the old system.

Pros

It was very easy to set up, even though my company's phone system is pretty complicated. They have great tools that are easy to implement. For example, I change the forwarding for at least one of my extensions several times a day. This process is easy and everything works flawlessly, as does the simultaneous ringing of my cell phone when someone calls my extension. I had some trouble with one number I ported from another provider, and the help desk fixed it within a couple of hours. A few months later, I had problems porting a fax number from an online fax provider, and they fixed it immediately. (The fax feature provided by Grasshopper is excellent, too!) Their prices are very reasonable, and they have taken a great deal of worry off my plate. I am very glad I found this software!

Cons

I can't say I have had any problems with the software that wasn't taken care of immediately by the excellent tech support. I had a little trouble setting up the extensions and recordings, but I had never had anything but an old-fashioned phone system before. Considering my lack of experience, the virtual system was not hard to figure out, and it was well worth it!

Costly, But Lots of Features

Overall, I was highly pleased with the quick onboarding process. It took less than 30 minutes to have the app fully set up and my number activated. My business chose to go with Grasshopper primarily because it's a trusted and well-known name in VOIP. Grasshopper has enabled us to have a separate phone number for our business and adds a ton of convenience in that we are able to use it with their app on our smartphones.

Pros

I like that, compared to its competitors, Grasshopper offers a wider variety of useful features. Some of my favorite features are visual voicemail, conference calling, Wi-Fi calling, virtual fax, and business texting. All of those features and more are included in all of their plans at no additional cost.

Cons

There are only two things that I dislike about Grasshopper. The plan pricing is the first on my list. They offer three different plans; I have the cheapest one which costs $29 per month which includes the phone number plus three lines. Second, I dislike that in order to use the Wi-Fi calling feature, you must first disable the Wi-Fi calling feature if you already use it with your cellular plan.

Very Basic; Room for Improvement

Pros

Ultimately this system is very straightforward and easy to use. For a small business, it provides the basic functions I need. I needed a business line so I could keep my personal phone free of business and this served that purpose.

Cons

One of my biggest frustrations is that it does not have a separate contacts function. The phone app requires syncing with my personal phone contacts which is exactly what I did NOT want. I wanted my business contacts completed separated from personal friends and family. Even the desktop app does not allow for that.

Would not recommend this

We used this to call our customers and text our customers. If they could get the glitches and kinks worked out, it would be a much better program. It was good to used for days when you have multiple calls per hour as it is hands free and you can just call from your computer. However, it is not one hundred percent reliable. The experience I had makes me not want to use it again, unless they were to fix everything so it functions like it should.

Pros

What I liked most about this software is that it provides a phone number and service that you can access using your laptop and headphones. It is easy to make calls from your computer, and you can send texts and check voice messages as well, and typed transcripts of those voice messages. It provides a professional looking phone system for your business and has a voicemail that is also seems professional and can be set up to transfer to employee's Grasshopper phone numbers or to roll over to their cell phones.

Cons

The problem with this software is that it is full of glitches. There were several times when Grasshopper sent the voice messages to the wrong phone numbers, the extensions got changed or were wrong, or the app just stopped working all together. It seemed like every week or two, we had to waste time calling in to customer service to get them to fix the problems. Also, you could not send mass texts or multiple texts to more than one person without them seeing each other's phone numbers and all responses going to all people in the group text. So if we had a group session where we wanted to confirm, invite, or remind twenty people, we had to send each text individually through Grasshopper. This involved sending a text, copying it, going back a screen, typing in the next number, pasting the text, and then sending it to the next person. It was a time waster.

VIOP Business Phone Review

Overall our experience has been good. Customer service is quick and helpful.

Pros

This not our first time using VOIP for our business line but Grasshopper overs a fair, competitive rate and one of the best Apps to complement the features of the software. It is very stable and unlike some other software, it has all the working features of the desktop version.

Cons

Our major problem has been that twice we have had our phone number mistaken for another company. Two times, two different companies about a year apart.