What the hell is Vonage thinking?
Marketing phone calls suck. I can barely tolerate dealing with a phone when the person on the other end is someone I know. Wasting my time telling some call center droid to never call again is only slightly more pleasant than cleaning up the yard after the dogs “played with” a rotting carcass.
I have been a very happy Vonage customer; cheap long distance and international calls, it just works, online voice mail, etc…
With one phone call, my opinion of Vonage has dropped immensely.
Vonage called earlier in the week to offer me a second line for free for 2 months. “As a valued and loyal customer, we are pleased to offer you a special deal” that is exactly the same as the deal offered on their website.
I was polite; No thanks, don’t need a second line, don’t call back….
They just called again to offer the same deal. I was not as polite and indicated in no uncertain terms that one of the reasons why I have been a long term customer of Vonage is to avoid marketing calls, take me off the list, do not call again, etc…
An angry letter has been written.
If they call again, I’m seriously going to consider switching services. Any suggestions?
July 2nd, 2006 at 8:48 pm
Rich (my manager) has been using SunRocket for 4 months with no problems and a lower monthly cost than Vonage. FWIW: I’m very close to going to SunRocket.
Good Luck
-Bob
July 3rd, 2006 at 7:28 am
Just had a similar experience with a german telco-provider. They called dujring the day when i divert my homephone to my cell. Since it takes some time to divert the call (after about 8 rings on the homephone), it always just rang once on the cell and i did never have a chance to pick the call up. So their computer rang me again for more than 10 days. It even called on a Saturday morning around 8:15 where i usualy still enjoy my matrace. I guess i don’t need to tell youi how angry i was, when i finaly managed to pick the freaking call up.
Do they call that early on saturdays in the US too (doesn’t seem like a clever idea to me)?
July 3rd, 2006 at 12:40 pm
I have been a very happy customer of Speakeasy.net. I chose them for service quality - not price - when I got fed up with SBC. VoIP has been flawless with free calling in the US, Canada and 22+ other countries. In the past year we had only one outage of about 2 hours. Their call center is located in Seattle and they are staffed with people that actually know what they are doing as opposed to working off a script.
July 5th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Yeah, this sort of marketing reminds me of Qwest. I have a land line which I absolutely never ever use, I only need it because I can’t get my DSL line unbundled from the phone. I use my cell phone for all phone calls, the only people who ever call me on my Qwest line are telemarketers from Qwest.
July 14th, 2006 at 4:00 am
Not sure if you have heard of Asterisk - it is an open source telephony switch/PBX. It runs fine on our Mac mini at home although the version we use is slightly old. Anyway, if you hook up your incoming phone line to it (another fun project) you can create an extension (we use Ext. 666) that can be the destination for all of your telemarketers. You can configure this extension anyway you want, but I’m using the great menus and voice prompts created by Steve Murphy posted here.
As for Vonage, I would consider changing to a standards-based SIP provider. This article might give you some ideas.