Can’t Buy Them All Vonage
Posted by Sheldon on December 19th, 2005.Print This Post | Email to a friend | Leave a Comment
After listening to Jon deal with the lower layer of customer unservice at Vonage, I thought about the standard way of fighting back against bureaucracy… creating a companysucks.com website. Just for fun, I thought I’d check and see if one was already created.
Interesting. vonagesucks.com goes to the vonage website. I have to assume that Vonage thought ahead and bought up the domain to prevent backlash or sued the first group of angry customers to “protect their trademark.”
Very interesting… vonagereallysucks.com also goes to the vonage website. How many could they afford to buy? Looks like just two on the really sucks theme. vonagereallyreallysucks.com is available as of today. I guess you can’t buy them all.
Approximately 5 hours of calling… on a 1800 number to Vonage, could have been dealt with in approximately 10 minutes if the customer service reps, and not just their supervisors, were allowed to actually make decisions.
How many dollars have companies spent wasting their time and customer time because their tier 1 support isn’t able to problem solve, and is only allowed to read from the manual.
Twice, the supervisor was able to help Jon to his satisfaction but in the process, I have removed myself from their “potential customer list.”
Not worth the headache.
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Remotely Related: Dell does not suck .com
December 20th, 2005 at 6:18 am
Bummer. I’ve never had a problem with them. But then again, I’ve never called them.
December 20th, 2005 at 8:02 am
That seems to be what everyone is saying. I guess you only have to call if there is a problem but if you have a problem, that’s when you need the customer service.
December 20th, 2005 at 9:14 pm
i use primus. they’re cheaper by $10 per month or maybe more because you get any feature you want for free…where as you need to pay extra with vonage. but they’re not perfect either.
December 21st, 2005 at 1:11 pm
I’m not asking for perfection, just a little bit of common sense.
December 22nd, 2005 at 2:40 am
Funny, had the sort of the same experience a while back. Have switched already and thought to give someone else the chance. Went with a company in the states called ZingoTel based on a referral from a friend who was already using the service. Got the unlimited plan obviously for next to nothing. Next step is to take a serious look at open source Asteriks - it just does not stop!
December 22nd, 2005 at 9:39 am
Bob, have you had a chance to experience customer support with ZingoTel?
February 27th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
THe most horrible experience with Vonage was cancelling. Look at this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=38&threadid=1810359&STARTPAGE=1
February 27th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
Ouch. The more I hear about Vonage, the more I’m thinking it isn’t worth the pain of the quality phone call. I wonder if Esposito ever had to deal with the Vonage call center.
April 26th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
[...] For those of you who have seen my Vonage post, this is not the same thing except with Dell. In fact, it is almost the opposite experience. [...]
May 30th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Vonage is complete garbage. The call “quality” is beyond bad, voicemail is completely unreliable, customer service is horrendous, and to top it all off, it costs $39.99 to cancel. What a hack job. They will definitely go bankrupt once people realize how bad this company sucks. VONAGE SUCKS!
May 30th, 2006 at 9:54 am
I wouldn’t be putting money on Vonage going bankrupt, AOL is still around and they did everything in their power to tick people off.
Who are you going to switch to, Charles?
July 13th, 2006 at 10:20 am
OMG… these people SUCK BAD!!!
I have had them for 5 weeks and they have sent me 4 routers..ALL of them did NOT work. They all had different issues.. one brought my upload/download speed way down.. one wasn’t compatible with the telephone.. one did NOT even turn on.. and this last one the phone light stopped working (the phone stopped working) after 4 days. They charged me 79.94 for one router and 89.94 for another one. They did not recieve the routers back in time…. so when I called them after they recieved my router, they told me they were NOT going to credit back my checking account they would credit my “vonage” account.. WTF is that?? They also charged me the 40 bucks to cancel. I am on the phone dealing with them now (after I got the regular phone co back up)
VONAGE SUCKS SOOOOOO BAD!! I HAVE NEVER BEEN SCAMMED SOO BAD IN MY LIFE.. I HATE THEM AND EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW!!
July 13th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Ouch, that’s tough! Did you escalate to the second level of tech support?