Should Have Known Better

[Cole]

I am honestly fed up.

First off, I had some questions about ordering, so I decided to submit a ticket asking about it. That ticket was never answered in a reasonable timeframe 5-7 days, so I decided to call. The first time I called, I was caller number 48 in line, and an hour and a half later, at caller number 22, I hung up. I finally got phone support a day or two later, answering my questions, so I decided, finally, to purchase the package.

I have read through the forum, and have found that people have waited longer than me. However, one week after I bought the service, I finally received an invoice email, saying that my invoice had finally been processed. The status page still does not even say that my invoice has been charged.

Now, I can understand if it takes longer than it is to process, but not if my damn welcome email says: Typically all orders are processed within 3-5 days, sometimes sooner. With all the other dissatisfied customers around here, the typical setup date seems to be an outright miscalculation.

If Hostrocket/Viatalk cannot handle the customer boom, then they should have closed off new customers. I cannot believe the mediocrity of not only the customer service, but the order processing. I hope things improve. I cannot even get a straight answer from viatalk, and there's no hell of a way I am waiting several hours on the phone to talk to a company that is not delivering.

[lauriew917]

I submitted tickets 2 weeks ago and am still waiting for a reply. I did not worry about it too much since I was going on vacation and my Sunrocket phone is still letting me dial out of my house, but as of today I can no longer receive incoming calls on my home line. I am unimpressed with customer service at viatalk so far. My order was processed quickly, and my account has been charged for the fee, but I have no idea if my number was ported at all. Also, I have errors on my page every time I pull up the viatalk website. I have a feeling I will be switching companies again...

[Cole]

Viatalk is a joke, just like Hostrocket is a joke.

[Andrew49b]

VT is the worst internet phone company on the planet and deserves to be shut down. Do not subscribe if you want phone service that works and if you expect to be treated like a customer rather than an enemy combatant. Tjuis company should be put out of its misery ASAP.

[ARSBTY924]

ViaTalk SUCKS. I placed an order on 8/2/07. My credit card was charged on 8/3/07 (Thats about the only thing your going to get fast from this company). I got my email stating my order will be processed in 3-5 days, only to find out from customer service thats its 3-5 business days. 5 business days pass and now its 7-10 business days. 10 business days pass and I get that due to SunRocket closing, they can not meet up with demands. You will always get them apologizing like they are reading off a cue card. I left voicemails to supervisors to call back and still havent got one back. I also said that ill wait for a supervisor on hold, but they told me they cant hold the line becuase other custers are waiting on line. Meaning other customers to sucker there money and time away. They call themselves customer service, but what have they done, they wouldnt even upgrade shipping or anything for customers inconvience. What they really mean is to sit still and when there ready to do something theyll do it, (1 month). Im already calling my credit card company and disputing there charge, Im also writting to NY State Govener Elliott Spitzer (thats were the company is based out of (NY)), my city counsel and an attorney, and will have them shut down. Dont order from ViaTalk., you will REGRET IT.

[Cherijj]

I canceled my order and called Vonage. Less than 48 hours and I have my equipment at no charge AND 2 months free. My advice, cut and run, dispute the charge and stay away from these guys. They are just as bad as Sun Rocket!

[fparhome]

I got tired of waiting. Ordered service 7-20, charged credit card 8-01, still not shipped. Called customer service to try to get a password to config the sunrocket gizmo. Waited for hours till the cell phone cut out twice. That was the straw that broke the camels back. Called Nuvio, they picked up immediately. They helped me get my old sunrocket gizmo. config. to work with Nuvio. I had service within an hour. Phone works great. Sound quality is better than Sunrocket. Then I charged back the credit card to Viatalk. CC company didn't even ask me to send in a form like usual. They just charged it back. Must be getting a lot of Viatalk chargebacks. CC did say they haven't made a decision yet about SunRockets Chargebacks. The lady I talked to said she gets about three a day. Said they may pool the money together and we get a percentage.

[Heat305]

fparhome, does nuvio offer residential plans? I went to www.nuvio.com but saw business plans and they were double what I pay with VT. I emailed nuvio yesterday asking them some basic questions so let's see how that goes. I am not a ex-SR customer. Do they offer "BYOD" plans? Do they have support state side or is it overseas like Vonage? I have been with VT since the start of the year and have been very pleased with the service. It's recently that the support has been dragging. Call queues are too high and tickets submitted are being responded to in a weeks time if not more.

Do you like nuvio quality? Do they offer just as much features like VT offers in the control panel? I noticed nuvio had higher rates when calling internationally vs. ViaTalk. Any info would be helpful.

[fparhome]

Yes, I have the residential plan 199 yearly. Click on the the sunrockret icon and then go to the menu click on plans. That should give you a list of residential plans to choose from. I used my SunRocket Innomedia gizmo.
Sound quality great, people on the other end said it sounded better than sunrocket. Control panel takes some getting used to. It's a little complicated. Nuvio has the second line option but I think there is a fee.

[Heat305]

fparhome, I am not an ex-SR user so I don't feel those plans would apply to me if they asked for some type of proof. And if I ported my number it would be coming from VT. I did however talk to their chat support people and they told me to go to their re-seller website which is below. It seems they are only taking orders directly from their site for ex-SR customers.

Would you be kind enough to take a snap shot of their control panel so I can compare it along side VT's? Do they offer as many calling features as VT? Can you list them for me also. You can pm me this if you don't mind. VT has been good to me but the support wait times are not acceptable for me and my family. Thanks in advance for you help.


https://etcomm.nuvio.com/html/

[hixsongirl]

Well, I am using vonage now but its not a good connection. They said they could not port my number because it was not in their service area? Didn't get that, but sound quality is about as bad as my cell phone and there is usually alot of static. Features is by far less than I had with SR. I paid VT on 8-3-07. But the invoice still reads order placed. No phone number or equipement. I too fell for the 3-5 days to process way back when and I am tring to get my money back. Was wondering for those out there that place a order over a month ago if anybody has been charged a monthly fee on their charge cards yet without receiving service? Seems like VT would do just that, in the way they are treating customers. Very disappointed!!!

[ventura777]

:cool:

With all due respect, I am an xrocker, and I made my jump to VT. my order took about 1 hour of wait time (200,000 sun rocket people tend to use up alot of call time) I used the BYOD, looked up how to break the admin password on the web. I had a phone number in 3 business days, was configured in 1 hour. tweaking phone quality took 4 days. I now have near perfect call quality.

The reason VOIP is cheap is becuase they don't have alot of people to sevice your technical needs. If they hired more people for this glut of new users, they'd have to train them, by the time they had new support staff the boom would be over...by the way the business would go bust and we'd all have to repeat the process again! VOIP users have to be patient to save $.

I feel for you man and I am sorry, but in the time you spent on hold you could have found all your answers on the online user groups. failing that You should pay the $40+ a month for a standard phone line get it over with.

VOIP is for technical poeple thats why it's cheap!

VIA TALK IS A GOOD SERVICE, WITH A LOW MONTHLY FEE, IF YOU UNDERSTAND THE TECHNOLOGY
;)

[Coldjensens]

We were orphaned by Sunrocket. We read the special promotion and favorable reviews for Viatalk and switched. We had about to months left on our Sunrocket contract and they offered to buy out that contract. This was apparently false. They also suggested that we pay extra to get priority for processing out device. We also paid extra for overnight shipping of our device. We paid up front for a one year service contract.

We never received the device at all. It has been at least a month, probably longer. Viatalk will not respond to E-mails and will not answer their customer service number. The one time annual fee was B.S. as they sent us a monthly bill for $2.50, bot will not send the device and ill not respond to further E-mails. They ant me to pay a service fee despite the fact that they are not providing service and that e supposedly paid for a year of service up front.

Viatalk is a complete rip off. Search the internet and find out how bad they are. (I used "viatalk sucks" as the search term, lots of hits).:mad:

[swc001]

I tend to agree with Ventura777, although I've had some spotty service lately. Got my ATA "gizmo" box from SunRocket to work with ViaTalk very quickly and had good service for a while. Then - dropped calls, fast-busy, incoming calls flip directly to v-mail, etc. - all between 20-80% of the time depending on time of day, sunspots, and how many warts grandma has, etc.

Anyway, I'm hoping things will smooth out as non-techies jump ship and relieve some of the network stress on VT's gateways. I, too, hope that VT doesn't go belly-up as did SR.

Hey, Ventura - I'd love to get some gizmo tuning pointers. I just disabled silence suppression and I *think* I'm getting better initial off-hook audio setup and less "hello? hello? - oh, yes, hi...".



:cool:

With all due respect, I am an xrocker, and I made my jump to VT. my order took about 1 hour of wait time (200,000 sun rocket people tend to use up alot of call time) I used the BYOD, looked up how to break the admin password on the web. I had a phone number in 3 business days, was configured in 1 hour. tweaking phone quality took 4 days. I now have near perfect call quality.

The reason VOIP is cheap is becuase they don't have alot of people to sevice your technical needs. If they hired more people for this glut of new users, they'd have to train them, by the time they had new support staff the boom would be over...by the way the business would go bust and we'd all have to repeat the process again! VOIP users have to be patient to save $.

I feel for you man and I am sorry, but in the time you spent on hold you could have found all your answers on the online user groups. failing that You should pay the $40+ a month for a standard phone line get it over with.

VOIP is for technical poeple thats why it's cheap!

VIA TALK IS A GOOD SERVICE, WITH A LOW MONTHLY FEE, IF YOU UNDERSTAND THE TECHNOLOGY
;)

[wmercier]

People!
First of I am not going to sugar coat VT’s handling of the influx of new customers and their poor, recent customer service. I believe that horse has been beat to death and I think that VT is well aware of it. They have and will pay the price on an individual basis in the loss of many who could and would not wait them out to mend their ways. No question they could have handled the situation much differently that would have caused them and the customers much less grief.

To their credit, if you were able to weather the storm and find a large basket of patience, you would probably now be rewarded with increasingly better and more reliable service. I am a SR victim and started the process to switch to VT on 07/18/07. Took about a month to receive my ATA and another couple weeks to port my number. I had a few glitches that forced me to do the waiting game, counting up and down the number of great callers on hold until I finally got a warm body to get me working again. As many have experienced, that took it’s toll on the patience quotient. Finally, today I received an email stating that my buyout had been completed and that my service has been extended. I checked my CP and sure enough, it’s a done deal.

If you can program yourself to be patient then you will come out the other end with a good service with many features that I believe you will be pleased with. I now feel that while VT made some monumental mistakes, they have now turned it around and are mending their ways to cement a good and better relationship with their customers. Are they now perfect? Far from it but at least they are trying. I think it goes without saying that for now and the future they can count on us consumers to advise them of their sins and let them know what is and isn’t acceptable. Voting your acceptance of their service with your pocketbook is the best way to gain VT’s attention. I am finally a happy and satisfied customer. Now please VT stay in business for the long haul!

[jsanty]

ViaTalk is the worst! The customer service is pathetic. Wait on hold for literally hours only to get disconnected. Submit support tickets because their servers are down, they respond 2-3 weeks later with some boiler-plate response. I predict ViaTalk will be the next Sunrocket to crash on the horizon. :mad:

[electronicssell]

pls forgive the sites ,maybe there are several reasons to explain why they delay your inquires.