Feedback from a new (happy) customer after first month

I found these forums helpful while configuring my new RingCentral system, so I thought I should leave some of my own feedback for other potential customers.

First, I was switching from another VoIP vendor so I was familiar with all of the basic concepts, softphones, smartphone apps, etc. Also, my main phone number was a Google Voice number that would be ported to RingCentral if I was satisfied after a few weeks of testing.

Provisioning a new RingCentral account, including configuring some existing Polycom phones from my previous vendor was easy and quick. Phone calls worked perfectly from day one and the call quality has been very good.

The only problem I had during my initial few weeks was SMS (text messaging) - I could send messages, but not receive. It took a full week and many exchanges with tech support people before they got their "telco people" involved and resolved the issue.

With all of the problems worked out and satisfied with the quality I started the process of porting my Google Voice number. I was nervous about this because all of my business clients use that number, but RingCentral handled the change perfectly. They sent emails to let me know what was happening and when, and the porting was completed on the expected date.

However, after my Google Voice number was successfully working at RingCentral for voice calls, I again experienced a full week of problems related to text messages. One problem was that I couldn't send text messages from the softphone app on my Mac. Every attempt to send a text caused a dialog box to pop up saying that my account was not authorized for SMS. While that was happening I had no trouble sending messages from the iPhone app, and those messages would all appear on the Mac softphone so my account was clearly "authorized" but the softphone just wasn't working.

The other SMS problem is that my ported number could not be used as the "caller ID" for text messages. This was particularly annoying because nobody recognized the new RingCentral-assigned phone number that did appear. Many, many messages went back and forth with tech support before it finally got "escalated to the telco group" who were able to fix the problem quickly.

Nobody would ever tell me exactly why I had two separate weeks of SMS problems, but I have a guess: a) it just takes longer to make SMS work because routing of text is completely different than voice; b) the new customer onboarding team is more focused on voice and they don't follow up to make sure all of the components are working properly; c) smartphone and softphone apps are buggy and need work. Regardless of what the problem is, I suggest RingCentral should do two things: 1) escalate problems to the "telco people" faster when SMS isn't working properly; and, 2) be honest about the timeframe to make SMS work on new accounts if there is really a structural delay built into that provisioning process.

So, now I am almost 5 weeks into my relationship with RingCentral and I am generally happy with everything. There are a few minor issues that I am still trying to resolve with the tech support folks, but overall it's a great service for a reasonable price.