More businesses than ever now take advantage of Voice over IP (VoIP), a method of routing voice calls over networks and the Internet, which has become the de-facto standard for businesses of all sizes. Its ability to offer an increased feature set at a reduced price over traditional voice service, like an on-site PBX, is something traditional phone providers can't touch. In this month's Business Choice Awards, we once again had readers evaluate the best VoIP solutions for business to help you make the critical decision of which service or system to use.
The major attraction of VoIP remains its low cost compared to traditional phone services. This is particularly true if you use a hosted VoIP service, where you'll need to purchase minimal hardware (if any). Provided that you have adequate bandwidth, VoIP scales easier than a traditional phone connection as you can simply plug in another handset rather than ask the phone company to run a new wire. VoIP will save you money on long distance, and depending on the service, calls between your employees can be free. It's also easier to integrate VoIP calls with business applications like CRM
For more than 25 years, we have been augmenting our hands-on, labs-based product reviewswith our Readers' Choice Awards, in which PCMag readers rate the products and services they use the most. The Business Choice Awards extend the Readers' Choice Awards by garnering feedback about the hardware, software, and services our readers deploy, administer, maintain, and use in a business environment, from SOHO to SMB on up.
This survey asked respondents to rate their overall satisfaction with the VoIP solution they use or manage and the likelihood that they would recommend them to others. In addition, we inquired about their satisfaction with technical support and the overall reliability of the solution.
If you select, deploy, or administer the products in our Business Choice Awards, or if you advise or manage people in these roles, then you know how critical it is to choose the right products. The results of the PCMag Business Choice Awards survey are invaluable when doing so. And on the next page we'll reveal the best VoIP solution for your business.
VoIP Providers
VoIP comes in many flavors, and this is evident in the companies included in this year's Business Choice Awards for Best VoIP Solution. MagicJack, Skype, and Vonage are simple solutions mostly intended for single users; they make adequate solutions for sole proprietors. Then there's a step up in complexity and features to Comcast, Ooma, and RingCentral—small offices will appreciate the cost savings. And finally there are the full-blown business VoIP systems offered by Avaya and Cisco. Our respondents were sprinkled around the different companies represented in this survey, especially indicating that the small to medium business (SMB) market truly embraces a variety of VoIP solutions.
In this year's survey for best VoIP solution, these eight companies received enough responses to be included as finalists. Ooma is our winner for the second year in a row based on an Overall Satisfaction of 8.8, although this score is down from last year's 9.4. Still, that 8.8 out of 10 is unbeatable in this lineup.
The interesting runner-up this year is magicJack, a product PCMag hasn't reviewed in many years—it's complicated—and yet it has obviously still earned a high appreciation from budget-conscious PCMag readers with a home office.
Noticeably absent is last year's runner-up, ShoreTel—it didn't receive enough response to be included. The other big-company VoIP services that did make it, Cisco and Avaya, take up the middle of the range here. Cisco's score is slightly down from last year (from 8.2 to 7.9), while Avaya's is up a bit (from 7.0 to 7.2).
Reliability, in this case the critical ability of the VoIP solution to consistently provide dial tone and service every day, loosely follows the trend of overall satisfaction. Ooma takes the lead in this category with a 9.0, followed by Vonage at 8.6. The low end goes to Avaya, Skype, and RingCentral, all with a 7.4.
Looking at tech support, Skype had the lowest percentage of respondents requiring at 11.8 percent, followed by magicJack (15.6 percent)—that's the consumer-oriented advantage. The Business Choice winner, Ooma, comes next with 20.9 percent, but when we get to RingCentral, more than half of respondents (53.6 percent) required tech support.
Ratings on that tech support show Cisco (7.8), Avaya (7.1), and Ooma (7.1) a cut above the rest. This could be partially due to Avaya and Cisco having massive technical support organizations, so kudos to Ooma for being able to compete with them. MagicJack's all-time low tech support score of 4.6 shows that respondents feel there is something quite lacking in the company's efforts (that's in keeping with what we've heard before). RingCentral, however, stands out in tech support, and not in a good way, with a high number of respondents requiring tech support and a pretty low tech support satisfaction score (5.8).
How likely is someone to recommend Ooma? A score of 9.0 indicates the answer is "very." Vonage is the only other vendor to get close with an 8.3 out of 10. This question is used to calculate the Net Promoter Score, which shows that people recommend Ooma whole-heartedly, though not as much as last year when it got a 9.6 and an NPS of 85 percent. These results are consistent with last year where respondents showered Ooma with love, loosely embraced Cisco and RingCentral, and shunned Avaya. On the other end, respondents actually steer their colleagues away from Comcast, giving it the list's only negative NPS score (-13 percent).
So, Ooma once again wins our Business Choice Awards survey for best VoIP solution with universally high scores in overall satisfaction, reliability, likelihood to recommend (and Net Promoter Score), and average tech support satisfaction. The only ding, and a slight one at that, is that 20.9 percent of respondents needed tech support with Ooma, but you can't win 'em all.
Business Choice Winner: VoIP
ooma
Ooma is doing something very right to win our Business Choice Awards for best VoIP solution two years running. Its consistently high scores across all categories make it the most recommended and well-liked of business VoIP vendors among office-bound PCMag readers.
Methodology
We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our survey mailing list. The surveys are hosted by SurveyMonkey, which also performs our data collection. This survey ran from March 9 to March 26, 2015.
Respondents are asked to rate their VoIP service provider. They are asked multiple questions about their overall satisfaction with the solution, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.
Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the VoIP solutions compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the VoIP solutions' rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your email marketing software or service provider?"
Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the best.
Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 best seller, The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors).
