joip Comments |
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| Date Submitted: | November 26, 2008 |
| VoIP Provider: | joip |
| Time with VoIP Provider: | 1 - 3 Months |
| Call & Service Quality: | 9 out of 10 |
| Customer Support: | 2 out of 10 |
| Pricing: | 9 out of 10 |
| Features & Options: | 7 out of 10 |
| Recommend: | No |
| Review: | A chicken with its head cut off I offered this response to Mel but recon I should offer it up to all. I would highly recommend Joip based on the quality and value of their phone services however I can't recommend them for other reasons. The show stopper is in their management practices. You can invest in the hardware which works very well however I don't think Joip will be in business long enough that you'll see a return on investment. First off their support: Forget Email, they never respond. Call Chris at their phone support. Chris is a good guy. I've talked to him probably a dozen times now. We know each others' voices. I think he's the only person working the support lines for Joip. I've never talked to anyone else. If anyone out there needs to get in touch with Joip (Chris), call their 888 line through your landline. If you use the Joip number they give you and call via the internet, the minutes are decremented from your account. In other words they don't use their own joip-to-joip themselves. Also, when you get the automated phone response, don't bother entering your phone number as that will go nowhere, just hit zero. Follow your way through their mercifully short list of options and that should get you to Chris. If you fail to get through to Chris and instead hear music, hang up and try again. You're not in a queue and it will hang up on you eventually anyway. Chris is in India I believe but perhaps it's the Phillipines, so when (not if) the line drops, call him back right away. Don't expect him to call you back - I don't think he has a Joip phone himself. Chris is polite and helpful so be nice to him. The Joip infrastructure is as screwed up as I can imagine. I'm surprised they are in business at all, especially when you read of my problem with them. That been said, their actual phone service has been first class in my opinion. I sent a phone to family overseas in the Caribbean where internet quality is often weak but these phones calling joip-to-joip have worked far better than I expected. I doubt Skype is any better. My problem with Joip is simply paying them. I try to add money to my account through paypal and it never goes through. They clearly have issues with their website - it's decidedly brittle. The damn thing just doesn't work right. I try to add $25 to my account and get errors. I call Paypal and they show some subscription schedule that won't be processed for a month. I don't have a credit card and this is why I need to pay with Paypal. It is also one of Joip's selling points. It's an interesting dynamic. If Joip fails, I can't help but believe that it's because they failed to go the extra inch to collect revenue that I suspect they badly need. It's also interesting how Panasonic postures itself in all this. Their name is all over the hardware and literature but the printed materials are notably filled with disclaimers related to Joip. Now bear in mind that Joip has an exclusive agreement with Panasonic so the phones themselves don't work with anything but Joip. I wrote and phoned Panasonic and they danced around my issues - basically saying nothing other than they stand behind their products... what that's supposed to mean in this context, I leave to you to guess. Should Joip go out of business what will Panasonic do? I rather hope they offer a firmware upgrade to make the phones work with Skype but who knows. The good thing is that the Joip phones are rather inexpensive so if you do gamble with them, you don't stand to lose your shirt. |
| Submitted by: | Steve year-old :: Reviewer :: Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada |
1 comments for this review
| Comment by: usman From: uae March 5th, 2009 |
hi my self usman from uae united arab emirates can u tell me phone is not working there site is block i have this phone now tell me what can i do now? plz plz need ur help (usman_munawer@hotmail.com) mail me thankx |
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