best voip service

hi everyone and welcome to the #getvoip hangout... we're going to discuss things on why is choosing a voip service so hard the first question i've actually got is "what type of review would best help users with their voip service provider decisions?" there are shoppers that are looking for voip services.. it could be for small business of five users, ten users. they could be reading a review from a business owner that's only got one line or five phones... it doesn't necessarily mean that their input on that provider or on that service directly can benefit that shopper's needs... what would you say eric here? i think that's 100% where just because someone uses a service or has experience with a service doesn't make them an expert on that service. certainly their input is valuable, but without a) knowing their exact set-up, their bandwidth... their internet pipe...

without knowing how many employees that they have it's very, very hard to draw an apples to apples comparison. so in my experience i find it best to look at professional and independant reviewers, there's a number of them out there and then of course white papers and industry reports as well. things like a market analysis are pretty good place to start, and then draw your conclusions from there a lot of times, what happens is that actual providers do provide testimonials on their own websites .. of course.. i'm sure you'll agree here, but most of the providers only show us the good reviews the most positive ones, definitely either upselling them or saying this is great and so on... they don't really talk about service that these customers have, they don't really talk about price points that's where' i'll say that the independent review sites come in you have getvoip.com you have top10reviews, you have voip-review ... there's a bunch and with those reviews you also have to be careful

i think we mentioned something where people are just jumping in to write a review especially when they've just experienced a negative encounter like an outage exactly ... and that triggers... i would say that's one of the biggest triggers for negative reviews one thing that i'd like to ask the panel is when you read the reviews that are on... the proprietors site or on getvoip.com or any of the voip reviews sites out there... what's one of the best ways that a user can look at reviews and tell a real review from a fake review? ... [chuckle] go ahead ... you know for example i as myself from someone who owns a voip review site reviews have to be backed up by real people... so one way you can tell is it all just positive reviews? is the provider 5/5 or 10/10 across the board? is this stellar? ...you can pick up on the lingo used in the review

i mean if it all sounds like it's too good to be true.. it most probably is. everyone has probably had 1 or 2 negative experiences with providers it's hard to say... there's many things that come into play. what would you say about that eric? i think that's true and if i can just provide a little perspective with alternative industries... well 1st, if you were to look at reviews of some classic telecommunications companies like sprint, or at&t or verizon, you're gonna' find some bad reviews there... there's always gonna' be a little grain of salt i think a good rule of thumb is a) look that total number of reviews, see how many what's the sample set? and then as you said, if you've got 1000 reviews and you've got all 5* that seems very unlikely to me usually i'm looking at... if i go for example...yelp: and i'm looking for another type of service, and i see a restuarant i see a lot of reviews

i see 3 and a half stars for example actually that's my favorite type of review. because that means they've had enough people that have liked it and there's gonna' be some bad experiences an i just kindof accept that, no one has a perfact day. i think one other thing that i look for... and this might be just a personal preference i weed out anything that has an overtly emotional context to... so someone's that raving about it, or hating it i tend to take those and put them on the far sides of the bell curve and say well this person's is... something's going on here. usually a review that i might look at has some sort of methodical approach they might look at a feature set, they might look at customer support, they might look at call quality... if i see some different points important points broken out individually

to me this means the person is actually doing review based on some intelligent analysis right! and it's backed by user experience it's not just the one day. aggh this guy sucks! yeh.. we get a lot of reviews for example one line reviews: we're putting in a criteria where we require a certain number of words to be back by the review we don't just take a review from someone who's had the service for one day or one week... you have to get to know the provider ....before you can say something about that provider... so i would say that user should definitely look detailed extensive reviews ...like you said eric, the 3.5 reviews are definitely important reviews to take into consideration.