About Alliance Phones
Expert Review
Pros
Cons
Plans And Pricing:
Like most hosted VoIP providers, AlliancePhones offers three types of plans, based on the number of end-users you have. Unlike other platforms, the more users you have, the lower the cost per user. The Easy Plus plan is for one to three users, the Simplicity Plus plan is for four to 20 users, and the Effortless Plus plan is for 21 to 100 or more users.
All plans offer the same rich feature set and only differ in the cost per user per month. So it seems that the lower costs simply come from the bulk purchase of user subscriptions. For each plan, additional local and toll-free numbers can be added for $5/mo and existing phone numbers can be ported to the service for a one-time fee of $15.
There are no additional costs for hardware, unless you choose to purchase a physical desk phone to connect to the service, which is available preconfigured directly from AlliancePhones.
Customer Support
Alliance Phones offers support via phone, email, and online support tickets. Although online chat is available, it seems to be only for sales rather than support. The support page includes several step-by-step instructions for some of the most basic procedures.
Additional customer support:
Company blog
You can find helpful articles under the AlliancePhones blog which is available through its website.
Features & Functionality
General Features
All plans offer the same set of features including the basic telephony features that are available on most traditional as well as VoIP telephony systems such as call waiting, call display, call conferencing, and call hold. Additional characteristics, dubbed Cloud PBX features, include some of the more advanced features you would come to expect from a cloud-based VoIP provider. These include:
- Configure your own message or music on hold content
- The customizable auto attendant can greet your callers and automate the routing of calls to appropriate parties
- Call queues can be implemented that distribute incoming calls to a pool of agents
- Hot desking allows employees to use their own personal extension from any phone device in the company by entering personal credentials
- You can manage your entire telephony integration from a single online portal that is accessible from anywhere over the Internet
- Additional advanced features such as text to speech, SMS integration, and follow me, among others, are also available
Devices
Calling
Call Manager
When compared to various other giants in the cloud-based VoIP market, AlliancePhones may seem to have bitten off more than it could chew. But this is far from the case. One of the things that makes this comparatively small provider stand out is the various capabilities available under the Call Manager series of features.
This set of features allows telephony administrators to have full control over how the telephone system will function, providing comprehensive management tools. In addition to this, a series of monitoring tools are also made available giving administrators a complete view of the state of the system, as well as the state of the calls being made.
Management tools include comprehensive call rules, call recording, call screening, call barging, eavesdropping, and call whisper. These may sound intrusive, but on the contrary, they are quite useful when training agents and examining the progress of their learning. Monitoring tools include call logs, call statistics, and call analytics all of which can inform and enlighten system designers to streamline and optimize the telephony system.
Advanced Calling
Ease Of Use:
One of Alliance Phones fundamental principles is ease of use. Quick and simple installation is emphasized and it seems to be the case. Customers have reported that their experience in registering, installing, and porting their numbers is quite easy. The same is stated for installation, management, monitoring, and actually using the service. IP phones purchased directly from Alliance Phones are preconfigured and need only be plugged in.
The truth is that compared to many other much more complex, elaborate, and feature rich providers, Alliance Phones is very down-to-earth and simple, avoiding the complexities of involved with having too many features. This is something that can be very attractive to the kinds of businesses that the company is targeting.
Verdict:
AlliancePhones is a reliable, high-quality service offering robust cloud-based telephony to its customers. Focusing on the extremely high availability of its services, the company boasts many satisfied customers, whose primary purpose is to simply communicate. AlliancePhones is the perfect provider for just that.
User Review
Write a Review- Support is great and pricing is reasonable. Sound quality or clarity is exceptional.
- We had to buy IP phones because we couldn’t use the old analog ones.
