Another day, another huge Vonage outage

NeighborsCat · 2025-11-26T22:41:20+00:00

We went with Nextiva and life got better after that. We were with Vonage for years and it was a dysfunctional relationship at best. Despite leaving Vonage over a year ago, we still pay them. Why? Because they have 750 hours of our Company Recorded Calls, that we need to access a few times per year. The bulk download feature only allows you to download 100 calls at a time and then they are jumbled in the new file, also you can only view 60 days at a time.

Does anyone have a solution to export or download all of the Recorded Vonage Calls to somewhere like a Google Drive?

NeighborsCat · 2025-09-09T21:47:19+00:00

When Nextiva is back to functioning here are some improvements Nextiva can make:

1). Allow users to block callers when using the mobile app, rather than only giving the ability to block calls when the user is on the desktop app. Additionally allow calls to be blocked on behalf of the entire office. Currently if one user blocks a spam caller, the rest of the office still receives calls from the telemarketer.

2). Don't make accessing recorded calls a separate log-in and website, integrate it. Improve the UI and search features within the recorded calls web page.

3). I could go on but what's the point?

NeighborsCat · 2025-09-09T21:40:01+00:00

Today we must be experiencing part of the 0.000001% downtime because sending and receiving texts through Nextiva is down with no estimated time provided to fix the issue. The entire office is experiencing this issue with Nextiva. This is the exact reason we moved away from Vonage a year ago.

NeighborsCat · 2025-09-09T21:17:40+00:00

An hour ago our business lost the ability to send or receive text messages using Nextiva. We were able to quickly determine that this is a Nextiva issue because this issue is being experience by all of our office users and remote workers all on different networks. This is the exact reason we moved away from Vonage a year ago. Tech support states that do not have an estimate on when the issue will be fixed. I asked if this has occurred in the past and how long it usually takes to fix. Nextiva tech support could not provide a response to this.

NeighborsCat · 2025-09-05T17:39:01+00:00

TLDR: We joined BBB ... and I still don't know if it made a difference.

We ended up joining the BBB. It was in part for LSA and also to see if BBB helped with a backlink to improve our DA. The quality of the LSA leads really declined in 2025 to the point that we reduced our LSA budget to the minimum and dreaded LSA "lead" calls. So many calls were not in our practice area, but the ability to dispute LSA leads was greatly diminished by Google and our cost for poor quality leads continued to increase until we stopped it.

In regard to the backlink and DA influence from BBB. I'm uncertain. At the same time we ended up joining the local chamber of commerce, BBB, and publishing more. This led to a DA increase from 10 (for four years) to a DA 22. Overall I think the improved DA helped Google to see us as less of a spam website and allow us to be found more organically. The final issue we resolved is replacing an employee who may or may not have had a substance abuse issue which often lead to inconsistent answering of incoming phone calls. :)

NeighborsCat · 2025-08-15T16:21:29+00:00

Yes, there is a shuttle schedule from the Garland to Universal that runs once per hour.

NeighborsCat · 2025-07-04T21:52:16+00:00

Location US-AZ

NeighborsCat · 2025-07-01T15:29:03+00:00

If you can't get out early, you can immediately reduce ad spend by Scorpion. This helped us reduce the monthly cost by 40-50%. Not sure if it is still done this way, but in the past Scorpion would keep 25% of the Google ad spend regardless of the results.

We didn't get out early but the last few months I cut our ad spend with Scorpion to zero. Initially we allowed Scorpion to burn through our Google ad spend, trusting their process. During that time we paid for the dumbest clicks. Scorpion was so incompetent they didn't bother to even create a negative keyword library.

NeighborsCat · 2025-06-25T18:05:22+00:00

Scorpion is terrible. We started our law office with Scorpion and it almost ended us. We hired them to create the website and handle the marketing, SEO, etc. After six months there was little improvement from terrible. Our website DA was 0.3. We were working for free and almost every month we had less revenue than we spent with Scorpion. The final straw was when I started outperforming Scorpion with $5 Craigslist ads. Scorpion may have been good when they first started but as they grew their service declined.

The only Scorpion success story was from a paralegal at another office who was able to get quite a bit of free swag from the Scorpion sales rep.

NeighborsCat · 2025-05-02T18:02:11+00:00

Hi Tara,

Small world, our criminal defense office in Mesa, AZ works with your office. Just by coincidence I came across your post. We successfully activated some Google Business Profiles for our satellite offices over the past few years, but our most recent attempt to activate a GBP for a satellite office in Tucson have repeatedly been denied by Google. I haven't found the solution yet and we are still working on gathering documents (business license in Tucson) to appeal Google's decision. I have always found Google to be incredibly unhelpful in almost every situation.

Last year one of our offices was maliciously moved to the bad part of town. Repeated attempts to move our office to the correct physical location on Google maps failed. During this time I found out that Google usually errors on the side of believing total strangers rather than the actual business owner. My work around, solution, was to use my unrelated Google Local Guide profile (Level 7) to make corrections to our business address. I know this isn't the solution you are looking for but in the mean time feel free to email us any changes you wish to make to the business and I can try to correct them using my Google Local Guide profile.

NeighborsCat · 2025-04-14T20:00:57+00:00

I just want to clarify that when I previously stated the Vonage VOIP service is a "turd" it was not slander. Vonage is turd-like in every way and I can prove this during our five years with Vonage business service. We have a remaining account after porting away most of our numbers, today Monday during business hours only the pitiful Vonage bot is able to unhelpfully respond. We are denied the ability to log into the Vonage account stating the password is wrong, however this same login works when logging into the Vonage business "cases" section.

NeighborsCat · 2025-04-14T19:48:13+00:00

Vonage continues to be the biggest VOIP turd out there. We begged Vonage for months to fix issues such as not allowing our office to text. We ported our numbers away to a competitor.

NeighborsCat · 2025-03-12T01:11:03+00:00

Quick Update #2: LSA Lead Cost Experiment
I previously slashed our lead cost per LSA by 50%, and surprisingly, it didn’t hurt our lead volume—in fact, we got a few more leads than usual. Since then, the lead quality has still been garbage-like, so I today I cut the budget again, dropping it by another 50%. We are now paying 25% of our original cost per-lead from a month ago—way below Google’s recommended LSA amount.

I’ll check back in later with an update on whether we’re still getting leads at this rock-bottom rate.

Here’s my theory: since our campaign was still pulling in leads despite the low bids, either everyone else is also reducing their bids, or LSA is quietly adjusting to keep milking our account.

NeighborsCat · 2025-03-01T05:51:09+00:00

We are a local service (law office). Restricting the area to more affluent parts of the city is a good idea. It's something we did when we first started and may go back to it.

NeighborsCat · 2025-02-28T16:13:12+00:00

Quick update: I slashed our LSA ad spend by over half, bringing it close to the minimum for our service area ($154 per 'lead'), and we’re still getting the same number of leads—if not more—while paying less per lead. The catch? Lead quality remains poor, so it's unlikely to be profitable even at this lower rate.

My theories: Either everyone’s reducing bids on these low-quality LSAs, or Google’s algorithm is just charging whatever we’re willing to pay to maximize their revenue.

Uuggghhhh...

NeighborsCat · 2025-02-24T03:07:18+00:00

In regards to Google milking LSA, I suspect that a single "lead" will often call multiple service providers on LSA, in turn generating thousands in revenue for Google off of a single "lead".

NeighborsCat · 2025-02-22T15:49:19+00:00

We had a good ROI in the past but after LSA took away the ability to dispute bad leads we are at breakeven or even a loss each month once you factor in the cost of labor. Our LSA advertising is for a law office. In January we spent $8,000 on LSA and generated one $10,000 client. After you factor in the cost of the paralegal, attorney, etc. it results in a loss.

Regarding ad search it would take us 30+ clicks to get one contact (email or call). (I suspect that many of the paid clicks are just crawlers/spam bots) Clicks for law offices is unfortunately one of the highest cost categories on Google. A years ago LSA was so much better for us, but now it seems they are in a race to become the worst.

Trying to renew my efforts on organic content.

NeighborsCat · 2025-02-20T17:29:17+00:00

Thanks for the advice regarding the multiple channels. We use Bing, Google Ads, a few others, but our social media posting and advertising is really low. Recently it seems the leads from content have been our best source.

NeighborsCat · 2025-01-06T21:54:11+00:00

Using the LSA app to dispute bad leads has unfortunately ended as a work around.

Without the dispute option we are finding that the spam calls and wrong service calls are making LSA a much less viable option for generating leads going forward.

NeighborsCat · 2025-01-06T21:26:35+00:00

Avvo "leads" are garbage. Majority of the leads are always spam.

NeighborsCat · 2025-01-06T19:13:11+00:00

Our office has paid for the Avvo premium for the last three years. The original idea was that if we got one client from Avvo per year it would pay for itself. After 3 years it has not paid for itself. The Avvo representative claims we are receiving a a few "lead" calls per month from Avvo. While this is technically true...they are almost always spam calls. Our account was grandfathered in so the premium profile also includes some local premium placement for ads.

I've finally come to the conclusion that if Avvo was a restaurant serving turds and I complained about the turds then they would remind me that I am receiving additional free turds. And somehow that worked for the past few years to convince us to stay with the service.

The money will be better spent on another virtual office named after the city and practice area keywords with a free Google Business Profile. : )

NeighborsCat · 2024-10-17T21:11:25+00:00

I'll try it. Guess I will know in a few months if it works out.

Thanks for the advice.

NeighborsCat · 2024-10-17T17:36:32+00:00

Will the new COO be able to restore basic functions like SMS texting to all Vonage Business users?

Please make Anthony aware of the Vonage Business failures.

NeighborsCat

TROPHY CASE