TalkPlus

TalkPlus (manage all your telephone numbers from one phone)

This would be a great service if only it worked. TalkPlus claims to offer all types of really cool features to manage several telephones (cell or land line phones) from one phone number.

In my situation, I have three cell phones. TalkPlus was supposed to make it convenient and possible for me to receive and make calls from one number, and program their system so that my call could be "mirrored" from either my business line or personal line. The outgoing call features appear to work; however, their incoming call features have failed repeatedly!

From the very start, it is extremely complicated to program the features the consumer or business owner wants to use with TalkPlus. Worse yet, once everything is programmed properly, the features do not work as advertised. Since the entire reason for paying for their service is to make telecommuting easier for business owners and consumers, that is what I expect TalkPlus to deliver. Unfortunately, they have failed miserably in that regard.

I have been paying about $30.00 per month for two "mirrored numbers" and two "virtual numbers" with 200 minutes. The minutes are only used when I accept a call on my "native phone" that is forwarded by TalkPlus OR when I make a call from my "native phone" (in this case, my private cell phone) and route it through TalkPlus to make it look like the call is coming from my personal OR business line. An application from TalkPlus needs to be installed on the "native phone" to use the outgoing call features.

After using the service for about five weeks, every time I attempt to add a telephone number to the Call Screening feature (which programs a call from a specific number to go directly to voice mail or replicate a busy signal), I receive an error message that I must input a valid numeric telephone number.

Other issues involve the fact that even though I have programmed the TalkPlus service to send all UNKNOWN callers directly to voice mail, that feature usually does not work, and the calls are routed to what TalkPlus calls my "native phone," the one

I am supposed to be able to manage all my phone numbers from. Anotherfeature that does not work consistently is when I have programmed a number in my Call Screening profile to replicate a busy signal, those calls sometimes come through on my main number, which isn't supposed to happen.

Finally, repeated phone calls and e-mails to TalkPlus about their glitches remain unanswered. In fact, I notice that during the past several days, it is impossible to reach a live person at their customer service number.

If TalkPlus expects to be a serious contender in their field, they need to fix their glitches and provide improved customer service, which right now is a big fat zero!

Note: Just a little update that on Tuesday, November 26, a live person finally called me from TalkPlus after my 10+ business days of trying to reach them via e-mail, online feedback forms, and telephone. They promised to cancel my account and refund me the equivalent of one month's service. I gave the employee and earful about their customer disservice AND technical problems, which they were happy to hear about. For now, I recommend that people pass on TalkPlus and RingCentral.com (still hasn't returned my inquiry after FIVE business days), and try out GrandCentral.com, a free service that actually WORKS!