Our experience with Efax or J2 went from Mediocre to Horrible
We have used Efax for several years and I’ve written about Efax’s poor customer service before. I put up with a few price increases and honestly knew there were cheaper services.
The service also went down hill lately and some people (especially anyone from Paetec) had problems faxing things to us. So I knew we had to get a new service. But the straw that broke the camels back was after my credit card was compromised I got an email from efax at 8pm Sunday night. I don’t know if it was shut off Sunday night because nobody tried to fax me and complained until Monday morning.
They saw the credit card data they’ve used for years come back as “lost or stolen” and they still went ahead and shut down a good customer at essentially the same time they sent out the email notice. No grace period or time to contact them, they shut you down and then let you pay for it to restart it after the fact. Needless to say, I didn’t give J2, Efax or their all Indian call center a new credit card. I changed to a new (less expensive) service and had it up and working within two hours.
I didn’t change because of the price. I didn’t change because of problems with reliability although I probably should have. But add all of the above, plus shutting me down with no notice toegether with poor third world customer service and the only people they’re going to have using their service are the people that didn’t realize that using a toll free number or local number for that matter, from the fax service means it’s not portable. If you use a separate 800 number for your fax it will be easy to change. If you use their 800 number, it’s theirs and you can’t take it with you or send the calls anywhere else.
By the way, in case anyone in J2 cares, the reference number for my call was 007026476.
Oh and I wasn’t going to tell anyone what company I’m switching to because I’m not saying this to sell anyone on anything, just point out an important thing to remember about using fax services. But I found a great fax plan comparison chart that you should really look at!
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Andy Carita says:
June 22, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I was sent a link to your site from a colleague. I am looking to get a tool free fax number for our company and was hoping you could point me in the right direction if your site isn’t where I need to be. Thank in advance
Andy
Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
June 22, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Hi Andy,
There are several fax services you’ll find on the internet, but if you get a toll free number directly from them they will tell you that they own the number if you try to leave. That may not sound like a big deal until you’re not happy with them and you want to leave and they tell you that you can’t unless you give up that fax number. They do that to lock their customers in, since it’s a pain in the neck to change your number after it’s in print and use everywhere.
You can avoid this if you get your own number seperately and then transfer it to or point it to whatever company you want to use for the service. If you point the number you get with a different service to their local fax number you can always just repoint it later.
So try to find a number you like with our service and look up tools on the website. We’ll activate it and help you transfer it to any service you want to use it with and they won’t be able to hold you hostage by it.
Bill
Kumar(new comment) says:
September 8, 2011 at 2:47 pm
I used efax for 6 years and when i wanted to port the number, they would not allow porting.