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Customer Support is a Major Focus for Ooma

October 26th, 2009 @ 10:42 am
by Team Ooma Filed in: News, ooma

Dear Ooma Users,

Here at Ooma, we care deeply that each of you has a great experience owning and using Ooma products. As part of this, we recognize that access to timely and helpful customer support is critical to creating a delightful Ooma experience. Unfortunately, we have not always lived up to our standards for timely and helpful customer support, particularly of late, and so I want both to apologize to those of you who have had a frustrating customer support experience and to emphasize that this is a matter we take seriously and are very actively addressing.

As a small, fast growing company, we are always looking ahead and try to plan appropriately to support our growth. We did not do this well enough to handle the volume we’ve experienced since the launch of the new Ooma Telo on Oct 1. I want to assure you that we are taking the steps you would expect, including adding agents, increasing training on the new Ooma Telo, revising policies to solve or escalate problems faster, and better utilizing automation. We intensively measure our customer support against high standards that we have set, and will not rest until we consistently provide timely and helpful support.

Personally, I am excited about Ooma in so many ways. We believe Ooma brings features not seen before in residential telephony, and at a price and value that is unbeatable. I greatly appreciate your being an Ooma customer, I thank you for your patience if you have had a frustrating experience with our customer support, and most of all I want you to know the whole Ooma team is committed to making your complete Ooma experience a terrific one.

Sincerely,

Eric Stang
CEO

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Free Voice Mail for All Ooma Users

October 21st, 2009 @ 10:48 am
by Rich Buchanan Filed in: News, ooma

Hi Ooma Users,

We’ve received a lot of terrific input from you over the last several weeks.  Some good. Some, well, let’s say “not so good”.  In this post I want to address the hot topic of voice mail.  When laying out features that non-Premier customers would receive, we examined whether or not to include voicemail.  The vast majority of phone systems sold over the last 3 years included an answering machine built into the base station.  It seemed logical that we could remove the online voice mail option since most phone systems used in homes today included an answering machine.

Wrong.  

An overwhelming percentage of the feedback was negative about removing voice mail. We do listen to our customers, so Ooma voicemail is going back into the product effective immediately (applies to all purchases made since the feature set changed 10/1/09 too).  Ooma Hub, Ooma Hub/Scout, and Ooma Telo customers will have the built in web based voice mail with local, remote, or web based access just like before.  For details on the complete feature set of the Ooma Hub and Ooma Telo please visit these links.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us; the good, the bad, and the ugly.  This is how we make our service better, by maintaining an open dialog, and responding to as many of you as we possibly can.  It’s with your help that we’ll continue to improve Ooma and change the face of telecommunications across the U.S.

Best regards,

Rich Buchanan
CMO
Ooma

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Ooma’s Unlimited Home Phone Service?

October 8th, 2009 @ 4:18 pm
by Rich Buchanan Filed in: ooma

Dear Ooma Users,

It seems that we’re still confusing people.  Couple that with the Internet practice of  “Ready. Fire.  Aim.” and we’ve created a perfect storm.  There have been a lot of posts here that have been just factually incorrect, and it has created additional confusion that I hope this post helps to clear up.

I’m going to try to lay out for everyone what “Unlimited” service means and why minutes per month are discussed as part of an unlimited service – either the 3,000 minutes per month since September of 2007 or the new 5,000 minutes per month in the recently revised terms & conditions.  I’m going to try this without the legal jargon and definitions that permeate typical terms and conditions documents.  So I’ll ask you to not try to read between the lines or try to be the next Perry Mason, but simply engage in a dialog about the rationale behind our policies.

First, and most importantly, our product offers unlimited residential phone service.  Period.  No limit on minutes, no hidden fees, no “bait and switch”.  Here’s the big “but” in the definition of unlimited.  We designed this service as a home phone or residential system and have consistently promoted it this way.  We do not want, and cannot afford, to have businesses begin to utilize the service consuming a huge volume of call traffic and driving our monthly call termination charges through the roof.

We humans, being what we are, will constantly “work the system” to save money.  But if we don’t at least police our system to prevent abuse – use of our service in obviously non-residential ways – then the ultimate impact is born by you the respectful Ooma user.  Abuse of the service by non-residential users drives up costs, decreases reliability, stretches our systems beyond their intended application, and puts at risk your reliance on the vital communications service we extend to you.

So how do we police the system to ensure compliance?  One of the tools we use is to look at the nominal amount of minutes per month your account consumes.  Can a residential user go over this?  Yes. And they frequently do during times of family emergency, weddings, etc.  That’s perfectly fine with us.  But when we see month after month use of more than 5,000 minutes it sets off a red flag that the calling patterns of that number should be more closely evaluated.

Once again, residential use is not a problem, non-residential or business use is not desired, hence the $39.99/mo fee for non-residential use in our terms and conditions.  We’re really trying to tell you we don’t want you to use Ooma as a commercial business phone service replacement.  So what does this mean if you have a home office?  Most likely nothing.  We know that a lot of our current users use their Ooma system with a home office, and our Premier package includes a number of supporting features. We will introduce a business version of our service next year, but it will not be the same business model as the Ooma Telo or the Ooma Hub.

How did we decide what number of minutes constitutes residential service?  A little bit of guessing and a whole lot of experience over the last 2 years.  The average number of minutes consumed by Ooma subscribers is just 400+ minutes per month.  The number of Ooma accounts that fall into the 5,000+ minute per month category is less than 0.1%, but they consume a huge percentage of the total monthly phone call connection fees we have to pay.  Call volume in some of these cases exceeds 10,000 minutes per month – almost 6 hours a day, 7 days a week, on the phone.

I hope this helps you understand how and why we’ve come to the decisions we have made regarding the use of Ooma as a residential phone service and why we have to be diligent about protecting the integrity of Ooma’s residential phone service. I love the fact that a lot of you have written to me privately as well as multiple blog posts sharing your opinions with me, both positive and negative.  I read all these emails and posts and try to respond to as many as possible.

Thank you for being an Ooma customer.

Best regards,

Rich Buchanan
Chief Marketing Officer
Ooma, Inc.

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How Ooma’s Terms & Conditions Affect Current, New Ooma Customers

October 2nd, 2009 @ 4:45 pm
by Team Ooma Filed in: News, ooma

Let me start with my apologies. It’s obvious that we weren’t clear enough about the changes we are implementing at Ooma and what the impact may be on you. So I’m going to try and break down each case for you and what the relevant changes are that may impact you.

Ooma Hub/Scout Combination Products (Includes all Costco.com purchase)

  1. Current Ooma Core Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set including voice mail.
    b. No annual regulatory recovery fee will be charged.

  2. Current Ooma Premier Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set.
    b. No annual regulatory recovery fee will be charged.
    c. If you are paying monthly for Premier, your monthly price will change to $9.99 from $12.99.
    d. If you wish to buy an additional year of Premier at $99.99, you have until 12/31/09.

  3. Current Ooma Premier Trial Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set.
    b. No annual regulatory recovery fee will be charged.
    c. If you want to purchase an annual Ooma Premier subscription, you can do so until 12/31/09 at $99.99, after that the price will go up by $20 to $119.99.

  4. New or Unactivated Ooma Hub/Scout Combinations
    a. No changes to your promised feature set, includes voicemail and a 60 day Premier Trial.
    b. If you want to purchase an annual Ooma Premier subscription, you can do so until 12/31/09 at $99.99, after that the price will go up by $20 to $119.99
    c. No regulatory recovery fee will be charged

Ooma Hub Only Product at Costco Stores

  1. Current Ooma Core Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set including voice mail.

  2. Current Ooma Premier Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set.
    b. If you wish to buy an additional year of Premier at  $99.99 you have until 12/31/09.

  3. Current Ooma Premier Trial Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set.
    b. If you want to purchase an annual Ooma Premier subscription, you can do so until 12/31/09 at $99.99, after that the price will go up by $20 to $119.99.
    c. The regulatory recovery fee applies per the original terms and conditions.

  4. New or Unactivated Hub Only Prodcut
    a. Voice mail is no longer included in Ooma Core.
    b. Enhanced voice mail is available as a standalone option for $49.99 per year if you don’t want to purchase all the Premier features. Enhanced voicemail includes:

    • One touch access to voicemail, call screening
    • Remote access to messages through any web browser or telephone
    • Voicemail notifications to your mobile phone
    • Voicemail mp3 audio file attachment sent to your email
    • Send-to-Voicemail
    • Do Not Disturb

    c. If you want to purchase an annual Ooma Premier subscription, you can do so until 12/31/09 at $99.99, after that the price will go up by $20 to $119.99.
    d. The annual regulatory recovery fee applies per the original terms and conditions

Ooma Telo Product

  1. Newly Purchased Telo’s
    a. Includes US domestic calling, a free phone number, call waiting, caller ID and 911 service. Voice mail is no longer included in the base service of the unit.
    b. Telo’s come with a free 60 day trial of Ooma Premier, which costs $9.99/mo or $119.99/yr.
    c. Enhanced voicemail is available as a standalone option for $49.99/yr if you don’t want to purchase all the Premier features. Enhanced voicemail includes:

    • One-touch access to voicemail, Call screening
    • Remote access to messages through any web browser or telephone
    • Voicemail notifications to your mobile phone
    • Voicemail mp3 audio file attachments sent to your email
    • Send-to-Voicemail
    • Do Not Disturb

    d. Telo’s come with an annual regulatory recovery fee of $11.75 beginning the second year of service.

  2. Previous Ooma Hub Owners
    a. Previous Ooma hub owners (Core or Premier), can move their accounts, phone numbers, and features to the new Telo service including voicemail, and will not be subject to the annual regulatory recovery fee.
    b. The used Ooma Hub may be resold but will require a $59.99 reactivation fee to assign a new number and owner. When activated, the new account will be subject to the $11.75 annual regulatory recovery fee.

Some of you have asked what the regulatory recovery fee is for, so let me explain why we have implemented it. If you have ever looked at your mobile or landline phone bill, you regularly see fees and taxes applied that are typically 15-20% of the monthly bill. In other words, these fees can be quite significant. Here at Ooma we, like every other phone service provider in the US, have to charge a fee to cover taxes, regulatory recovery fees, and other costs related to our providing phone service to your local service address but to our knowledge our charge is significantly lower than what others typically charge. We’ve tried to maintain this cost as low as possible and it is less than $1 per month. While this is not a huge cost to provide you phone service, we realize we did not ask any of our current customers to bear this fee at the time they initiated service, so we’re not asking out current subscriber base to pay this regulatory recovery fee.

Thank you,
Rich Buchanan

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Hello, Ooma Telo

September 30th, 2009 @ 10:36 pm
by Team Ooma Filed in: News

Dear Ooma Customer,

It’s been a busy several months for us here at Ooma, but we wanted to stop and say “thank you” for being part of the Ooma family. Your support and guidance is what has made us successful so far, and we hope we can count on your help in the future too.

We have been listening to your comments and suggestions and have a number of new things cooking in the Ooma Labs that will roll out over the next several months. Our “top ten” list of the many new Ooma Premier features and hardware that will be released over the next few months include:

  1. The Ooma Telo – Ooma’s second generation product featuring DECT 6.0 connectivity (released today!)
  2. The Ooma Telo Handset – DECT 6.0 handset with digital connectivity and unsurpassed audio quality (releasing in early November)
  3. The Ooma Telo Bluetooth Sync – Bluetooth connection for address book synchronization and cell phone calls through the Ooma Telo
  4. Ooma Google Voice Extensions – Extended Google Voice to your home phone too
  5. Unlimited International Calling Plans – Call international destinations all you want for as low as $9.99/mo
  6. iPhone and BlackBerry Clients – Offload your cell phone minutes and enjoy Ooma’s low international rates when calling from a Wi-Fi connected smartphone
  7. HD Voice – Experience the future of telephony now with double the audio resolution of conventional telephones
  8. MP3 Ringtones – Musical ringtones are not just for your cell phone anymore
  9. SIP Registration – Use business desk phones built around the SIP standard with your Ooma service
  10. Click-to-Call – Click a number in your contact list, cell phone or call log to have the call dialed and connected automatically

We are also making some changes to our Terms and Conditions and to our pricing. For all our existing Ooma Core customers, these changes are limited. Here is what applies to you:

  • We’ve increased your minutes of residential, domestic calling to 5,000 minutes per month
  • We’ve reduced the monthly subscription price for Ooma Premier to $9.99 (from $12.99)
  • We’ve grandfathered existing Ooma Premier annual subscribers at the previous rate of$99.99. New annual subscriptions will be priced at $119.99
  • We’ve implemented billing for 411 (directory assistance) at $0.99 per call (800-GOOG-411 or 800-FREE-411 are free options). This charge will be deducted from your Ooma prepaid calling account

For new Ooma customers, here are highlights of our new Terms and Conditions:

  • 5,000 total minutes per month of residential domestic calling
  • Ooma Premier monthly subscriptions are $9.99/month
  • Ooma Premier annual subscriptions are $119.99/year. This now includes either one freenumber port ($39.99 value) or a free Ooma Telo Handset ($49.99 value)
  • $11.75/year Regulatory Recovery Fee in Years 2 and beyond to cover taxes, regulatory fees and other costs
  • Voicemail is now bundled with Ooma Premier
  • 60-days of free Ooma Care telephone support. Thereafter, non-Premier customers receive free email support and may purchase OomaCare telephone support for $39.99/year

As you can see, we have improved the terms for you, our current customers. We have maintained our commitments to you while improving our residential service and reducing the monthly charge for Ooma Premier. We have made slight changes for new customers to reflect our latest business activities and to be more in-line with current market conditions. If you have any questions about the new terms and conditions or the new pricing, please comment below or send us an email.

UPDATE: 10/2/09
Comments to this thread have been closed. Your questions and comments are addressed in an updated post – found here

Thank you again for being an Ooma customer.

Until later,

Team Ooma

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ooma’s Refer-A-Friend Reward Program (Update: extended through Sep 30th)

July 30th, 2009 @ 11:17 pm
by Dennis Peng Filed in: News

We are happy to announce that ooma is rolling out in 100 Costco stores across the nation. We have also extended our special Refer-A-Friend Reward Program that provides your family and friends the gift of free calling while giving you rewards.

Let your family and friends know that there has never been a better time to purchase ooma! We are offering the ooma Hub for $199.99 at select Costco Warehouse stores. For each successful referral, you will get your choice of either a $50 international calling credit OR 6 months of ooma Premier service.

All they need to do is purchase at one of the 100 Costco locations before August 31st September 30th, activate by September 7th October 7th. There is no limit to how many friends you can refer and how many rewards you can collect. Click the map above to find a participating Costco store near you.

For more details or to redeem your reward, please visit http://www.ooma.com/referafriend.

Update: The referral program has been extended to September 30th!

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Costco Refer a Friend

June 23rd, 2009 @ 5:27 pm
by Bobby B Filed in: News

For a limited time only, we are offering a special Refer-A-Friend Reward Program that provides your family and friends the gift of free calling while giving you rewards.

Let your family and friends know that there has never been a better time to purchase ooma! We are offering the ooma Hub for $199.99 at the following Costco locations. For each successful referral, you will get your choice of either a $50 international calling credit OR 6 months of ooma Premier service.

All they need to do is purchase at one of the 20 Costco locations before July 11th, activate by July 18th and remain active for 30 days. There is no limit to how many friends you can refer and how many rewards you can collect.

Simply buy an ooma Hub at any of these following Costco’s:

Anchorage, AK Waipahu, HI
Anchorage, AK Oak Brook, IL
Phoenix, AZ Gaithersburg, MD
Alhambra, CA Bloomfield, MI
Chula Vista, CA Clackamas, OR
Folsom, CA Houston, TX
Rancho Cucamonga, CA San Antonio, TX
South San Francisco, CA Arlington, VA
East Jacksonville, FL Tukwila, WA
Naples, FL Bayamon, Puerto Rico

For more details or to redeem your reward, please visit http://www.ooma.com/referafriend.

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ooma Voicemail Forwarding Enhancements

April 22nd, 2009 @ 1:27 pm
by Bobby B Filed in: News

If you’re already enjoying the convenience of receiving your ooma voicemail in your e-mail or on your mobile phone – get ready for more. We’ve recently rolled out a couple highly useful enhancements to the voicemail forwarding feature:

1. New e-mail client support. We’ve expanded support for mobile e-mail clients. Now you can listen to your ooma voicemail from your Blackberry, iPhone or other mobile smartphone.

2. MP3 encoding. Voicemail attachments are now encoded in MP3 format, reducing the file size by more than half without sacrificing any quality.

These two enhancements are ready for use now. If don’t have voicemail forwarding enabled – go ahead and take it for a spin!

Voicemail forwarding is only available with ooma Premier service. If you’re interested in learning more about ooma’s enhanced voicemail features, visit ooma.com/premier.

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Recent Posts

Customer Support is a Major Focus for Ooma

October 26th, 2009 @ 10:42 am
by Team Ooma Filed in: News, ooma

Dear Ooma Users,

Here at Ooma, we care deeply that each of you has a great experience owning and using Ooma products. As part of this, we recognize that access to timely and helpful customer support is critical to creating a delightful Ooma experience. Unfortunately, we have not always lived up to our standards for timely and helpful customer support, particularly of late, and so I want both to apologize to those of you who have had a frustrating customer support experience and to emphasize that this is a matter we take seriously and are very actively addressing.

As a small, fast growing company, we are always looking ahead and try to plan appropriately to support our growth. We did not do this well enough to handle the volume we’ve experienced since the launch of the new Ooma Telo on Oct 1. I want to assure you that we are taking the steps you would expect, including adding agents, increasing training on the new Ooma Telo, revising policies to solve or escalate problems faster, and better utilizing automation. We intensively measure our customer support against high standards that we have set, and will not rest until we consistently provide timely and helpful support.

Personally, I am excited about Ooma in so many ways. We believe Ooma brings features not seen before in residential telephony, and at a price and value that is unbeatable. I greatly appreciate your being an Ooma customer, I thank you for your patience if you have had a frustrating experience with our customer support, and most of all I want you to know the whole Ooma team is committed to making your complete Ooma experience a terrific one.

Sincerely,

Eric Stang
CEO

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Free Voice Mail for All Ooma Users

October 21st, 2009 @ 10:48 am
by Rich Buchanan Filed in: News, ooma

Hi Ooma Users,

We’ve received a lot of terrific input from you over the last several weeks.  Some good. Some, well, let’s say “not so good”.  In this post I want to address the hot topic of voice mail.  When laying out features that non-Premier customers would receive, we examined whether or not to include voicemail.  The vast majority of phone systems sold over the last 3 years included an answering machine built into the base station.  It seemed logical that we could remove the online voice mail option since most phone systems used in homes today included an answering machine.

Wrong.  

An overwhelming percentage of the feedback was negative about removing voice mail. We do listen to our customers, so Ooma voicemail is going back into the product effective immediately (applies to all purchases made since the feature set changed 10/1/09 too).  Ooma Hub, Ooma Hub/Scout, and Ooma Telo customers will have the built in web based voice mail with local, remote, or web based access just like before.  For details on the complete feature set of the Ooma Hub and Ooma Telo please visit these links.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us; the good, the bad, and the ugly.  This is how we make our service better, by maintaining an open dialog, and responding to as many of you as we possibly can.  It’s with your help that we’ll continue to improve Ooma and change the face of telecommunications across the U.S.

Best regards,

Rich Buchanan
CMO
Ooma

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Ooma’s Unlimited Home Phone Service?

October 8th, 2009 @ 4:18 pm
by Rich Buchanan Filed in: ooma

Dear Ooma Users,

It seems that we’re still confusing people.  Couple that with the Internet practice of  “Ready. Fire.  Aim.” and we’ve created a perfect storm.  There have been a lot of posts here that have been just factually incorrect, and it has created additional confusion that I hope this post helps to clear up.

I’m going to try to lay out for everyone what “Unlimited” service means and why minutes per month are discussed as part of an unlimited service – either the 3,000 minutes per month since September of 2007 or the new 5,000 minutes per month in the recently revised terms & conditions.  I’m going to try this without the legal jargon and definitions that permeate typical terms and conditions documents.  So I’ll ask you to not try to read between the lines or try to be the next Perry Mason, but simply engage in a dialog about the rationale behind our policies.

First, and most importantly, our product offers unlimited residential phone service.  Period.  No limit on minutes, no hidden fees, no “bait and switch”.  Here’s the big “but” in the definition of unlimited.  We designed this service as a home phone or residential system and have consistently promoted it this way.  We do not want, and cannot afford, to have businesses begin to utilize the service consuming a huge volume of call traffic and driving our monthly call termination charges through the roof.

We humans, being what we are, will constantly “work the system” to save money.  But if we don’t at least police our system to prevent abuse – use of our service in obviously non-residential ways – then the ultimate impact is born by you the respectful Ooma user.  Abuse of the service by non-residential users drives up costs, decreases reliability, stretches our systems beyond their intended application, and puts at risk your reliance on the vital communications service we extend to you.

So how do we police the system to ensure compliance?  One of the tools we use is to look at the nominal amount of minutes per month your account consumes.  Can a residential user go over this?  Yes. And they frequently do during times of family emergency, weddings, etc.  That’s perfectly fine with us.  But when we see month after month use of more than 5,000 minutes it sets off a red flag that the calling patterns of that number should be more closely evaluated.

Once again, residential use is not a problem, non-residential or business use is not desired, hence the $39.99/mo fee for non-residential use in our terms and conditions.  We’re really trying to tell you we don’t want you to use Ooma as a commercial business phone service replacement.  So what does this mean if you have a home office?  Most likely nothing.  We know that a lot of our current users use their Ooma system with a home office, and our Premier package includes a number of supporting features. We will introduce a business version of our service next year, but it will not be the same business model as the Ooma Telo or the Ooma Hub.

How did we decide what number of minutes constitutes residential service?  A little bit of guessing and a whole lot of experience over the last 2 years.  The average number of minutes consumed by Ooma subscribers is just 400+ minutes per month.  The number of Ooma accounts that fall into the 5,000+ minute per month category is less than 0.1%, but they consume a huge percentage of the total monthly phone call connection fees we have to pay.  Call volume in some of these cases exceeds 10,000 minutes per month – almost 6 hours a day, 7 days a week, on the phone.

I hope this helps you understand how and why we’ve come to the decisions we have made regarding the use of Ooma as a residential phone service and why we have to be diligent about protecting the integrity of Ooma’s residential phone service. I love the fact that a lot of you have written to me privately as well as multiple blog posts sharing your opinions with me, both positive and negative.  I read all these emails and posts and try to respond to as many as possible.

Thank you for being an Ooma customer.

Best regards,

Rich Buchanan
Chief Marketing Officer
Ooma, Inc.

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How Ooma’s Terms & Conditions Affect Current, New Ooma Customers

October 2nd, 2009 @ 4:45 pm
by Team Ooma Filed in: News, ooma

Let me start with my apologies. It’s obvious that we weren’t clear enough about the changes we are implementing at Ooma and what the impact may be on you. So I’m going to try and break down each case for you and what the relevant changes are that may impact you.

Ooma Hub/Scout Combination Products (Includes all Costco.com purchase)

  1. Current Ooma Core Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set including voice mail.
    b. No annual regulatory recovery fee will be charged.

  2. Current Ooma Premier Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set.
    b. No annual regulatory recovery fee will be charged.
    c. If you are paying monthly for Premier, your monthly price will change to $9.99 from $12.99.
    d. If you wish to buy an additional year of Premier at $99.99, you have until 12/31/09.

  3. Current Ooma Premier Trial Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set.
    b. No annual regulatory recovery fee will be charged.
    c. If you want to purchase an annual Ooma Premier subscription, you can do so until 12/31/09 at $99.99, after that the price will go up by $20 to $119.99.

  4. New or Unactivated Ooma Hub/Scout Combinations
    a. No changes to your promised feature set, includes voicemail and a 60 day Premier Trial.
    b. If you want to purchase an annual Ooma Premier subscription, you can do so until 12/31/09 at $99.99, after that the price will go up by $20 to $119.99
    c. No regulatory recovery fee will be charged

Ooma Hub Only Product at Costco Stores

  1. Current Ooma Core Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set including voice mail.

  2. Current Ooma Premier Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set.
    b. If you wish to buy an additional year of Premier at  $99.99 you have until 12/31/09.

  3. Current Ooma Premier Trial Users
    a. No changes to your current feature set.
    b. If you want to purchase an annual Ooma Premier subscription, you can do so until 12/31/09 at $99.99, after that the price will go up by $20 to $119.99.
    c. The regulatory recovery fee applies per the original terms and conditions.

  4. New or Unactivated Hub Only Prodcut
    a. Voice mail is no longer included in Ooma Core.
    b. Enhanced voice mail is available as a standalone option for $49.99 per year if you don’t want to purchase all the Premier features. Enhanced voicemail includes:

    • One touch access to voicemail, call screening
    • Remote access to messages through any web browser or telephone
    • Voicemail notifications to your mobile phone
    • Voicemail mp3 audio file attachment sent to your email
    • Send-to-Voicemail
    • Do Not Disturb

    c. If you want to purchase an annual Ooma Premier subscription, you can do so until 12/31/09 at $99.99, after that the price will go up by $20 to $119.99.
    d. The annual regulatory recovery fee applies per the original terms and conditions

Ooma Telo Product

  1. Newly Purchased Telo’s
    a. Includes US domestic calling, a free phone number, call waiting, caller ID and 911 service. Voice mail is no longer included in the base service of the unit.
    b. Telo’s come with a free 60 day trial of Ooma Premier, which costs $9.99/mo or $119.99/yr.
    c. Enhanced voicemail is available as a standalone option for $49.99/yr if you don’t want to purchase all the Premier features. Enhanced voicemail includes:

    • One-touch access to voicemail, Call screening
    • Remote access to messages through any web browser or telephone
    • Voicemail notifications to your mobile phone
    • Voicemail mp3 audio file attachments sent to your email
    • Send-to-Voicemail
    • Do Not Disturb

    d. Telo’s come with an annual regulatory recovery fee of $11.75 beginning the second year of service.

  2. Previous Ooma Hub Owners
    a. Previous Ooma hub owners (Core or Premier), can move their accounts, phone numbers, and features to the new Telo service including voicemail, and will not be subject to the annual regulatory recovery fee.
    b. The used Ooma Hub may be resold but will require a $59.99 reactivation fee to assign a new number and owner. When activated, the new account will be subject to the $11.75 annual regulatory recovery fee.

Some of you have asked what the regulatory recovery fee is for, so let me explain why we have implemented it. If you have ever looked at your mobile or landline phone bill, you regularly see fees and taxes applied that are typically 15-20% of the monthly bill. In other words, these fees can be quite significant. Here at Ooma we, like every other phone service provider in the US, have to charge a fee to cover taxes, regulatory recovery fees, and other costs related to our providing phone service to your local service address but to our knowledge our charge is significantly lower than what others typically charge. We’ve tried to maintain this cost as low as possible and it is less than $1 per month. While this is not a huge cost to provide you phone service, we realize we did not ask any of our current customers to bear this fee at the time they initiated service, so we’re not asking out current subscriber base to pay this regulatory recovery fee.

Thank you,
Rich Buchanan

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Hello, Ooma Telo

September 30th, 2009 @ 10:36 pm
by Team Ooma Filed in: News

Dear Ooma Customer,

It’s been a busy several months for us here at Ooma, but we wanted to stop and say “thank you” for being part of the Ooma family. Your support and guidance is what has made us successful so far, and we hope we can count on your help in the future too.

We have been listening to your comments and suggestions and have a number of new things cooking in the Ooma Labs that will roll out over the next several months. Our “top ten” list of the many new Ooma Premier features and hardware that will be released over the next few months include:

  1. The Ooma Telo – Ooma’s second generation product featuring DECT 6.0 connectivity (released today!)
  2. The Ooma Telo Handset – DECT 6.0 handset with digital connectivity and unsurpassed audio quality (releasing in early November)
  3. The Ooma Telo Bluetooth Sync – Bluetooth connection for address book synchronization and cell phone calls through the Ooma Telo
  4. Ooma Google Voice Extensions – Extended Google Voice to your home phone too
  5. Unlimited International Calling Plans – Call international destinations all you want for as low as $9.99/mo
  6. iPhone and BlackBerry Clients – Offload your cell phone minutes and enjoy Ooma’s low international rates when calling from a Wi-Fi connected smartphone
  7. HD Voice – Experience the future of telephony now with double the audio resolution of conventional telephones
  8. MP3 Ringtones – Musical ringtones are not just for your cell phone anymore
  9. SIP Registration – Use business desk phones built around the SIP standard with your Ooma service
  10. Click-to-Call – Click a number in your contact list, cell phone or call log to have the call dialed and connected automatically

We are also making some changes to our Terms and Conditions and to our pricing. For all our existing Ooma Core customers, these changes are limited. Here is what applies to you:

  • We’ve increased your minutes of residential, domestic calling to 5,000 minutes per month
  • We’ve reduced the monthly subscription price for Ooma Premier to $9.99 (from $12.99)
  • We’ve grandfathered existing Ooma Premier annual subscribers at the previous rate of$99.99. New annual subscriptions will be priced at $119.99
  • We’ve implemented billing for 411 (directory assistance) at $0.99 per call (800-GOOG-411 or 800-FREE-411 are free options). This charge will be deducted from your Ooma prepaid calling account

For new Ooma customers, here are highlights of our new Terms and Conditions:

  • 5,000 total minutes per month of residential domestic calling
  • Ooma Premier monthly subscriptions are $9.99/month
  • Ooma Premier annual subscriptions are $119.99/year. This now includes either one freenumber port ($39.99 value) or a free Ooma Telo Handset ($49.99 value)
  • $11.75/year Regulatory Recovery Fee in Years 2 and beyond to cover taxes, regulatory fees and other costs
  • Voicemail is now bundled with Ooma Premier
  • 60-days of free Ooma Care telephone support. Thereafter, non-Premier customers receive free email support and may purchase OomaCare telephone support for $39.99/year

As you can see, we have improved the terms for you, our current customers. We have maintained our commitments to you while improving our residential service and reducing the monthly charge for Ooma Premier. We have made slight changes for new customers to reflect our latest business activities and to be more in-line with current market conditions. If you have any questions about the new terms and conditions or the new pricing, please comment below or send us an email.

UPDATE: 10/2/09
Comments to this thread have been closed. Your questions and comments are addressed in an updated post – found here

Thank you again for being an Ooma customer.

Until later,

Team Ooma

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ooma’s Refer-A-Friend Reward Program (Update: extended through Sep 30th)

July 30th, 2009 @ 11:17 pm
by Dennis Peng Filed in: News

We are happy to announce that ooma is rolling out in 100 Costco stores across the nation. We have also extended our special Refer-A-Friend Reward Program that provides your family and friends the gift of free calling while giving you rewards.

Let your family and friends know that there has never been a better time to purchase ooma! We are offering the ooma Hub for $199.99 at select Costco Warehouse stores. For each successful referral, you will get your choice of either a $50 international calling credit OR 6 months of ooma Premier service.

All they need to do is purchase at one of the 100 Costco locations before August 31st September 30th, activate by September 7th October 7th. There is no limit to how many friends you can refer and how many rewards you can collect. Click the map above to find a participating Costco store near you.

For more details or to redeem your reward, please visit http://www.ooma.com/referafriend.

Update: The referral program has been extended to September 30th!

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Costco Refer a Friend

June 23rd, 2009 @ 5:27 pm
by Bobby B Filed in: News

For a limited time only, we are offering a special Refer-A-Friend Reward Program that provides your family and friends the gift of free calling while giving you rewards.

Let your family and friends know that there has never been a better time to purchase ooma! We are offering the ooma Hub for $199.99 at the following Costco locations. For each successful referral, you will get your choice of either a $50 international calling credit OR 6 months of ooma Premier service.

All they need to do is purchase at one of the 20 Costco locations before July 11th, activate by July 18th and remain active for 30 days. There is no limit to how many friends you can refer and how many rewards you can collect.

Simply buy an ooma Hub at any of these following Costco’s:

Anchorage, AK Waipahu, HI
Anchorage, AK Oak Brook, IL
Phoenix, AZ Gaithersburg, MD
Alhambra, CA Bloomfield, MI
Chula Vista, CA Clackamas, OR
Folsom, CA Houston, TX
Rancho Cucamonga, CA San Antonio, TX
South San Francisco, CA Arlington, VA
East Jacksonville, FL Tukwila, WA
Naples, FL Bayamon, Puerto Rico

For more details or to redeem your reward, please visit http://www.ooma.com/referafriend.

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Recent Outages – Corrective action plan

April 16th, 2009 @ 10:30 am
by Dennis Peng Filed in: News

There have been a number of discussions internally about the two outages this week. Needless to say, we are very disappointed in our handling of the situation. Although there are some external factors we don’t control, there are many that we do, and we clearly have room to improve. We’ve listened to all the feedback that the community has been kind enough to share and I want to take a moment to go over some of the steps that we are taking to improve communication about major outages and how we plan to mitigate/avoid them in the future.

Communication

  • We have closed a loophole that prevented the product marketing team from being immediately notified about major outages during off-hours. This prevented us from responding in the forums in a timely manner this morning.

  • We are adding a mechanism for us to display outage notifications on our homepage and Lounge login page. The notification will be displayed at the top of the home page and link to our status in the forums. This should be live tomorrow.

  • We have created an official ooma_status twitter feed. You can now find us at twitter.com/ooma_status. This gives you RSS and SMS notification options as well.

  • We will send outage notification e-mails to customers who are subscribed to our marketing communication list. If you are not subscribed, you can do so here: www.ooma.com/contact/. Be sure to click the “I currently own an ooma system” checkbox. This is the only opt-in list we can use right now where we can safely send tens of thousands of e-mails without getting blacklisted. In the future, we will consider allowing separate opt-in’s for outage vs marketing notifications.

Mitigation/Prevention

  • We are adding a second upstream Internet provider. We have hardware on order, hope to have it live next week.

    We are doubling the capacity of our provisioning systems so we can accelerate the rate of recovery. That should be live by the end of the week.

  • We have found two issues that prevented the ooma Hub from automatically recovering during the last two outages. The fix is being tested as we speak and will remove the need for a manual power cycle.

  • We are adjusting our back-off and retry mechanisms to prevent the Hubs from placing undue load on our system during outage recovery. That should be complete by the end of the week.

  • Longer term, we are planning to add a second data center in the Midwest/East Coast.

No doubt there will always be room for improvement, and we will continue to look to the community for feedback.

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About the April 13th Service Outage

April 13th, 2009 @ 8:30 pm
by Dennis Peng Filed in: News

A major outage of the ooma service began today (April 13th) at approximately 11AM (pacific time). This outage affected all ooma customers and was triggered by Internet connectivity issues at our upstream service provider. While we do not have all the details around the problems that affected the Internet connection at this time, we do know that these problems were not isolated to ooma, but did effectively cut off the ooma service from the outside world.

Between 2PM and 3PM, Internet connectivity was slowly being restored to our service. However, the flood of ooma Hubs coming back online created an immense amount of load on our provisioning systems. We rushed to add capacity to the system, but the nature of the network outage had interfered with the system’s ability to recover by itself. Beginning at 2:30PM, we began throttling Hubs from connecting to our servers. This allowed the system to settle down and work through the backlog of requests. As the systems stabilized, we slowly began opening up blocks of users to connect to the ooma service.

As of 5PM, most service has been fully restored. Some Hubs may not recover automatically in an expedient manner – if your ooma service is still down, please reboot your ooma Hub. Unplug power from the back of the device, wait one minute and then plug the power back in. The ooma Hub may need to download a software update, but it should go into service shortly thereafter.

Rest assured that we are taking this outage very seriously. Discussions have already started on how to make the service resilient to a similar event in the future. ooma currently has one data center located in west coast. We have planned to light up a second data center in the midwest or east coast this year, and this outage has served as a stark reminder for us to get moving on that. This has also served as a good opportunity for us to re-evaluate our contingency and business continuity plans.

We know that phone service is critical function that everyone relies on. We apologize for the outage this afternoon and thank you for your patience as we work through some growing pains.

Update: Please refer to our latest post to read about how we plan to mitigate and handle outages in the future.

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