Magic Jack Customer Service

Substitutes for Magic Jack Customer Service

Magic Jack was formerly named as an Editor’s Choice at CNET, and has worked well for hundreds of thousands of customers. Unfortunately, there are thousands of other customers who curse the day they began using Magic Jack.

Perhaps the most bothersome aspect of Magic Jack is its customer service, or lack thereof. Customer Service Scoreboard rated Magic Jack’s customer service as abysmal, giving it only 30 points out of a possible 200. Support groups have sprung up on the Internet to address problems as users encountered them, but it’s difficult and time-consuming to hunt all over the Internet looking for those resources, so I’ve listed a few of them below:

• Magic Jack has a Frequently Asked Questions page on their web site to answer some questions you may have, but this information relates to the buying decision (can I port my current phone number to magicJack, is 911 supported, etc.)
• Magic Jack also offers the ability to chat with a Live Agent via chat on their web site. As long as your questions are basic, commonly answered questions, you may have some luck with this feature.
• Many users have encountered more complex problems while using Magic Jack, and have turned to forums such as the “unofficial Magic Jack support forum” or a similar forum which discusses more general VoIP issues, broadband DSLReports.com.

There are many other online resources which can help fill the void left by the nearly non-existent Magic Jack customer service.

One of the most common complaints about Magic Jack is that its advertising leads consumers to believe they can make free phone calls anywhere in the United States and Canada – which is not entirely true. Bear with me for a couple paragraphs while I outline some of the billing practices of the telephone industry.

If a customer of  Telephone Company A wants to call a friend who uses Telephone Company B, Telephone Company A has to pay a fee to Telephone Company B to “terminate” the call at the friend’s house. Normally these termination fees are very small – less than 1¢ per minute.

There are significant variations in these termination fees, however – notably in rural areas where the cost to provide telephone service is very high, given the great distances between houses and the low volume of calls. These rural fees average about 6¢ per minute, and provide additional revenue for the rural telephone company to construct and maintain their lines.

Some enterprising companies are taking advantage of rural telephone companies’ ability to negotiate higher termination fees by setting up free conference call sites in a scheme called ‘traffic pumping’. When conference call attendees dial in, each of their phone companies are responsible for paying a termination fee to the rural telephone company – and that fee can be upwards of 20¢ per minute. It doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars, which the rural phone company then splits with the company that set up the conference call system.

It’s a bit much to try to pay a bill that large when you’re charging your customers less than $2.00 per month, so Magic Jack simply decided not to provide service to rural telephone companies. No calls means there would be no termination fees – but that means there are places you can’t call using Magic Jack. As it turns out, there are workarounds – for example, the use of GVJack to make the calls MagicJack won’t connect.

Next: Magic Jack Customer Service (part 2)
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