This sort of talk is usually accompanied by some happy face of someone talking on the phone. Does any company promote they have bad customer service (or maybe just “ok”)? Who wants to say that?

Unfortunately, you figure out pretty quickly how serious that company is. Mostly they’re eager to take your money, but try and get any service support and you find yourself pounding your telephone to get a live person on the phone or an answer to what you thought must have been a simple question.

At TurboBridge, we do in fact take customer service seriously. Customer service to us is pretty simple, answer the phone or respond to emails in a prompt manner, try and resolve the issue as quickly as possible to the satisfaction of you (our current or hopeful customer) and if doubt decide in your favor.

While all of TurboBridge’s systems are highly automated, you can control all aspects of your account online, sometimes you might need to talk to someone and we’re here to help. In fact, our customers often tell us how pleasantly surprised at our customer support.  TurboBridge personnel answer all your queries and each is empowered to make it right for you without “consulting” their supervisor or adhering to specific corporate policies. We just want you to be happy!

We strive to be easy to do business with while offering you a great service at a great value. Simplicity is key.

What you’re seeing today is the retail version of TurboBridge, we wrote an application to provide enterprise telephone audio conference. But we also provide services to a number of other companies who have their own demands for a telephony application. Perhaps they need their own special conferencing feature, a special announcement, unique calling handling. Whatever the desired application, it’s easy enough for a 3rd party developer to interact with the TurboBridge platform using standard web protocols, things that any web developer understands!

TurboBridge actually is called into service for much more than conferencing. Our voice engine is used for various IVR applications, outbound calling and unique telephony applications. The developer can focus on creating their application and we focus on providing a reliable platform with interfaces to multiple types of networks including the good ole telephone network.

If you’re a 3rd party developer, looking for a system to manage your applications interaction with an audio network, don’t hesitate to contact us and ask for our published API to learn more about the capabilities of our back office systems.

Believe it or not, the most likely reason is the person calling in punched in the wrong conference ID number. At TurboBridge, our systems keep track of the action from each caller during a conference down to very minute detail. A caller will declare they’ve trying it multiple times to no avail and yes they’re punching in the right digits. Clearly something must be wrong with our systems? However, all too often when we check our log files, we can see each digit the user depressed and sure enough, they’re entering the wrong code number multiple times.

The reason for this is dialing memory. We think we did one thing, but our fingers did another. It’s a common mistake and it’s most acute where the conference ID has a repeating sequence of numbers (like 63373, the user might type 63733 repeatedly and insist they dialed correctly). We’re all human and these things happen.

Another reason is unfortunately not the fault of the user. We take today’s telephone network for granted. It just works. Or seems to at least. The reality is the phone network was built over 50 years ago and unfortunately suffers in terms of immense complexity and business rules that seem archaic in today’s world of the Internet. When you place a phone call from New York to TurboBridge, your call may go thru 20-30 different switches and 4-5 telephone companies before it lands into our data center.

If along the way, any of these 4-5 telephone companies has an issue, it may well impact the quality of your conference call. Worse, your phone call may go a different way each time you call depending upon traffic & time of day and to make it nearly impossible to fix, we have no idea how your phone call actually go to us.

The good news – this doesn’t happen too often and if you get a bad connection or our system refuses to recognize your conference ID (even if you dialed it correctly). Usually dialing back corrects the problem. But these problems can be nagging and difficult to troubleshoot.

For example, early last year, we noted that some callers had trouble reaching TurboBridge at a specific hour each day. We determined after a great deal of research that a circuit from the mother of all telephone companies, AT&T, was having some issue. We contacted AT&T and a very nice man in their service center told us there was no way the Great AT&T had any problems with their network and if they did, they would already know it since they’ve spent billions on sophisticated equipment to monitor it. Such is our life.

The problems continued and we called the nice man at AT&T every day with more detailed information. He remained quite nice but he failed to reason that AT&T could have a problem.

But we persisted and finally the very nice man at the AT&T service center said he would investigate if for nothing else so we’d stop calling them. After another day passed, the very nice man at AT&T contacted us and sheepishly informed us that they had found a circuit card in their network that was defective. This card was only briefly used each day during heavy traffic periods and for some reason they’re very expensive monitoring systems failed to realize it was broken.

This problem wasn’t just impacting little TurboBridge. No thousands of callers were impacted. But they obviously didn’t challenge AT&T like we did. The long answer was AT&T eventually replaced the card and big surprise, the problem went away.

At TurboBridge, we keen to provide an excellent service with excellent support and want to get to the root cause of any problem or issue, no matter how long it takes.

When we created TurboBridge as a company, we wanted to be upfront in our information, easy to do business and offer a good value on what seems to be a fairly standard business tool, telephone conferencing. However, not many companies are so forthcoming with their information. We decided to be different.

While TurboBridge is built using 100% of our own technology, we’re reliant on a host of other suppliers in our daily operation. This includes various telephone companies to whom we’re directly connected with, large name brand Internet backbone providers who provide connectivity to us and Class “A” data centers (big dark buildings with no windows) that house our servers and provide supposedly uninterrupted power to keep us going. If any one of these suppliers has a problem, it cascades down to us and may ultimately impact service to you.

We monitor vour systems 24 x 7 and generally we’re well aware of an issue long before you notice it. But rather than keep quiet about it, we’re going public with this information. So if you’re a new or prospective customer, we want you to be confident in selecting us for our integrity and honesty. If you’re an existing customer, this is an easy way to check if some problem you’ve encountered is already known by us.

In any event, in this online era, the best, fastest and most reliable way to contact our support staff is via email support (at) turbobridge.com. Have a question, concern, problem or need help — don’t hesitate to contact us.

TurboBridge is unique in that we offer access to your conference bridge via Skype. This is great for people who are traveling international where it may be expensive to call in or also great for those who working away at their computer already. We all know what Skype is and how it works and it’s a comfortable program to use.

TurboBridge offers a host of access methods (and no you don’t need a computer to use TurboBridge). TurboBridge has access telephone numbers throughout the US, Canada and various international locations. Access via our popular TurboPhone (via your Internet Explorer browser) and as well SIP (if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry). SIP is for IP telephones and IP-enabled office PBX systems.

HiDef Conferencing was offering Skype access on an unlimited basis and at one point TurboBridge did as well. However, business conditions changed with Skype (which was recently acquired by Microsoft) and as a result, we’ve had to start charging for Skype access to TurboBridge  (at a low $0.01 per minute per participant, note there is no charge for the Skype user to reach TurboBridge, sort of like a toll free call). Skype users using the Skypeout service can access TurboBridge using any our normal telephone numbers (in this case, the caller will pay Skype on a per minute basis).

TurboBridge is a great value and our fully automated systems allow us to keep prices low and quality high and while we’d like to offer Skype on an unlimited basis, simple matter Skype’s pricing to us won’t allow that (though we can always hope for a change).

So welcome HiDef Conferencing customers to TurboBridge and we’re happy you found us.

Upon sign-up, you’ll be prompted to create your first conference bridge and you’ll be ready to make your first conference call immediately thereafter. You’ll also get a welcome email from us with your important account details.

But how many times have you signed up for a service only to discover it’s not for you for whatever reason and you quickly discover that cancelling the service is a test of your patience. “Please call us to cancel your account, our office hours are xx to xx”. Worse, when you call, they want to know why you cancelling and then begins 1000 reasons why you shouldn’t cancel and the classic “wait we have a better deal for you.”

Isn’t that annoying?

At TurboBridge, we found that annoying. We know that sometimes our service might not be right for you, for whatever reason. Or maybe you just needed the service for a limited time. Whatever. It’s your business. We’re sorry to no longer have you as a customer. But we felt that annoying you as you were leaving was just — well annoying!

That’s why with TurboBridge you can cancel your account online at any time. We didn’t hide the cancel account button either. It’s right there on the main page of the customer portal. No fuss, no hassle. Even better, if you cancel within our 30-day money back guarantee, we’ll automatically refund any service charges (less actual usage). No need to call and ask. We’ll do it for you automatically.

TurboBridge is also happy to welcome you back, if you sign-on, cancel but decide to rejoin our service. Super, welcome back! You’ll find all of your account settings and created conference bridges still active

On-line account cancellation represents how we think at TuroBridge. Good value. Quality service and easy to do business with.

We often get customer inquiries about whether TurboBridge offers web conferencing. The short answer is we don’t. The longer answer is we do! In addition to our retail services, TurboBridge provides wholesale audio conferencing services to a number of other companies who integrate our conferencing with their other solutions.

We’re pleased to announce that join.me, a provider of web conferencing, uses TurboBridge for the audio conferencing portion of their service. Join.me is a service offered by the well known LogMeIn company. Join.me has developed a very innovative web conferencing collaboration service with many of the same attributes of TurboBridge. Mainly, join.me is a simple easy to use web conferencing service. It’s easy to set up or schedule a conference, easy for your participants to join and easy for the presenter to present. There’s much to recommend about join.me when compared to the older traditional web collaboration services which often required everyone to download a big application and offered numerous features that were difficult to use.

But we left the best part for last. The basic join.me service is FREE.

Yes, free, it’s easy to sign-up at http://join.me and includes free toll conferencing as well (powered by TurboBridge).  Look for join.me to expand their offering with additional services for a small monthly fee but their intent is for the basic service to remain free. There’s no reason not to try this fantastic service today!

While many video conferencing systems have audio conference bridge elements, you have to buy them and figure out how to run your telephone lines to the bridge and worse, figure out how many telephone lines you actually need. With TurboBridge, your video system needs to merely reach us and we handle the complexity of all the audio components.

Newer video conferencing systems from Tandberg, Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize, Logitech all support SIP audio add-in and it’s a simple 10-minute configuration to set up with few hassles. Best of all our expert SIP technnical staff is there to work with your team to ensure you’ve set everything up right. All at no cost.

TurboBridge supports ‘conferencing on demand’ whereby we actually will create a conference with your specific parameters sent from your video system. We also support traditional reservationless conferencing. We also support instant start from your video system to minimize unnecessary audio prompting found with other providers.

TurboBridge will conference your video participants, other SIP devices, toll and toll free callers as well as Skype user sinto a single audio bridge with no fuss. In addition, most video systems now support the HD Audio Codec G.722 enabling HD Audio quality for other SIP users as well.

Best of all – our low flat rate pricing, starting at  only $14.95 per month ensures your company an incredible value. Contact TurboBridge sales at (888)-666-3620 to learn more about our special video service offerings!

A multinational electronics company had offices in several countries and project teams that worked between them and with their customers. They had equipped each office with a Cisco Call Manager for their PBX. The calling rates between these various countries using the local telephone company was quite high as were the rates for calling internationally.

They installed an Asterisk PBX as tandem hub and sign-up for various SIP trunks for pure outbound calling. The Asterisk PBX had the routing intelligence and flexibility to deal with all types of interfacing with the various SIP companies. After some trial, they decided to run these trunks over the public internet and found only a handful of instances where they encountered poor call quality and if so, only for a few moments. Ironically, the Cisco Call Manager wasn’t able to handle the various SIP interface parameters they needed for all their service providers.

Initially, this company started using the conferencing capabilities of the Asterisk system. It worked, but they quickly ran into problems. First off, they wanted each office to be able to configure and set-up conference rooms as they needed and the IT dept wasn’t comfortable allowing too many administrators access to the Asterisk system. Second, they needed to include US callers and they didn’t wish to incur the cost or expense with establishing US telephone numbers and trying to manage it all. Finally, they were concerned about the load conferencing presented on their Asterisk system, which was already busy handling tandem calls.

Discovering TurboBridge, they literally configured a new SIP trunk from their Asterisk tandem in < 5 minutes such that any user on their network could reach TurboBridge via VoIP.  Outside participants can dial in via any of the TurboBridge access methods. PLUS, the company’s internal staff, using both Cisco and Polycom IP phones which support HD Audio (G.722) can experience crystal clear communications.

Using TurboBridge, this multinational company reduced their conferencing expenses by 1/3 and increased their overall call quality. A nice bonus and it was easy to set-up with no hassles. TurboBridge’s ability to support multiple administrators and accounts, enabled each division to manage their own conference ID and monitor usage.

This particular customer was using 90,000+ minutes of toll free conferencing each month and had a bill in excess of $5,000 a month! The good news, TurboBridge was able to offer them a lower rate and right out of the gate, this customer was saving over $2,000 a month.

We had mentioned that TurboBridge also offered local toll numbers which might save them even more money. The company was hesitant, they didn’t want to appear ‘cheap’ and they also didn’t want to confuse their customer on what number they needed to dial.

TurboBridge toll and toll free numbers are almost the same 800-309-2350 or 805-309-2350. Almost the same is an understatement, only 1 digit difference! We suggested the customer advertise both numbers for several upcoming conferences and let the customer decide what number they wanted to dial.

The customer agreed to advertise both as a trial and on one of their first calls, fully 2/3rds of all participants dialed the toll number! The customer continued the trial and the same % held, 2/3rds called the local number with no prodding from them.

Two simple changes, selecting TurboBridge and offering toll calling as an option has saved this company almost 75% of what they had been spending for conferencing. It’s real money. It’s a real savings and it’s all because of TurboBridge.