Magicjack Blocking Conference Calls
Talk about a successful company getting greedy. Not content to enjoy its hefty slice of the VoIP telephone service pie, magicJack recently started blocking its own customers from calling telephone numbers of competing conference call services.
(For those to whom cell phones are still a mystery, magicJack is a phone service that allows you to go any phone into a computer and form phone calls over the Internet for only $20 per year.)
A riled magicJack customer who had recommended magicJack to dozens of friends and relatives phoned the Clark Howard consumer advocate radio show today and reported to an astounded Clark Howard that he recently tried to connect to his family’s weekly telephone conference call with his magicJack service and was denied access. When he called technical benefit, he was informed he could now spend only magicJack’s conference service.
In other words, magicJack users can now participate only in conference calls which they commence or which happen to be initiated by another magicJack user.
magicJack conference call service awe stories are spreading on Internet message boards and complaint sites like crabgrass. One man stated he could no longer access his company’s conference calls from home using his magicJack Internet phone service.
A formerly happy magicJack user writing on the magicjacksupport.com forum relayed the message he received from the company when trying to access a conference call using a competing conference call service:
“Important Announcement: Please listen to this entire short message. The number you have dialed cannot be completed from your magicJack. For free conference calling setup, you must dial 305-848-8888. You may press one at any time during this message to connect. Please spend this number for all future free conference calling. Please visit FreeMagicConference.com for more information on magicJack free conference calling. Again, that was FreeMagicConference.com.”
Another frustrated magicJack user copied and pasted his surreal customer service phone call conversation with a magicJack tech support agent during which the representative repeatedly tried to get him to initiate the conference call himself as a “solution” to his problem.
What magicJack’s marketing geniuses apparently failed to fathom was that not all people organize their own conference calls. Sometimes the calls are initiated by one’s employer or an organization over which one has no control.
It is hard to think of an analogy of a similar ill-conceived marketing ploy since most successful companies do not deliberately try to irritate their customers. For instance, what if Toyotas only worked on the company’s own private toll roads, regardless of whether they led to places you wanted to travel? How many people would trade in their Toyotas for Hondas or Nissans that allowed them to drive anywhere they wanted to go?
Fortunately, the free market has a way of correcting human error and corporate greed (except in the case of the banking industry, of course, in whch executives receive million dollar bonuses for foolish business practices).
Chances are that magicJack will rectify its marketing blunder, either voluntarily or by mandate from the FCC, whose regulations they could be violating by blocking calls to legitimate telephone numbers.
For more articles by this writer, click here.
Sources:
http://www.magicjacksupport.com/mj-blocking-access-to-freeconferencecall-com-pimping-alt-t7355.html
http://clarkhoward.com/liveweb/shownotes/2008/06/19/13682
http://russthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/magicjack-call-to-free-conference-call-not-placed-to-218-339-2500/
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Filed under Corporate Conference Call by on Jan 15th, 2012. 
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