GoTo Connect review: A comprehensive communications hub for SMBs

GoTo Connect is a cloud-based communications platform that rolls telephony, video and messaging into a single product. It’s designed to streamline business communications into a single entity. It’s a brand that’s had many different guises over the years. Previously known as LogMeIn – a name that continues to appear in its domains – it acquired the GoTo moniker after merging with Citrix’s GoTo products.

Today, the company develops several products under the GoTo brand, including GoTo Meeting, GoTo Webinar and GoTo Connect, the latter of which we’re reviewing here.

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GoTo Connect review: What do you get for your money?

Prices start at £10 per user per month for the Basic tier. This buys you the cloud-based phone service with unlimited extensions, smart call routines, and call forwarding. You can deploy a single recorded greeting, create one ring group and one call queue. Meetings are capped at 40 minutes and four participants.

If you upgrade to Standard, at £21 per user per month, many of those caps disappear. You can create an unlimited number of auto attendant greetings, ring groups and call groups – and meetings can go on indefinitely, for up to 150 people and a maximum of 50 webcams. Importantly, you also get features that aren’t rolled into the Basic tier, such as hotdesk support so staff can log in on any VoIP desk phone, plus e-fax. GoTo claims Standard is its “most popular option”.

The top-end Premium tier, starting at £44 per user per month, includes everything in Standard, plus larger meetings, analytics, and call centre tools such as whisper and barge, real-time queue updates and agent effectiveness reports.

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GoTo Connect: What phone tools does it have?

The dialler sits at the heart of the GoTo system. It has top billing in the sidebar and is also the tool through which you’ll reach voicemail and missed calls. It works in tandem with the integrated contacts manager, allowing you to search by name as well as extension, and displays any contacts you’ve designated a ‘Favourite’ in the sidebar for easy access.

You can log in on multiple devices simultaneously, including desktop and web apps, the mobile app and a desk phone. It also has presence tools with which staff can designate themselves as available, away, appearing offline or not to be disturbed. If none of these is quite right, you can instead set a bespoke message.

Voicemail is delivered to a cloud-based mailbox and, on the Standard and Premium tiers, can also be sent as an attachment with optional transcription to a user’s email address. Voicemail boxes can hold up to 99 messages, which we reckon should be plenty for all but a tiny minority of users or anyone on a particularly long break who hasn’t set up forwarding. Nonetheless, the option to archive messages offline via email is to be welcomed, and you can set your account to delete a voicemail as soon as it’s been sent that way.

The system is pre-configured with common sense functions, including default voicemail messages, so you can get up and running quickly and refine things over time – perhaps by recording personalised messages and setting up dial plans (see below).

There’s also a call recording option on the Standard and Premium plans. You can configure this to record all incoming or outgoing calls (or both), choose the recording format, and save the results either to the system or your own AWS storage. This latter option is one we welcome, as it provides control over where and how long you archive your recordings.

On either Standard or Premium, you can also set up lines to have a dual purpose, accepting both calls and faxes, and forwarding the latter to email.

GoTo Connect review: How do meetings and messaging work?

Meetings are easy to set up and publicise, thanks to a neat addressing system that tacks your username (or an alternative of your choice) onto the end of the meet.goto.com domain. This saves you having to type out (or any correspondent having to type in) a long address of random letters and numbers when all you want is a quick catch-up.

You can record meetings to the cloud or your own computer. Opting for the cloud has several benefits aside from saving space on your own machine: it rolls in cameras and phone audio, which aren’t saved if recording to your computer, and you can set the system to detect any slides broadcast during the meeting, which can be saved as a downloadable PDF. You can also share the recording with anyone who has the meeting link, which you can set to remain active for a year.

The messaging module has all the features we’d expect, but to get the most out of it you’ll need to be in the US or Canada, which are the only two countries in which you can also send text messages to mobile phones.

Outside the US and Canada, you can still use the system for team messaging, where your content remains within the GoTo environment. You can both send direct messages and set up private channels, the latter of which are effectively chat rooms in which several team members can contribute to a single thread without the whole organisation getting involved. As well as text and emojis, both private messages and channels can be used to send files and images. Where they differ is the added ability to start a video or voice call directly when using private messaging.

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GoTo Connect review: What admin tools does it have?

Behind the scenes, there’s a comprehensive administration console, which is logically broken down and easy to navigate, making a clear distinction between options that apply to an individual user and those that apply system-wide.

On the individual front, you can set what happens when you receive an incoming call. By default, it comes through to your extension, but you can send it to several internal and external lines simultaneously to be picked up by any of them. Beyond that, there are options for unanswered or failed calls, with the former including voicemail, transfer, or hanging up, and the latter sending the call to an alternative line, either within or outside the system.

If you’re using a compatible VoIP phone, you can also define its soft button functions remotely from the user settings screens, which saves navigating the on-device menus.

The separate Administration console, which applies company wide, lets you enrol devices, manage users and groups, set up ring groups and schedules, and filter calls before they reach any extension. This last option is particularly powerful, allowing you to enter specified numbers (or blocks of numbers if you include a wildcard) which, when detected, can be automatically hung up, sent to voicemail, redirected to a specified extension, played a clip, or notified that they’ve been blocked. For any organisation that receives a lot of nuisance calls, this could prove a significant time-saver.

We were particularly impressed by the visual Dial Plans feature, which is analogous to interactive voice response (or IVR) on other systems. This lets you build a virtual handler that routes callers to a particular destination depending on their button presses. It’s the kind of thing you’ll have encountered when calling an insurer that asks you to press different numbers for quotes, claims or cancelling your policy.

Rather than setting it up using drop-down menus or by uploading XML, you drag out nodes from a sidebar and connect them the way you’d join thoughts in a mind-map. Where nodes have several possible outcomes, like pressing one, two, or three on the keypad, you simply link as many connectors as required, with each leading to the next node in the chain. It’s easy to see what leads where, and to redefine the dial plan by disconnecting links and reconnecting them elsewhere. You might do this because someone has left, you’ve reorganised a department, or because the insights attached to your dial plan indicate that a significant portion of your callers hang up when they encounter a particular node, potentially costing you business.

These insights are specific to Dial Plans, and sit apart from the broader reports system, which can be automated to collate data on, say, user activity or meeting attendees. The system also gathers a significant amount of background health and quality data, logging latency, packets lost and more. If a user is frequently reporting problems, you can add them to a watchlist and attach an alert that notifies specified recipients immediately if quality drops below a certain level on their connection.

GoTo Connect review: Should you buy it?

There’s a lot to like here. The Dial Plan feature is the best implementation of an IVR builder we’ve used, and handy features such as the ability to link the call recording function to AWS, to detect slides in a meeting and the use of simplified meeting room links combine to deliver a system that’s both flexible and easily understood.

We were a little disappointed that video meetings were capped at 40 minutes on the Basic tier, but at £10 per user per month that tier still represents good value for money for small businesses, and shorter meetings are often better focused than those that drag on, anyway.

If you can afford to upgrade to Standard, which starts at £21 per user per month, you’d be hard-pressed to hit any limits, making it an ideal choice for businesses that need a plug-in communications upgrade they can fit and (largely) forget.