Since my business has been growing and our team is far flung I need to give clients the impression of a centralized office and also give employees the functions and ability to use their Voice over IP (VoIP) phone in their remote office just like they are down the hall. Only just a few years ago the way to get a centralized system, you had to have a physical box called a PBX that connects to the phone company and gives an office its telephone lines. But if you didn’t have a physical office with employees you were out of luck. Telecom technology has advanced over the last decade and VoIP is is a pretty solid technology with services like Skype and Vonage. But those are individual and home-based solutions. So, in a drive to expand into the the small business market, companies came up with the idea of a VoIP switching systems or “virtual PBXs.
So Many Choices Narrowed to Two Providers
In my research I looked at a variety of companies and narrowed it down to two companies – RingCentral and Virtual PBX. The goal: tie together dispersed teams under one phone system to have a more unified corporate presence.
To do some research, I found some great questions from Web Worker Daily who evaluated the same products. Here is a list of questions that every small business we had to ask themselves while researching phone systems:
- How many lines do we need? Here we mean the number of phone lines that you expect to be speaking on simultaneously.
- How many extensions do we need? An extension rings to an individual, or to a department (such as sales).
- How much time do we spend on the phone? While we use a lot of email, we decided to go with unlimited minutes to avoid any surprise costs at the end of the month.
- Do we need a system that is incoming calling only, or one allowing us to transfer to other coworkers? We would prefer being able to transfer calls for convenience.
- Do we have to purchase a special phone or use the ones we have? Some virtual PBXs and phone systems do come with hardware while others are entirely online.
One Number to Rule them All
My team is similar to Aliza’s – people with their cell phones, home office phones, some Skype users. All those numbers where work numbers and to a client it looks like a jumble especially when they have a problem and want to call one number to find someone or escalate a problem. I looked at both services and found the following that Web Worker Daily found as well:
- Auto attendant. This is the voice that answers company calls and automatically routes them based on caller input.
- Call rules. This allows, for example, “Press 1 for Sales; Press 2 for Marketing.”
- Follow me services. This feature gives you the ability to have your calls forward to the phone number where you’re available.
- Custom greetings. This is the ability to record your own greetings for each person or department.
- Web-based system management. Being able to manage your phone system online means you can handle issues and changes from any Internet-connected computer.
- Virtual fax. This feature is nice for us because we are currently using a virtual fax system, so this can save some monthly fees.
- Dial by name directories. This allows callers to enter the first three letters of a team member’s name to find them easily.
We also needed an 800-number since we are going to be dealing with clients all over the country soon. You can also get stuff like vanity numbers if you want but that wasn’t in our evaluation process. You can also do international routing if you want and Web Worker Daily covers this well at the end of their post.
Evaluation and Decision
First, I love that RingCentral has an iPhone app that I can use to make calls and have my return calls use the called ID. That is solid. It also has a visual voicemail app. Bad thing is that the softphone client is only for Windows and you have to get a certain phone pre-provisioned from them. The other thing I didn’t like is that all the forwarded calls have a minute charge which is a bit much. You can do the unlimited plan.
Virtual PBX had all the same features but two important things for now and great service for later. First, you can use any SIP client and they have a special config and push Gizmo5 which is a great cross platform client and was just bought by Google. Second, I can transfer calls between Gizmo users which means that I can bring new people into the phone system for projects, give them access, let them connect via Gizmo, work on the project and if they are done and not continuing as a contractor, disconnect with no issues.
There is no setup fee and no cost for minutes on the VoipPBX plan (forwarding costs do apply in other plans) plus it has something awesome for the future – ACD or Automatic Call Distribution. As the business grows and there are services that require a support line, this function is great to have and know we can expand into it.
Any other products we should consider?
We haven’t pulled the trigger on getting the service yet and writing the post is to get some feedback from the readers on their experiences and recommendations on other services we should truly consider. Leave a comment, would love hear from you all.
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