October 19, 2007

Virtual Phone Systems - Feature Rich and A Boost For Your Business

I was recently listening to a podcast from John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing who was interviewing Siamak Taghaddos, CEO and founder of GotVMail. They were discussing, in depth, why virtual phone systems are great for small businesses who do not want to manage their own phone system.

Cnet recently covered Ring Central which has a range of interesting features.

One feature I thought was very neat was a password protected feature which requires you to enter a password for the phone to be answered. Why?

Let's say you have your Ring Central phone directed to your home number. Do you want your children to answer the phone? No.

I was in my church recently, looking at their PBX system, from Avaya, and I thought to myself if they only had a simpler phone system with no wires all over the place. Although a virtual phone system would not be good for them, a managed phone system would be. No sitting on the floor for hours, figuring out how to add a new phone line or change some setting.

Whether you need or have a full fledged phone system or just need a few lines, it's important that you push as much of the management and care of technologies to someone else who has expertise in the solution. For small businesses, there's no need to manage your own PBX, get a virtual PBX or managed phone system.

There's several providers of virtual phone systems such as Ring Central, Grand Central, VirtualPBX.com, Gotvmail and OneBox. What are some differences:

The level of support you'll receive and commitment to your business

The per minute price of their service

The richness of features they offer

Like any technology purchase, consider your needs and see which phone service can best meet that need.

If you're just starting out, and have a "virtual" company of employees or partners, not in the same building, a virtual phone system is ideal for you. You can give one number for customers instead of an index card with 10 different cell phones.

Your virtual phone system goes way beyond just the phone call, but you can assign one line to give customers a recorded message, for example. There's a lot you can do with a virtual phone system, it really depends on the built in features and the time you invest to learn about all the features available to you.

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