Unless
you’re still a just one-man-shop, running your business on a backbone
of cell phones is a recipe for disaster in the long term. It’s something
we found out first hand at our own company, knowing full well that we
outgrew the capabilities of Google Voice after using the platform for
nearly three years. Customers expect promptness and professionalism when
it comes to phone communications, so we decided to move up to cloud
hosted VoIP for our phone needs.
I’ve touched on the subject of cloud hosted VoIP/PBX in the
past,
letting everyone in on how Google Voice was helping keep my small
business on top of customer calls. While Google Voice is a solid service
for a one-man company, it just wasn’t cutting it as my company
FireLogic
continued to expand. At two people, we rigged Voice up fairly well but
had a lot of rough edges to deal with. We called it quits at three
people and moved onto cloud hosted VoIP service from industry veteran
RingCentral.
Google Voice isn’t as much of a cloud hosted VoIP provider as they
are a bona-fide call routing and VM provider (some call it a virtual
PBX). Outside of their
free calling service
within your Gmail interface, Google Voice doesn’t provide the same
level of features that a full fledged VoIP provider like RingCentral
can. Ditching Google Voice in place of RingCentral was one of the best
internal technology upgrades we have made as of late.
The limits of Google Voice and other “free” solutions
When I was growing my computer repair business as a sole technician,
running between customer visits and juggling phone calls, Google Voice
served me extremely well. For example, it saved me time on having to
call in to a voicemail line to check messages; I merely listened to my
VMs from my email.
But our company has been growing steadily since early last year. When
it came time to bring on help, we managed to get Google Voice to
function between two people. I merely added his cell number to my
account and we juggled incoming calls together. However, the situation
became less ideal the busier and larger we became.
Since Voice is built to run piggyback on top of someone’s Google Apps
email account, only one person has full access to the service unless
you share passwords. We got around this issue by creating a dummy “GV”
account on our Apps domain, but this was not long lived. Google Voice
became a band-aid for a long term communication problem we had to
address quickly.
Here are some of the other growing pains we experienced during our last few months on Voice:
- Google Voice is a service that
blasts all your selected phones at the same time. There is no way to set
up a staggered hunt group (that I’ll explain later) which follows a
logical path of “if no answer, ring phone B” and so on. You can place a
schedule on which phones get rung at what time of the day, but this
still pales in comparison to what RingCentral has given us.
- Since we work on a lot of projects with customers now that require multiple team members on a given call, Google Voice’s solution to conference calling
was unacceptable. On GV, you’re expected to have everyone else ring
your GV number at a given time, and then join people in one by one. This
rarely worked as advertised, and was frustrating more than anything.
- Sure, you can create a dummy account in your Google Apps for the
sake of sharing access with others. But is this safe or recommended? Not
really. Unless you piggyback your account off a free Gmail account
(which jeopardizes your control over your Voice number should something
happen), you’re paying for another Google Apps license. Cheap, but not
100% ideal.
- For a one man cell-only shop, this doesn’t matter. But since we
expanded into a public office and also brought on a full time
administrative assistant, forcing everyone to make all calls off their
personal cell minutes was becoming arduous. Voice has no solution for
using robust business level IP Cisco or similar phones.
While some of the above snags may not matter to all computer repair
businesses, we were quickly seeing that customers were becoming agitated
as we hobbled calls in a messy manner and had to play hardball just to
communicate effectively with them. Enough was enough, and after some
long and hard research, we chose to settle on
RingCentral. For the price, features, and functionality, they are simply second to none for our needs.
How to choose a cloud hosted VoIP provider
While RingCentral happened to be the best choice for our needs, it
may not be the pick for everyone. There are numerous questions you
should ask as a small business owner before taking the plunge with a
prospective provider. Like with any industry, there are plenty of
gotchas and smoke & mirrors employed to try and snag new customers.
With the proper planning and fact finding, you can avoid the pitfalls of
basing your decision on shallow qualifications such as price or
freebies alone.
Here are some of the questions we asked during our pre-purchase research calls to each company:
- Are virtual extensions included, and if so, are they an extra cost?
If your company has any mix of cell-phone only workers, virtual
extensions are a must. Some provides don’t offer this feature at all,
and some have a low cap on the number of extensions you can get.
- What are the specifics surrounding minutes and usage?
This is the perhaps the single wildest area of difference between the
big names. We prefer RingCentral’s unlimited approach to minutes for our
desk phone lines. Some providers have strict conditions around toll
free minutes and outgoing calls.
- What kind of faxing support is provided? While
faxing is on its way out, some customers still demand it, and worse,
some vendors you work with will ask for it. RingCentral includes faxing
support at no extra cost but some providers have tight terms around
faxes coming in and out. Be sure to ask.
- Is a toll free number included, and how much airtime does it get? Most
VoIP providers advertise this heavily, but be sure to inquire as to how
many incoming minutes your plan is given. This is rarely unlimited, as
toll free lines are a luxury feature. We use a toll free number for out
of state customers.
- Is there a demo period, or money-back period? Good
providers offer a period where you can change your mind and cancel
service if you are dissatisfied. We went with RingCentral because they
gave us a simple 30 day money back guarantee. You don’t want to be stuck
with something you cannot return.
- What kind of live support is provided? Some
companies offer 24/7 support; some only have business day support; and
some offer limited support via email only. If you have no issues with
the Google Voice “on your own” support mentality, then this may not be a
big deal. But most time-strapped IT business owners (myself included)
want to be able to speak with someone when the service breaks and
business is being lost due to it.
- Is there a contract required for service? Some
companies will gladly offer you better than expected pricing in exchange
for staying tied down for one, two, or more years. Unless you are 100%
certain that you wish to stay with a single provider, try to push back
on any contractual obligations – or ask for the “no contract” price if
possible. Flexibility beats rock bottom pricing in some cases.
In addition to RingCentral, some of the other companies we inquired
with included FreedomVoice, Vocalocity, PhoneBooth, Phone.com, and
OneBox, to name a few. Some of the biggest differentiating factors
between providers include the number of minutes allowed for
incoming/outgoing calls; whether virtual extensions are allowed at no
extra cost; and what sort of extras are bundled like conference bridges
and fax service. For our needs, RingCentral was a distant first choice.
Do your own research and compare your needs to find which provider is
best for you.
Finding a preferred provider is half the battle. Configuring the
service to match your workflow requirements is the other. All the bells
and whistles advertised are useless unless you can
leverage
them to help streamline your business. While Google Voice was a definite
step up for our company over plain cell service, RingCentral has truly
unlocked a world of potential. If you go with RingCentral, they even
allow you to speak with an “implementation specialist” for a few weeks
after you go live to ensure your service gets configured properly, which
I used heavily myself.
So what the heck can cloud hosted VoIP do for your business? Here’s how it has helped us.
Use hunt groups to intelligently ring sets of phones
Hunt groups sound complex, but in reality, they are quite simple in
execution. If you are a Google Voice veteran, you’re very familiar with
the way Voice can push calls to other phones, what they call simple
“forwarding.” Google limits you to
six phones,
and unless some of them are on a ring schedule, they all ring at the
same time. While this may be useful for some, if you are running a
growing company, this becomes a nuisance quickly.
When we made the move to RingCentral, we took advantage of hunt
groups that route our three main numbers (two local, and one toll free)
to the various phones in use at our company (desk and mobile). And
seeing that we have a full time admin assistant handling incoming calls
now, we didn’t want our techs getting every single sales call or
customer inquiry on their cell phones.
RingCentral hunt groups allow us to stagger
our incoming calls to two desk phones, and if no one answers, then the
calls hit our techs’ cell phones. This helps funnel simple issues and
misc calls through our assistant, which can then forward calls to one of
us if necessary. We have saved each tech (including myself) hours of
time on the phone each week due to this very simple improvement. We can
focus on customer work when onsite, yet still ensure that customers are
handled with a friendly voice during business hours.
Transfer calls between desk phones & cell phones alike
One of the big selling points of legacy PBX systems was the ability
to transfer calls between any number of internal phones. Cloud hosted
VoIP takes this same concept and capitalizes on it by not only allowing
for transfers between IP desk phones, but also to cell phones. This was
something we sorely lacked on Google Voice. Once a call came in, we
could “switch phones” but this was a rather cryptic feature that rang
every other phone on our account, and you had to hope that the proper
party took the call over. Not ideal.
RingCentral allows us to do traditional transfers between our two
desk phones, and has a feature under the moniker “call flip” which
allows you to customize a list of cell phones which can accept a call
transfer directly from a land line. Techs in the field can now take
customer calls that need to be handled on an as-needed basis from our
assistant. For mobile repair companies, this feature alone is worth its
weight in gold.
Full blown call recording on any call
Google Voice has quite excellent call recording, I will admit. But it’s severely crippled in the fact that you can only record
incoming
calls. This is a pain when you have to initiate a call with a customer
that requires recording, and either have to ask them to call you back,
or skip recording the call altogether. Services like RingCentral solve
this problem by allowing universal recording which gets saved on their
cloud network for a period of time. Any recording can be downloaded and
archived for the long term as well. Unlike on-premise PBX systems that
usually require expensive hardware, this feature is cloud based and
seamless.
Masking caller ID on outgoing cell calls
Keeping your private cell phone number just that – private – is
tricky in this day and age as we continue to become more mobile-centric.
While I used to be able to do this in Google Voice in a basic way, with
RingCentral, this was taken a few steps further. First and foremost, if
your mobile phone can accept the RingCentral app (native free app on
iPhone, Android, and BB, with an unofficial paid app for Win Phone) then
you can mask all of your outgoing calls to your main company number.
Likewise, RingCentral allows you to use this same masking
functionality right off their website through your online account. This
is great because 1) I hate it when customers get a hold of my or one of
our techs’ personal cell numbers and 2) it keeps a consistent, clean
communication image with customers. Instead of worrying about customers
routing issues to multiple personal cell numbers, this ensures everyone
is calling a single central number for their needs. This also helps
prevent issues with customer calls when techs happen to leave your
company.
Virtual Extensions that treat cell phones like first class citizens
A virtual extension is a simple way of creating a full blown
extension at your company that routes directly to a cell phone. This
becomes more useful as your company grows in size, and adds more
mobile-only workers. RingCentral is nice in that it allows for free
virtual extensions for all mobile workers. Since they are using their
cell minutes anyway for phone time, RC doesn’t care about them receiving
incoming calls. If your call routing scheme increases with complexity
and needs, then virtual extensions are a true lifesaver.
Conference call lines that can host professional customer telemeetings
As I mentioned earlier, Google Voice has a pathetic approach to
conference calls. Everyone is expected to call your company number at
the same time, so you can manually patch them in. Sometimes it works…
most times, it doesn’t. Our provider RingCentral simplifies this growing
need by providing our company with a totally free conference call
bridge line which acts just like the functionality that all of the big
boys use from Webex, etc. You can have up to 1000 callers on your bridge
line, and this makes customer meetings over the phone a lot more
pleasant. Three, four, five, and larger multi-way calls become as simple
as a two way chat on a regular phone call. Big business image at a
small business price.
The small things matter, too
Some of the finer features of a proper service like RingCentral are
quite useful as well. For example, I already mentioned how we save on
keeping a physical fax machine running, or paying for a separate fax
service, since our provider allows incoming/outgoing faxing at no extra
charge. We can also forward voicemail emails (which have an audio file
attached) to a distribution group on our Google Apps platform, which can
blast any number of workers who need access to them at the same time.
And RingCentral also happens to support texting to your company numbers –
something we heavily used on Google Voice.
Overall, I have to say that moving to a cloud VoIP provider has been
one of the best internal IT changes we made in the last half year. We’re
paying about $60 USD for all of the above features each month, and it
has paid for itself many times over in saved time, frustration, and
functionality. While I can’t say that RingCentral is the right choice
for every IT company, it definitely was the pick for us. Sometimes
spending a few dollars on your own internal needs will reap rewards —
you just need to be willing to look
outside the box.
Have you moved to cloud hosted VoIP? Has your experience been
different than ours? Are there concerns you have about moving your phone
needs into the cloud? Let us know in the comments area below!
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