A few years ago when I was shopping around for new phone service, I tried out a few of the online virtual business phone systems. The old telephone company standard just wasn’t meeting my needs anymore, yet the costs kept going up.
The good news is that if you wait long enough, some smart entrepreneur will create a technology solution that meets your needs exactly. That’s what happened to me with RingCentral. This virtual phone service is easy to use and has a bunch of options to meet just about any small business owner’s needs. I’ve been a RingCentral customer since 2007 and my experience has been excellent — great service and great support.
In my opinion, RingCentral is the perfect small business phone system — especially because our businesses are so mobile these days. RingCentral will free you up from your desk and follow you anywhere.
Here are some of my favorite features of this service.
- Call Announce. If you set up call announce, your callers are asked to give their name. Then RingCentral rings your phone number and tells you who’s calling. You can decide whether to take the call or not. And you can set up your answering rules to indicate business hours so the phone rings only during specific times of day and days of the week.
- Follow Me service is great for the entrepreneur on the go. You can set the service to try different phone numbers (up to 10 in a sequence) before it gives up and sends your caller to voice mail. This is also a great option for a small business with virtual employees.
- Get (and send) Faxes Anywhere. One less machine for your office! You can send and receive faxes anytime, anywhere as simple as pie using the RingCentral dashboard. And you get notification in your mailbox when a fax has been sent to you.
- Smartphone Apps. Whether you use an iPhone, Blackberry, or Android, there’s a RingCentral app that will work on your phone. I have the app on my droid and my iPad. This makes the service even more valuable to me. I can access my voicemail directly on any of my devices (and I can make phone calls on my iPad with this app too!).
- Set Up Business Hours. You can define your business hours so your phone only rings during specific times of day and days of the week. Outside of those business hours, your calls will go to voice mail.
There are way too many features of this service to list here. I think this virtual business phone system is super handy for just about any small business. Plus, it will grow as you grow. And what’s really neat is that you control it all with just a few clicks inside your RingCentral dashboard.
Suffice it to say that I love RingCentral and it meets my needs perfectly. If you want to give it a test run, you can try RingCentral free for 30 Days.
I love my RingCentral service and I know you will too!
About Denise O'Berry
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