Outsourced PBX?I'm looking for a good solution for an outsourced PBX. We're currently using Aptela and it's pretty bad. To be honest, I don't really even want a full VOIP system, and I'm not interested investing the time, money, or institutional knowledge in using something like Asterisk.
It's 2008, there's no need for a 5 person company to own a PBX.
The features I need are pretty simple:
Grandcentral looks to be the right solution, except that it doesn't seem to have a phone tree.
Has anybody run into anything that might fit the bill?
There's actually plenty of reasons for a 5 person small business in an office to have a physical PBX (TCO, reliability, call quality), but a virtual company like yours is different.
I haven't seen a virtual VoIP PBX that I'm confident enough to recommend. However one associate is using Speakeasy and says its good, they've made great progress in the last couple years.
I had a feeling you'd respond.. At this point I'm looking at Ringcentral rather seriously.
The trade-off for me is that I expect VOIP call quality to suck no matter what, I'd rather just have a voip system that forward to our cell phones.
I understand that cell phone call quality sucks just as much. Being a company that doesn't really depend on the telephone, but values flexibility far more.
The irony here, is my entire business is hosted, managed services. If I'm so vehemently against running my own VOIP system it either means I'm onto something, or I'm lazy. :)
Our team uses a firm called One Box. We love it so far and have no issues to complain about. Check them out here: http://www.onebox.com/.
Good luck Michael!
Accessline (and Office Depot rebrands) does have a virtual "cell phone" PBX. The thing I don't like about these is they own the local numbers (no ports in or out) and if you do toll free the rates usually aren't the best. There are no term agreements, so pricing and service can change anytime. Also with staff in many states you'll often pay a so/so rate for transferring calls long distance.
The other thing is outbound calls generally don't go through these systems, they're mostly for inbound call handling. So clients receiving calls don't see the company number but your cell or home phone - and customers will learn these numbers. Long term this can cause problems if those numbers changes or those staff members leave.
Kevin, your last point definitely touches on a concern I have, which is keeping cell phone numbers away from customers.. I'm thinking the solution might be by default to have cell phones set to block outgoing caller-id, since I don't think there's a good way around it.
That may work but I can tell you from my experience its been a problem. I'd had clients block outgoing caller ID and nearly all have had it turned off since.
Ultimately you have to look at how mobile do you really need to be? Cell phones cost $50-120/mo so a company of 10 spends $500-1200/mo for cells, plus say $80/mo for a hosted "cell phone" PBX. But do you really need to talk in the car?
10 users in traditional telecom is 5 lines, 5 unlimited US lines is as low as $185/mo and a good hybrid (VoIP/traditional) phone system is $1900-2200. Put softphones on your computers (~$30) and headsets (~$50) and you're set. Say you spend $4k on a phone system, its a 5+ year investment, so it costs you less than $67/month. You can't talk in the car, but you can have staff all over the US and be connected.
The mobile question itself is a moot point for me, since we provide both proactive and reactive 24/7 services to all of our customers.
Everyone in my company needs to have a cell phone, so we pay for it. By turning these into our standard method of communications, we save money. What would be most ideal is if we could find a way to make all of the phones spoof their caller-id as being our company's 888 #
The problem with your of a phone system being $67/month is that we're both consultants, but of different sorts. The main difference is you charge your customers T&M. My model is more of an HMO model where my customers pay a high premium, but we own the risk for anything that goes wrong or needs doing.
Internalizing and maintaining knowledge is expensive. My minimum customer opportunity is $30k/year mainly because of the complexity of proper, accountable knowledge management. This sort of knowledge, maintaining an immature VOIP PBX, has no profit in it for me.
I'll gladly pay "extra" for somebody else to do it, for not having to bear the risk of hosting the infrastructure in my office or datacenter, and for not having to maintain any in-house knowledge of the system.
Every business has different needs, sounds like you really need the cell phones. I'd recommend checking out Office Depot Office Auto Attendant if you're interested in the SmartVoice package I can sell and support that one, the rest you can just order online.
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