FINALLY, A POWERFUL VIRTUAL PBX PHONE SYSTEM THAT'S AFFORDABLE FOR SMALL BUSINESS

If you’re starting a new business or are looking to establish phone service for an existing business, you’ve come to the right place. The objective of this website is short and simple; to help you make a decision on the best Business Telephone Service for your Small Business by providing a fair assessment of your options. Within this website, we provide you with some basic data that you’ll need when looking to establish business phone service.

To help you cut to the chase, we’ve included the summary of our results on this page, so that if you choose to immediately take our advice and move forward with our recommendation, you may do so without hesitation. For those who need more information before making a decision on your business telephone service, continue to browse the links on this site and read on. We’re pretty sure that after reading through all of the information and assessing your options, you’ll agree with our overall assessment.

After reviewing several small business telephone systems, we’ve found that that the Virtual PBX System offered by a company called Ringcentral provides the most bang for your buck. Although their Virtual PBX Phone System isn’t perfect, as nothing is, it far exceeded our expectations and surpassed ALL of the other choices that were available to us. In descending order, here are some of the reasons why we chose them as the best Small Business Telephone System.

1. When comparing their service to other small business telephone services, the only system that had more features than Ringcentral was an actual $7500 PBX system that we took a look at. Needless to say, that particular system simply was not the best option for a small business.

RINGCENTRAL’S FEATURES INCLUDE:
- Toll Free Phone Numbers	- Local Phone Numbers	- Voicemail System
- Internet Fax to Email	- Virtual PBX System	- Optional Digital Phone Line
- Dial by Name Dir.	- Call Forwarding	- Answering Rules
- Call Control	- Message Alerts	- Music/Messages on Hold
- Click to Call Out	- Outlook Integration	- Call Logs
- Calling Card	- 24-hour Support	- Multiple Extensions
- Call Transfer	- Fax on Demand	- Professional Recordings

2. They offered a Free Trial, which allowed us to evaluate the product without making any long-term contractual or financial commitments.

3. They didn’t require a deposit or some lengthy application process.

4. They had a plan that was only $10.00 per month, which helped us to minimize our risk even if we decided to move past the trial period.
There was no waiting period to get our phone number. We actually had our own phone number within 5 minutes after registering.

5. They didn’t require a credit check, which was wonderful considering that each credit inquiry could potentially hurt our credit rating. Being that we weren’t absolutely sure if we wanted the service for the long haul, the last thing we wanted to do was damage our credit by just test driving a product.

6. When we did need help and had questions about some of the billing rates, the customer service reps were more than adequate at answering our questions.

7. When we finally started using it, it was everything they said it was, and more.

Now, to take just a little bit of the shine off of this Small Business Telephone Service, we did encounter a couple of small issues at first.

1. Somewhat like cell phone carriers, the phone service bills you according to plans, which encompass minutes. Basically, each plan has an allotment of minutes included in it and after you’ve exhausted your minutes, you are then charged per minute. Even though the per-minute charges are generally much cheaper than most cell phone carriers, (costing around 4-6 cents per minute depending on the plan), it’s something that we didn’t initially keep an eye on.

2. When you sign up, they will give you the option of choosing a toll-free number or a choosing a phone number in almost any US area code. We initially elected to go with the toll-free number. After we got our number, we wanted to immediately set up a mock greeting, telephone extensions, and voicemail to see how the system worked. Well, what we didn’t realize is that when you call into your toll-free number from an outside telephone, minutes are deducted from your plan minutes according to the time that you are logged into the system. Playing around in the voicemail system effectively caused us to run out of minutes in our trial period. As a strong counter to this negative, Phone Numbers with regular local area codes don’t incur these charges. You can also get around these charges by configuring your virtual telephone system using your computer and a microphone. There are several ways other ways you can configure your system and check voicemail without incurring charges, but you should definitely keep this information in mind before planning to set up the phone system and personalized greetings.

3. If you don’t use a feature called “Softpphone” which is a feature that allows you to answer your phone and manage your PBX through your computer with no “per minute” charges, you will have to answer it on an existing telephone line, which may be a cell phone or land line. Although on one hand this is a slight drawback, on the other hand it is part of what makes the Phone System so great. The whole phone system is built around a concept called Follow-me Call Forwarding which works like this:

a. Your Phone number is answered by your Customized Virtual Answering Service.
b. The customer presses the extension of the person who they want to reach, either because they know the extension or because they used the dial by name directory
c. The call is routed to the person who’s extension it is.
d. The Call automatically attempts to forward to a sequence of numbers that were programmed by the person who’s extension it is. It will dial up to 10 different numbers (i.e. cell, home, wife’s cell, a business partner’s cell, etc), until it reaches that person or goes to voicemail. This is one of the main features that help to give your clients that professional big business impression. When you get a call into the system, it doesn’t matter if you are at the gym working out, or stuck in Atlanta traffic, the customer will have the impression that you are in the office awaiting their call.

To find out more about how this works, I definitely recommend taking the hands-on approach. Take a look at their overview or sign up for the Free Trial and you’ll see exactly how it works.

Overall, we give this Small Business Virtual PBX Telephone System 9 out of 10 stars. Although we hated to do it, we had to deduct 1 full star because of the per-minute billing. Even though we have never gone over our minutes since we started using the service ourselves, we realize that most businesses would rather be billed at a Fair Flat Rate as opposed to by the minute. We hope that some day soon, all small business telephone services, young and old, big and small, cellular or landline, come to the conclusion that Flat Rate Billing is the ultimate key to consumer happiness.

To find out how we can we came to the conclusion that Ringcentral is the Best Small Business Telephone Service available, check out our page on Choosing a Phone System