We'd like to start contacting some rather large companies to sell our product and we want a convenient way to relay around our business number to cell phones or other connections as needed.
Any advice on setting up a business number for a small startup is appreciated..
RING CENTRAL: RingCentral provided a toll-free number for me. Their interface is awful and they're just generally not that innovative, but they accomplished the task for $15 / mo or so. I wouldn't use them again, but only because there was no "wow."
GOOGLE VOICE: Google Voice is hit or miss. The connection is spotty, the dial out sometimes just doesn't work, there's a slight delay in the connection when answering etc. It is promising as a personal product, but nowhere near business quality. I've tried on two occasions...and both times got frustrated and needed to switch. Contrary to what others have said, you can have a phone assigned to two Google Voice accounts, but one must be marked "home/office" and it won't be able to send or receive SMS messages. It's confusing because I'm sure they're trying to avoid this use case.
GRASSHOPPER: I have been using Grasshopper for 3 months after hearing recommendations from Jason Fried and Mixergy. I find their interface to be really unintuitive and difficult to use.
They have great support, but I had to rely on it too often. I called 5-6 times to set up basic Google Voice functionality (route calls to my cell phone, have voice mail). The Java program for recording your voicemail greeting was wonky and broke often. The recording was poor as well. They encourage you to hire voice actors to do the work, but I want my voicemail to sound like a human, not a radio robot. They should simply allow you to upload an MP3.
There's no good way to dial out. With Google Voice you can log-in to the web app or use their mobile app. With Grasshopper, the only way to dial out is to call a number first, then dial the number you want to call. With this approach, sometimes connections were refused that were later successful from my cell phone. Nice people and I love what they're doing with Chargify, but I plan to move to something else...
TWILIO: I considered Twilio and will most likely use it for other aspects of the business (click to call, sms follow-up). But I ultimately decided it was better to use a solution designed for this purpose rather than spend developer resources making Twilio work for us. It will be cool to see applications built upon Twilio that solve problems like this.
LINE2: Line2 looked interesting, but recently had crippling DDOS problems and is iPhone only. It also seems best suited for a single person consultancy rather than a company.
ONSIP: I recently decided to make the move to OnSip. They were also recommended by Jason Fried. Since they are essentially just providing virtual PBX via SIP, you can choose from a wide selection of phones, apps from third party developers etc. So I plan to purchase an office phone (with a cord!) and use that during work hours. When I'm not in the office, or for off-hours, calls will be routed to my cell phone and I'll use an iPhone app to dial out.
If you want to tell me, please email me mail at awarner dot com
I worked hard to get them as a sponsor because I thought they were very easy to use.
A GV-like service that was built for businesses is Phonebooth (http://www.phonebooth.com/). Give it a try, it's freemium!
This feature is a must-have for me, as I would prefer not to answer every call with my business tag line :)
Check Grasshopper.com. I am not a customer of theirs.
I like the attempts at transcription for voice mail, but find the voice mail difficult to configure otherwise. Sometimes I get messages on the ring-to phone, sometimes on GV. There's no way to set the number of rings before pick up.
I'm having a much better experience with standard VOIP numbers through Callcentric, to the point that I'm looking at trying to port out the Google Voice number. Has anyone had any success in porting a number out?
However, I replaced it with Grasshopper (http://www.grasshopper.com) a few months ago and haven't looked back. It is much better for inbound calls and is well worth the $10/mo for the entry-level plan. You can setup an 800 number (or a vanity 800-number for $30), and record an entire phone tree for various "departments" like support, sales, etc.
Starting out as a 1-man team, all of these extensions routed to my own cell phone of course. But then as I grew, it was easy to login and change the destination of each extension to various team members. Both of my companies are primarily B2B, so being able to give the user experience of having a stable central hub, when we in fact work mostly remotely, is comforting to existing and potential clients. Without this, we'd have to try forwarding calls to each other's cell phone numbers, or telling the client to try dialing the other person's number directly, both of which are simply unacceptable.
The one downside of Grasshopper is that, as of now, you are still unable to make outgoing calls through the number, since it doesn't have a GV app for Android or iPhone.
* You get a screen pop on your computer (or your Android) when a call comes in, with the whole interaction history between the caller and anybody in your business, so your chances of sounding like you know what you're talking about are higher.
* It syncs in real-time, 2 way, with your Google Contacts and makes it a snap to share contacts between colleagues.
* It gives you fine-grained control over your Caller ID when making phone calls, so people who call you back are reaching you where they should (e.g. a support call shows your main company number, but a personal call shows your personal business number)
* Unlike most of the other services, Making an outgoing call is not an afterthought, it's well built into the system as a full feature. And most startups trying to get customers do a lot of outbound calls, and rarely get called. (10:1 ratio)
Twilo and Tropo (which runs on voxel) are both alternatives you may want to look at.
Most Android: Do it. Not Android: Use Grasshopper/Phonebooth
Apparently they now route a decent % of all calls.
I've been told that people have tried to call me and got busy signals multiple times.