Small Business Phone Systems

By J.B. Malik, Editor-In-Chief

You’re a small business owner, consultant, or real estate agent, and your business has grown to the point where your mobile phone is not enough — you need a real phone system — capable of taking multiple incoming calls and forwarding them them to you (and/or any of your employees), taking a message if you’re busy, etc.

(Skip this review and sign up for a FREE 30-Day Trial of RingCentral).

Companies like RingCentral can provide small business owners and entrepreneurs with a Virtual PBX.

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RATING:

Pros:

• Very inexpensive (a basic membership is FREE)
• Many mobile/telephone plans don’t have Skype’s multitude of features
• Great for: high-volume domestic and/or international callers; very small office/home office professionals, independent consultants, real estate agents, etc
• Excellent if you need multiple “local” numbers around the U.S./World
• With new high-tech phones available, Skype no longer needs a PC to work.

Cons:

• Using some of Skype’s collaborative tools and features with other parties is impossible if they don’t also have Skype
• Skype’s reliability is only as good as your internet connection/PC stability.
• Skype is not a full phone system but can be used with one. But if you just need a main phone number, auto attendant, multiple extensions, etc., we recommend a low-cost, ‘hosted’ phone system solution, like RingCentral.

If you make a lot of business calls and you’re not using Skype yet, drop everything you’re doing and sign up for a free account. See, when Skype was first being widely used, analysts and critics dismissed the service as an unreliable alternative to POTS (plain old telephone lines) and cell phones.

But I’ve been a Skype user for over a year, and I have yet to experience an outage. Very occasionally, I get a middling quality connection. But overall, using Skype saves my business hundreds of dollars a year in telephone charges. And (the best part), Skype lets my business do things I can’t do with any other service. (more…)

By J.B. Malik, Editor-In-Chief

Maybe you’re not ready for a small business phone system. Here’s something else for you, if you:

• Have a mobile phone; and
• Receive personal AND business calls directly to your mobile phone number.

It’s from CallWave and it’s called “VTXT”, or “Visual Voicemail”. Forget the fancy acronyms, I call it “awesome.” (It has a few quirks, but they don’t outweigh the usefulness of the service). Here’s how it works: (more…)