Small Business Phone Systems

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…)