Voip phone services

Is your company late to the party?

Are you still struggling with exorbitant phone bills for physical phone lines, paying management fees to specialists to make simple changes to a complicated phone system, or are you and your employees tied to your desk phones beyond all possible reason?  Is your existing VOIP system difficult to manage or not offer the options you need to make your business easy to operate? Ugh! No! You're better than that!

There are some things that are better to purchase and maintain locally.  A phone system is no longer one of those things.  By cloud-basing your phone system, not only will you almost always save money, but you will practically eliminate your phone outages, add features you never even knew you wanted, and make your workforce more flexible and mobile.  Every desk phone you own will become an optional convenience rather than an anchor.

There's no way you want to read an entire presentation with every single benefit or option on my website.  So I'll tell you what I tell all my customers when we're setting up their new VOIP system:  'Try to forget everything you think you know about what a phone system should or should not be able to do.  Then let your imagination run wild on how your business could communicate with customers and each other better, and tell me every idea that pops into your head.  I'll make 98% of them happen with no additional cost.'

Now that I've said that, I'm going to give you more food for thought.  If you already know you want it, you can stop reading now.  If not... here are a few examples to stir your imagination:

Remote / Mobile / Flexible Workforce

This one is a layup:  You have employees that could or should work remotely but communication suffers when they do.  Or you wish employees who typically work in the office but could or should work from home when they're ill with Covid or the flu, recovering from surgery, during maternity/paternity leave, or they (or you) simply deserve the option to not have to drive into work every day to boost morale... but communication suffers when they do.  On top of that your staff endures an absolute communication circus when they try to re-route phone calls during these short-term disruptions to their usual workflow.  So you've tried expensive company cell phone plans, or you've dealt with the lack of professionalism when you transfer a business call that ends up in an employee's private voicemail, among other things.  This is silly now.  With a cloud-based phone system, location is irrelevant.  Cell phone apps, PC-based apps, and the ability to plug a desk-phone in anywhere with internet make this the easiest of easy fixes.  There should be nothing about routing or configuration changes wherever an employee (or yourself) happens to be.  No more chasing people around, or being chased around.  There are even options where users can modify their own personal dial plans, ring groups, find-me/follow-me settings, and more, eliminating the need to bother with phone system management entirely during the day-to-day, no matter where anyone happens to be.

Staying professional while out of the office and/or international

Another easy one:  You're about to putt on the tenth green on Friday afternoon.  Or you're at your child's school program right during their solo.  Or you're at your beloved pet's veterinary appointment to get whatever that thing is that it swallowed out of its vitals and the vet has just walked in.  BUT... your most important client has called the office and isn't happy about something and needs to be managed sooner than later.  What do you do?  Do you grab the call and miss an important moment in your life and/or irritate everyone around you?  Or do you miss the call and let it end up in your personal voicemail where your kids all sang your voicemail greeting a decade ago and you can't bear to replace it with something more professional and then call them back from your personal cell phone, leading to the worst of all travesties... that your customer will always call your personal cell phone forever into the future?  Nope.  You just open the app on your cell phone and call them right back from the office phone number, and as long as the people or pets around you stop screaming for a second, they'll never know you weren't at your desk... but even if the screaming continues, you can help your client and not give away your cell phone number, no matter where you are.  And if you're somewhere even more serious, you can simply silence the ringer like any other call, disable notifications, and/or simply log out of the app so that you're not even bothered with notifications, or many other options to suit your style... and even after your company has tried to reach you on your mobile... the call still ends up in your business voicemail, the phone system will email you a transcribed copy of the voicemail, and your staff doesn't handle the call multiple times if you don't answer.

Business Texting

Not for all businesses, but more common than you'd think:  Your clients communicate best via text.  Your employees respond best to text.  Your clients and your employees have established relationships that don't need to be filtered by a receptionist.  Yet you still make them call your main number and pay a receptionist to answer and transfer those calls, or you make your employees take the time to listen to voicemails and call clients back.  Why?  Previously the reason was that to allow texting between client and employee, you needed to purchase company cell phones or reimburse your employees for their personal cell phones... and then struggle to get the client communication back when your employees moved on, often to a competitor.  Now, you just enable business texting on your existing phone numbers and/or add a direct text-enabled phone number to your existing extensions for a couple of dollars per month and it's easy from there.  Your receptionists' jobs are easier, your clients are responded to more quickly, communication integrity is maintained, and if an employee moves on you just move their number to their replacement and communication resumes without losing the client.  Also, you'll note that this is web-based as well... meaning no international charges whatsoever while you or your employees are out of the country.  I've been using this feature to call and text with my clients for free for almost 3 years while I've been living in New Zealand, using my US phone number.  It's only a tiny bit less functional than native texting on cell phones, keeps it distinct and separate from personal texts, and costs way less money.

Everything Else... all that complicated stuff that drives you and your staff crazy

Last but not least, mostly because I'm tired of typing, not because I'm out of ideas:  You have a wide variety of phone numbers, different sub-businesses where employees need to answer the phone differently, employees wearing different hats, dynamic schedules, a complex network of auto-attendants, a call center spread out all over the globe with people working from home and/or multiple offices, a rotating batch of support agents, or any other number of not-previously-mentioned complicated needs.  Every time you want to make a change you have to call your phone provider and they charge you a fee for every change or take forever to implement it... or even worse, tell you that what you want isn't possible without purchasing some more hardware, or more lines, or reconfiguring your whole setup which will cause a cascade of other issues.  Go cloud based.  With the GoToConnect services I typically recommend and sell, you only pay the monthly subscription per user/device and everything else, including all of the above, is free and easy to configure.  You can configure all of the above and more by yourself with a fairly shallow learning curve in an intuitive web management portal, or you can call me and I'll tweak it for you (usually for free), or you can call GoTo support and their support will help you setup what you need for free.  

So stop being handcuffed or soaked by the old school way of doing phones.  The world moved on years ago.  If you're behind, I'll help you catch up.  I've implemented these phone systems for dozens of clients ranging from single users answering phones for 4 different businesses to single businesses with hundreds of users and everything in between, including a travel agency with a call center split between the US and Costa Rica but answering phone numbers for both in both places.  Not only can I set it up for you and hold your hand through the process, but I've got enough experience seeing the results of a variety of approaches, I can likely shorten your trial-and-error phase with some well-placed recommendations as you try out all your new toys.

Here's how to get started:  Gather up your phone bills, including any you can round up showing how much you pay for hardware, lines, phones, support, and taxes.  Then call me.  I'll grill you for a half-hour or an hour, depending on the complexity, to learn everything I need to make a recommendation.  Then I'll put together a comprehensive quote and we can compare options together.  My success rates:  80% chance that I'll be able to provide a quote that gets you everything you want while saving you a significant amount of money.  18% chance you'll gain all the features while spending about what you're spending now.  2% chance I'll have to ask you if the benefits you'll gain are worth a tiny increase in overall cost.  I have NEVER even had to try to talk someone into a significant price increase.

*Note:  Yes, GoToConnect has a plugin for Microsoft Teams.  It'll do most of what you want, but possibly not everything from within Teams.  It is my understanding that they're expanding their Teams functionality constantly.  I have many customers that use them together with Teams quite happily, and one that wasn't as happy as we'd hoped.  If you have particular interest in these functions, don't hesitate to ask and I'll get concrete answers that address your specific needs when I generate a quote.