VOIP. VOIP. VOIP. New Number 614-656-4315
Okay for the last 3 years of having a ‘real’ phone number for the company I have also had a healthy phone bill that I prefer to ignore most months and I usually just close my eyes and send the check. It gets expensive. About a year ago I bought two VOIP phones with plans to hook them up and never got around to until about a month ago. What is cool about them is you can hook them up to any ethernet cable on your network (or any network, anywhere) and direct calls to that phone regardless of where it is. And it costs much less than normal phones as a result of using bandwidth I am pretty much already paying for via our internet service. So anyways, I went through 3 companies trying to get the features and service that I needed and settled on Vocalocity after trying Packet 8 and ViaTalk. Packet8 requires that you use their phones but their interface for setting up the phones and the menus is great. I had already spend 600 on new phones that ended up not working. They said they would work when I signed up. Wrong. Canceled service after 1 week.
ViaTalk was a mess as they never quite allowed me to set up the phones the way I needed them to operate. I needed a menu driven system that would allow extensions to be selected and to have access to a digital voice mail, etc. 2 weeks later I canceled that service as well.
Vocalocity is working out great so far aside from some glitches with existing routers and modems which were supplied by AT&T which I was able to finally resolve. So we have a new number and a fancy menu system that routes calls as selected. It is totally cool. We have a new number too! 614-656-4315. Don’t be scared of the menu system. I am still answering all of the calls and replying to all of the messages and all that fun stuff. I just wanted to be ready to handle the call volume as we grow into needing additional lines, more people and all that ‘big business’ stuff. For real though, the phone system makes Out Motoring sound much bigger than it is. It is pretty much like Alice in Wonderland behind the wall.
VOIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocal. It is the same technology that Vonage uses but in business applications the equipment is a bit more robust and allows for more flexibility to create phone networks that are much more modern and easy to manage than most business phone systems for small business.