Why choose a voip phone system for your business as opposed to a traditional landline?
For us at Cardiff Web Design, it came down to the following factors when choosing our phone system.
To give you some background, Cardiff Web Design has operated for a number of years from our homes. Most of the web design was completed by one person, with services being sub contracted out to the team, who also worked from home.
This worked for a number of years but in order for the business to expand, we had to employ people full time. Of course, for this to happen we had to have an office to work together.
Barclays Eagle Labs provided the perfect solution, we share office space with other tech companies and as you would expect the internet service here is extremely fast and reliable. We have routers / repeaters throughout the building at approximately 8 metre intervals.
The mobile phone reception in the building is not so good though. The building is extremely large and the walls are thick, which impedes the mobile signal so mobile calls often drop, suffer from bounce back or are hard to hear.
We needed a landline number to project the right image. The business has changed, we now have a team of people who come in to work together. Customers expect when they are dealing with a company for them to have an office with a phone, and for the calls to be answered by a receptionist. Very often in the past, when we were busy they may not have been answered at all. If this does happen now, at least we can find the call on the central system and respond at a later time.
Having a mobile number on the website for all enquiries was no longer the best way to do business and to communicate between ourselves. An option could be to add several mobile numbers to the website, but we felt this would end up with confusion between ourselves as to who was dealing with what, never mind confusing the clients.
Another issue we have is that as we are all over the internet, this attracts a large amount of spam or canvassing calls, which tie up the mobile and block legitimate callers from being able to contact us.
Having a local 02921 number was a decision which we could no longer put off.
We spoke to BT and several other companies and for us to have our own number we would have had to install a new line into the office, agree an upfront fee and take out a minimum term contract of 12 months or more.
In addition to this, if we wanted to transfer calls between agents, we would need extra lines installed for each agent with the accompanying costs plus we would pay per minute for the transfers between numbers.
The costs were prohibitive, plus the solution wasn’t portable, we would have to get permission from the building managers to have the lines installed, wait for engineers to call and eventually at some point in the future after a lot of expense and inconvenience we may have a system that worked. One of the benefits of our current office space is we are not tied into a contract, leaving us free to relocate if we need to as the business expands. With a fixed phone, there would be more costs, time and engineers involved.
A traditional landline phone for us, was not worth pursuing.
After reviewing the leading VOIP phone system suppliers and talking to clients who used these systems. We choose to go for the Ringcentral system.
This allowed us to set up a main local number for incoming enquiries with no large initial setup cost, just the amount for the lines purchased. We also have additional landline numbers for each user.
We were given a choice of telephone numbers to choose from and I think we choose a good one 02921 050808, and we have consecutive numbers for our extensions for instance if you want to call me directly its 02921 050813, and these are included in the small monthly rental.
We haven’t bothered with a physical handset, at the moment all calls are coming through the Ringcentral app, which is available for Android and iOS so no matter what phone they have, the team can all run the app. In addition to that we can run the system on our laptops.
This can be useful as Ringcentral integrates with most CRM systems, allowing us to initiate the call from the CRM system and therefore track the progress from a central system, that we all now use daily.
We have flexibility on our system, in that we can choose the order in which the phone can ring, Luke can get the call first, then if he doesn’t answer, it will pass to me and if I don’t answer, then it can ring Colin’s phone. We can also opt to have all phones ringing at the same time.
The added bonuses we didn’t expect, which we use on a regular basis are the conference call facilities and video calling which we use to communicate between ourselves and also with clients.
We have the ability to record calls and have advanced call centre functionality such as recording all calls, or recording individual calls. We don’t do this at the moment as we have a legal responsibility to announce call recording on the IVR, but we may well implement this in the future. We can also set up phone groups for specific projects, which includes all facilities previously mentioned plus messaging. Call monitoring is also easy to set up and we can allow certain users to monitor other calls, all easily set up with the intuitive interface.
We are so impressed with the Ringcentral system that we have now become resellers.
We started small and over the last 6 years we have grown. Most of our clients are also small to medium businesses who are also moving up from being mobile only to having their own phone system.
It’s a common request to change the website mobile to a landline as the business expands, we have found the service invaluable and if it works for us, then it will work for you … with our support.
We look forward to sharing our experience with our clients and are happy to advise on improving your website presence and enabling your business to grow. The support we have received from Ringcentral is second to none and with that support we are growing our business.
We look forward to helping your business grow and are happy to share our experiences with you. Most importantly we have the support to enable us to support you. Get in contact to find out more on 02921 050808
Chas