Is your business looking for a Voice Mail Telephone System?

Here are my pros & cons for this voice mail business telephone service:

Pros

1. Their pricing schedule is wonderful. They include minutes in with your package (starting at $9.99), so you don’t have to pay for minutes unless you go over your package allotment.I was initially only looking at their virtual fax service because I may be switching my home number to Magic Jack & if you think about it, most virtual fax services already charge you $10/month, whereas with this full small business voicemail package, you get faxing PLUS all the other features including voicemail messages that come into your email. If you go one level up you get your own toll free fax number.
2. To get additional virtual pbx numbers is only $4.99 per month. You can’t beat that. And their business voicemail system works with local numbers too.
3. They have this really cool controller that you install on your computer & when a call comes in, you can set it up to either accept the phone call, send it to your business voicemail greetings, or just let it ring & eventually it will go to your configured voicemail system. This is exactly what I needed & I couldn’t do this with the other business phone system I used to use called Freedom Voice.
4. You can also use the controller to call out so that your toll free number shows up on the persons call display. This way if you work from home, your home number is never divulged & you don’t have to private caller, which can be a problem because most people don’t pick up a private call. With other phone systems such Freedom Voice, they charge you by the minute to speak on the phone. With Ring Central I never have to worry about minutes.
5. You can even dial overseas using your minutes. I still don’t completely understand how the amounts are calculated even though I had a supervisor explain it to me, but it can be done. I make overseas phone calls all the time as I need to speak to clients, and I still have never gone through all my minutes.
6. Another tool you can use, is using the call controller to speak to a staffer overseas for free. They will need to use their computer (like Skype), but you give them their own extension & then have them download the controller and away you go. This is perfect when you are managing staff and want to speak to them.
7. There are other features that I use with Ring Central such as one that is commonly used with Realtors (Real Estate Agents) and Multi Level Marketing People (I’m neither just so you know). What I did, was I set up 3 extensions just for my offline marketing plan, and then placed a separate toll free number in ads I ran in newspapers. Callers would listen to the professional voicemail greetings I recorded.
8. Ring Central’s interface is HUGE. It’s very clear that they spent a lot of money creating that interface. In my opinion it is a lot better than Freedom Voice’s toll free number pbx service.The only challenge I had, was understanding all that Ring Central has to offer, and getting it set up properly because their staff can misinform you. But saying that, I managed and I’m happy when my small business voice mail system works.
9. They have a lot bigger selection of “music on hold”.
10. You can of course port your current 1-800 toll free number over and while they told me it would take a week or so, it only took 24-36 hours.
11. They are in Canada too for all you Canadian small businesses out there.

Cons

1. Their sales team doesn’t know what they are doing. I was either lied to or misinformed by the sales rep who signed me up & not just about one thing, but about at least 6-10 things. For this reason I went through a lot of stress for the first 2 weeks once I moved over from Freedom Voice because there were so many problems. Even the day I told her to go ahead & sign me up it took her hours to do that & I was left hanging because she went into a meeting and didn’t bother to inform me. So they are either very uneducated about what is going on in their own company, they lie to get the sale, or they have poor communication skills. (or a combination of all of those issues).
2. Once I realized it wasn’t just a simple mistake & she was the problem, I couldn’t even speak to her manager because no one would pick up the phone. It just kept ringing and ringing. After realizing I could only deal with their tech and customer support call center, it took me almost 2 weeks before I finally got in contact with her manager. Until this day I don’t know why because they said they e-mailed him and he said he never got the e-mails. He did compensate me though so I stayed with Ring Central.
3. They don’t let you speak to anyone in the US once you are signed up. They only have their sales team in the US. Their tech support and customer support is all in the Philippines. After encountering so many problems I’ve since wanted to complain about their support team to someone in the US since clearly the ball has been dropped, but I had to pull teeth from the sales manager to get a name of who oversees that area of their business.
   So the bottom line is you can’t easily talk to someone in the States about their call center in the Philippines.
4. First level tech support in the Philippines is terrible. They all give you different opinions or stories. Or it’s clear they don’t know what they are talking about, so I learned very quickly that I have to ask to speak to a manager right away in order to get someone who is smart. And while they are much smarter and I had 4-5 different supervisor’s names and e-mail addresses in my address book so I could get answers quickly every time I e-mailed them with a question or problem, they wouldn’t respond back to me.Finally after the 5th time this happened I lost my temper and threatened to cancel my account.I e-mailed the sales manager again and he had the head supervisor of the Filipino team call me. I used him for support twice when suddenly 2-3 weeks later he was promoted, so now I have someone else. It’s clear there’s just too much moving around at this company, but they seem to have weathered their business problems for years now.I began to understand why no one ever stays put at Ring Central. It is very hard to deal with them because their communication skills and common sense just isn’t there for me and that’s even with management. I have since learned this is an issue even when hiring Filipinos to do work for me.
5. As of September 2014, every time I create a new ticket because no one has responded to my previous ticket, they shut it down claiming it’s a duplicate. I’ve been waiting for 3 weeks now for someone to come onto my computer & upgrade my softphone. They will call & not reach me & then never call back.The last guy who did it took an hour because he didn’t know what he was doing & he had to keep putting me on hold to ask someone else.Their customer service has gotten a lot worse over the years, again, the ONLY reason I continue to use them, is because they don’t have any real competition to speak of who has what I need.
6. As for the quality of the hardware with Ring Central, so far there’s been a few glitches, like people telling me they didn’t hear the beep so they couldn’t leave a message, me pressing a button on the controller and the call not transferring to me, etc.I don’t get a lot of calls so it’s hard to say how often this would happen, but for the most part the online business voicemail system works 98% of the time.

I know it seems like I have a lot of complaints about Ring Central. It did take around a month to get everything set up and I had to understand how the backend of their company works, but for the price I pay and what the system gives me, I’m going to stick with Ring Central.

It is clear they have poor management across the board both in the US and the Philippines, but now that things are set up, I’ll just deal with it, as I shouldn’t have to call tech support all the time anyway and for the most part I don’t.

As of the update to this post on 10-09-11, I have called their tech support maybe once in the last 4 months.

So, if you think  you can deal with the initial stress, their toll free number and voice mail system is DEFINITELY worth it. If you have any questions, just contact me.

Michelle