General Consultant Discussion

VOIP Solutions and RingCentral. Just want to let you know we became a 'referral partner' of RingCentral. We embarked on a phone system search about 2 years ago as our in house system was getting dated and the complexity of having changes made and lack of mobile functionality was hurting us, especially with so many remote employees now. We initially purchased Vocalocity which was then acquired by Vonage..2 words...It Sucked! The feature set was strong, but the lag was horrible. You couldn't have a professional business conversation with the service. They would constantly blame our router which was an almost new SonicWall, $2,500 router. We then did a 30 day test drive (after our Vocalocity fiasco) with RingCentral and loved it. We now have it deployed to about 28 devices for about 6 months. About half in our office using PolyCom handsets (and 2 conference room phones) and the rest are handsets at remote employee homes, or they are using the Windows/Mac Application. They also have a full functioned IOS & Android app with virtually all the same functionality. One of the best things is that every user gets their own 'gotomeeting' like web conferencing tool. At the basic subscription level you can have up to 4 people in the conference. At the middle subscription ($10 more per month) you get up to 25 people in the conference. RingCentral was founded by the same team that founded WebEx so they know how to do remote video & desktop screensharing right. Each user also gets their own dedicated reservationless conference call number with excellent low lag performance for up to 100 users. All users can record conversations if they want. WIth the mid-tier service level you can set it to record all conversations. Cost varies based on quantity, commitment, service level etc, but typically between $23 and $35 per month per user. It's 100% cloud based so no servers or other equipment needed in the office beyond handsets which you don't even need if you use the PC or mobile device. The nice thing is if you and/or your employees want to keep people's personal cell phone numbers away from clients, but want clients to be able to reach your team wherever they are, when you put RingCentral on your cell phone, it's almost like giving it a 'split personality' where the employee can use it as their own personal cell phone yet send and receive calls, texts & faxes all with your business identity. This way you can avoid buying employee's company phones and just give them a stipend towards their data plan or something. Full disclosure, we make a small commission on every system we refer but we help you get pricing, explain features etc. RingCentral will walk you through the implementation process. There are dozens of amazing features. One example is call flip where you start a conversation on your handset in the office. Now say you have to run out to a client but want to continue the call. You hit a hotkey and now your cell phone rings instantly. You pick up and now are continued in the call from your cell and can walk out the door to your car. There are too many others get into here. If you are interested, please don't fill out an info form on their site (as they have their own direct sales people). I'll take care of it. The pricing to you is identical either way. Just email or PM me.

Interesting. Thanks Mark.

Good info - I forwarded it to the main office

Is there a minimum (we would only have 3 people)? Can numbers be ported to it? How does it work if there are only people working from home, no ""office""? Can you send faxes?

http://www.ringcentral.com/office/plansandpricing.html\

@PhilMcIntosh You can even have 1 user. Yes, porting your numbers is part of the setup process. Every 'number'/'seat' you have also acts as a fax sender and receiver. The system includes a powerful, visual drag and drop IVR (Interactive Voice Response) editor to setup your voicemail and other stuff such as 'press 1 for sales, press 2 for support' etc. It even supports groups so if you have 2 people on today to handle phone support, it can ring both at once or go in sequence until somebody picks up. If both are on the line, it can go into a hold queue. THey have integrations to ZenDesk, Google Apps, Chrome, Salesforce and a bunch of other stuff. When somebody calls you they get a standard message, a special ring, or a custom message while it tries your various devices/numbers for you and while its doing that its listening for a fax tone. If it hears that it automatically receives the fax and sends it to your app and/or as an email attachment. You can send faxes via email or via the desktop or mobile app.