VirtualPBX Blog

Get a Toll-Free Number to Present a Professional Image

Posted on December 6, 2018   by Casey Houser

If you don’t yet have a toll-free number for your business, you could be missing a great branding opportunity.

While it’s true that U.S. households are moving away from landline phones in favor of cellular phones, their lack of need for long-distance plans should not color your perception of your own need for a toll-free number.

Sure, individuals can call your local business number for free, from anywhere, on any cellular plan. But can they recognize your local number as easily as 1-800-SKY-DIVE or 1-800-FLO-WERS?

These examples stand out because they’re memorable. If you grab the right vanity phone number, you can make your own business just as memorable.

How to Pick Your Vanity Number

VirtualPBX partners with TollFreeNumbers.com to help you get the perfect toll-free number.

On our partner’s website, you can type in the name or market of your business and find numbers that relate.

Any number you choose will work with the VirtualPBX Business Phone System, and we’ll even waive the porting fee if you get a number from TollFreeNumbers.com.

Your Toll-Free Number Will Work Anywhere

Aside from you new phone number looking cool, it will also be recognizable from anywhere.

Consider what you think of when you see an ordinary out-of-town number like (702) 555-1234. If you live in area code 408 and you see a 702, you know the number isn’t located near you. It’s a turn-off, and it looks unprofessional.

However, a 1-800 number implies that you’re a business, no matter where you use it. It’s basically a free local phone number — just branded to your specifications and portable to anywhere you want to take it.

On any billboard, online marketing campaign, TV spot, or magazine feature, your toll-free number will represent you exactly as you want to be. And any caller can access it for free.

Upgrade Your Marketing

You can also use 1-800 numbers to better track your marketing efforts.

Say you have a marketing campaign taking place on billboards in Dallas, Washington D.C., and Boston. If you use the same number on each billboard, it will be hard to track where people are calling from unless you ask them.

If you have multiple toll-free numbers, though, you can route those inbound calls to specific business representatives who will know, ahead of time, how to address the caller. The VirtualPBX business phone plans let you effectively route calls in a number of ways, including with Advanced Transfers and ACD Queues.

It’s holiday season, so while you’re grabbing a toll-free number for accessibility and marketing purposes, give your business an additional gift from our Refurbished Phones and Hardware Sale. We’re overstocked on many refurbished desk and conference phones, adapters and routers, and computers.

Click the banner below to begin shopping. Don’t wait! Our supply is limited, and the sale closes on December 31st.

Check Out Our Refurbished Phones and Hardware Sale!

Posted on December 4, 2018   by Casey Houser

If you’ve been waiting to purchase hardware for your office, our Refurbished Phones and Hardware Sale could be your chance to save big.

Check out our dozens of desk phones, routers, and computers available for purchase up to 80 percent off retail.

You could save hundreds of dollars on the hardware we’ve made available through this event.

Refurbished Desk and Conference Phones

Our Year-End Phones and Hardware Sale brings you a number of refurbished devices — all restored to their factory conditions.

The overstock from our phone rental program has left us with a number of desk and conference phones, including the Yealink W52P desk phone and Yealink CP920 conference phone models.

You can upgrade your office with hardware that works like new but comes at an extremely reduced price.

Adapters and Routers You Can Own

We’re also full up with the Cisco SPA112 analog phone adapter and several Netgear routers, including similar hardware from brands like Audiocodes.

And don’t miss our few Samsung and Asus Chrome Boxes and Apple Mac Minis. You’ll want to grab those quickly because we only have a few in stock.

Gifts Come Early

Treat your business to an early set of gifts with some new hardware for the office reception or conference room.

Get the party started by clicking the banner below. Happy shopping!

Remote Work Infographic: Coffee Shop Essentials

Posted on November 30, 2018   by Charlie Galaviz

By 2020, 34% of international business leaders believe over 50% of their employees will work remotely.

Accordingly, should companies meet the requests of their employees, the telecommute pendulum will swing closer towards that norm in 2019, and it won’t be just requests to work from home. In a survey of remote professionals, 27.08% say they prefer working from coffee shops over working from home or coworking facilities.

What’s not to love about coffee shops? Free wifi, cost-savings, and the aroma of freshly brewed cups of joe. Consequently, what makes coffee shops great can also make them not so great if you don’t come prepared. With our top 5 essentials, you can maximize your productivity and efficiency at your local coffee house.

Already a customer? You’re in luck! The VirtualPBX Web Phone is included for free with any business phone plan. Take a look at our Adding a Web Phone Guide for easy step-by-step instructions on setup.

Got any remote work best practices for coffee shops? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter!

CIO Applications Chooses VirtualPBX as Top Enterprise Communications Provider

Posted on November 27, 2018   by Casey Houser

CIO Applications, a Silicon Valley IT print publication, has chosen VirtualPBX as one of the Top 25 Enterprise Communications Service Providers for 2018.

This grants us a prominent title among all communications service providers and a full-page feature in the coming issue of CIO’s magazine.

Our CEO’s Take

For the CIO Applications feature, VirtualPBX CEO Paul Hammond commented on our present service offerings:

“We are on a mission to offer the best voice solutions with the utmost attention to customer care,” he said. “We have raised the bar for our performance as a communications service provider with solutions that address the needs of any business, regardless of our size.”

He continued by noting our path for the future:

“We intend to offer another 20 years of service and continue to operate as we always have – with an open office door and a dedicated team of employees ready to meet the ever-changing face of the communications market.”

Our Product Lineup

Our portfolio of products begins, foremost, with our business phone system, Dash. It comes with multiple enterprise-grade features such as Call Recording and Conferencing, Hot Desking, Ring Groups, and an Automated Attendant. Large businesses with hundreds of employees, or startups with only a dedicated few, can take advantage of the best feature set in the industry.

From there, we offer a range of desk phones and conference phones alongside our Softphone App for desktop and mobile and VirtualPBX Mobile service, for native 4G LTE calling.

We have something for every employee – whether they work from home, in an office, or make the majority of their sales while in commute. CIO Applications covered that fact by highlighting both our products and services before focusing on our future endeavors like API Access and Call Recording storage options, which you can see further in the article copy shown here.

Our Dedicated Team

Paul’s praise of our staff only begins to scratch the surface of each individual employee’s dedication to the portfolio we offer.

From our Marketing team to Sales; from Services to Support; and from Product Development to the Management Team, we all put in the hard work necessary to make VirtualPBX a leading medium-size company in a market filled with giants. We create an enterprise-level set of products with the feel personal touch that only a smaller outfit can provide.

This comes across well in the CIO Applications piece that notes our humble beginnings – a basement in San Francisco – and our trajectory from creating the “first commercially-available hosted business phone system” to today. Our distributed workforce of a few dozen employees completes what takes other businesses double the budget and manpower to achieve.

We’re all excited to be recognized in the Top 25 in our market. This award bears that out and gives us reason to keep looking forward.

How Your VoIP Service Reaches 99.999% Uptime

Posted on November 20, 2018   by Casey Houser

At VirtualPBX, we take a lot of pride in our business phone plan features, including our VoIP service uptime, which we advertise as 99.999 percent.

That last digit might seem showy. We don’t mean to brag, though. The final .009 addresses an important issue: we deliver phone system reliability that not every service provider can match.

Our claim of that last digit is anything but simple. We operate six servers across the globe, work with multiple phone carriers, and protect our networks with enterprise-quality firewalls and backups to assure that your phone system is reliable.

99.9 vs 99.99 vs 99.999 Percent

It bears repeating that the figure — 99.999 percent — isn’t meant to be flashy. When you round to that many places past the decimal, you actually see some significant effects.

There are 525,960 minutes in a year. When you break those minutes down by the whole percent, you end up with 5259.6 minutes in each percent. In other words: 525,960 / 100 = 5259.6

This means that, if we only offered 99 percent uptime, you could see outages in your phone system, on average, of 5,259 minutes a year. That’s almost four whole days! It’s clearly unacceptable.

You can extend those calculations to the tens, hundreds, and thousands place by dividing the number of days, respectively, by 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000.

% Uptime	Downtime per year (minutes)
99% Uptime	5259
99.9% Uptime	525
99.99% Uptime	52
99.999% Uptime	5

What we strive for at VirtualPBX is only five minutes per year of downtime. This industry gold standard is extremely difficult to reach, but it’s achievable through a number of efforts.

Global Servers

No VoIP service provider is equipped to properly handle enterprise clients without multiple servers to their name.

VirtualPBX’s global network of servers makes it possible for us to work with clients worldwide. They also assist with our reliability because we can lean on them as fallbacks for when a local outage occurs.

If, for instance, one of our U.S.-based servers experienced a power outage, we could immediately route traffic from that location to another inside the U.S.

Our clients’ calls would still connect because the second server picked up the slack.

Firewalls and Backups

In our servers, we use firewalls to protect malware from getting in, and we use backups to make sure your company information always remains accessible.

Our firewalls provide double-duty – like much of what you see in this article. They help keep the information in our servers safe by protecting them from internet malware and keeping bad actors at bay. They are essential for keeping yours and our data safe so the whole system can function as expected.

Similarly, our backups reach across multiple physical locations to provide a redundancy for both VirtualPBX processes and client information. Our global network gives us the ability to move important data from one secure lockbox to another. Everyone in our ecosystem remains protected and accessible.

Multiple Phone Carriers

As VoIP service provider, we connect calls through internet connections. We work with various phone carriers – think AT&T or Bandwidth – to connect calls to other VoIP devices, smartphones, and landlines.

In fact, the process of connecting calls can get complex, as we discuss in our feature about how VoIP calls use the PSTN.

The way we’re able to hand calls between users is by working with carriers. Our portfolio of relationships with these companies means we can reach phones across the globe, and it also means we can increase our uptime.

We aren’t limited to handing off calls to a single carrier. Therefore, if one of our carriers experiences a problem, we can look to others to help route calls to the proper destinations.

You can read even more about the structure of the public telephone network in our comprehensive guide, What is VoIP?.

Does Your VoIP Service Measure Up?

We maintain and bolster our 99.999 percent reliability by doing everything we can to protect your data. We secure our relationships with carriers and work hard to continue our position as a leading VoIP service provider.

Does your current service provider measure up? If your service isn’t what you expect, it could be time to switch to a better business phone plan.