Custom VoIP Plans Form Fit Your Business

Posted on June 18, 2019   by Casey Houser

Our new Business Phone Plans meet the needs of 99% of our customers by pairing sets of powerful features with industry-leading prices. For the 1% that need something more, we reserve custom VoIP plans.

What you get with Custom Voice Solutions from VirtualPBX is a phone system built to your exact specifications. The professionals who build our standard plans work directly with your team to design a calling interface that fits you exactly.

Let’s take a look at two distinct examples that call routing could be useful in addressing: 1. Multiple user languages and 2. Pop-up campaigns.

Multiple Customer/Client Languages

The languages your customers speak should not create a barrier between them and your phone service.

You want to make it easy for customers to reach both English- and Spanish-speaking representatives from your organization. Or, for that matter, any language you specify.

We can make that possible by setting up two or more Automated Attendants at the base of your phone system.

How it Works

While a stock VirtualPBX system uses only one Automated Attendant menu to guide callers, a custom VoIP plan can split an initial greeting to many sub-menus.

Initial entry to the Automated Attendant will necessarily include a message to callers asking them to choose a language. This could be similar to the “For English, press 1; Para español, oprima dos” message you’ve probably heard when using other companies’ phone trees.

Our professionals take that choice – 1 for English, 2 for Spanish – and branch to a major column of choices that correspond to the chosen language. Like you can see in the diagram here, your entire organization’s departmental structure can be represented fully in either column.

Each Attendant can be tuned to reach individuals (or departments, using Ring Groups) that are manned by people who speak the language of the caller.

Benefits of This Custom Arrangement

The primary benefits of our bespoke Automated Attendant are oft-mentioned throughout this site. In short, it allows your company to organize itself inside a menu that guides callers to the appropriate person(s) who can help them.

A custom VoIP plan that splits the Attendant into multiple languages doubles down (or maybe triples, quadruples…) on the convenience it offers you and your customers.

While you make sure your staff can create sales and troubleshoot issues in multiple languages, we make sure callers can effectively navigate your company framework. We may even work with partners such as Snap Recordings to create greetings that are fluent and crystal clear. Callers won’t have to struggle through your phone tree because their first language isn’t English.

Furthermore, your customers should then ultimately have a better experience when purchasing your product or troubleshooting a problem because they’ll be matched with someone who shares their native tongue.

Pop-Up, Short-Term Campaigns

A second issue a custom VoIP plan might address is the need for a temporary phone system.

Your need for a political campaign headquarters might last a year and a half. Your trade show could require voice services for six weeks leading up to an event, and then a weekend of intensive call handling before being dismantled until next year.

How It Works

The standard ways to order a VirtualPBX Business Phone System are monthly and yearly. Ordering yearly saves you money because of your commitment to the service, and ordering monthly gives you flexibility in sticking with VirtualPBX through the short or long-term.

Pop-up campaigns, however, don’t exactly fit the mold of a monthly or yearly schedule. These campaigns will last long enough to express commitment to the service, but not so long that yearly plans outpace the campaign’s intention.

You can work with our Sales team to create a custom arrangement that’s right for you. For example, it should be possible to create a phone service for a political campaign that will last five months but could last 20 – depending on its success. And we can create a service specifically for a trade show that will recur yearly, and uses the same phone number and extensions from year to year, but is “paused” or redirected to a simple answering service for when tickets aren’t being taken and shows aren’t in session.

Benefits of This Arrangement

In these cases, our manipulation of time scales lets you focus on your campaign.

You can, of course, add custom features to your system, like advanced transferring of calls based on caller location or time spent on hold, moving calls to Ring Groups based on those possibilities. But in the meantime, we can adjust the duration and state of your phone system based exactly on your needs as a group.

You don’t need to worry about paying for service for months when you won’t use it. You can take heart that your phone numbers will be preserved from year to year.

Make Your Own Custom VoIP Plans

There are too many situations to cover here that custom VoIP plans might address.

If you’re in the situation where you’re comparing our Plans and thinking, “This doesn’t quite fit what I need,” it’s time to talk to us about a custom arrangement. A quick discussion with our Sales department can match your needs with our capabilities.

Give us a call, email, or web chat to get the discussion started.

Private Call Recording Storage on VirtualPBX Enterprise

Posted on June 11, 2019   by Casey Houser

One of the most exciting recent developments in our Business Phone Plans is the addition of private call recording storage.

We’ve now made it possible for all Advanced, Enterprise, and Ultimate customers to send their call recordings directly to Google Drive or Amazon S3 storage. This helps them protect their data and gain a greater amount of storage than is available in bespoke VirtualPBX.

If you’re thinking about purchasing an Enterprise plan, read further for a quick look at the benefits private storage can provide. And if you’ve already become one of our customers, check out our Private External Storage beta test to become an early adopter of this feature.

Direct to Personal Storage

When you choose to use Google Drive or Amazon S3 as your enterprise storage location, you will bypass the included storage in your VirtualPBX account. This can help you avoid storage limits and make it easier to manipulate or transfers those files.

Data Limits

By default, all Enterprise users get 1 GB of storage for their call recordings. This cap can be expanded with the purchase of additional storage at only $4.99 per gigabyte.

How easy it is to fill that storage capacity depends on the number of recordings you complete. Consider the following chart that shows how many minutes you can record per megabyte and gigabyte.

What this means is that a single individual could record months’ worth of 1-minute calls before reaching the limit. However, a company of 50+ employees could reach a 1 GB cap much more easily.

If you find that using your own servers is a better choice, we want to give you that option.

Easy Manipulation and Transfer

Although we give all our customers the ability to download their call recordings, your own desire for manipulation of files may need a different setup.

When your files are directed to call recording storage in Google or Amazon, they don’t touch VirtualPBX servers. They’re moved immediately to those other platforms where you can handle them as necessary.

This could make it easier for you to store recordings in multiple folders. It could also make batch manipulation easier – a benefit for companies with a large call volume.

Our Enterprise Plan is meant to reach larger businesses. That said, the largest of that group could see a boost in their productivity and efficiency when storing recordings directly on their external accounts.

Privacy

We also hope to offer you the reality of data privacy when it comes to call recording storage.

As it has been mentioned, when you choose Google or Amazon as your storage location, you bypass VirtualPBX servers.

This means that we never store your recordings permanently on our servers. You don’t have delete them or move them manually because they’re never in our possession for longer than it takes to automatically transfer them to your personal storage.

If you have privacy requirements for your own company or for your market, using private storage could help you stay aligned with those directives.

Manage Your Call Recording Storage

If you’re interested in private call recording storage, look no further than VirtualPBX Business Phone Plans.

Our Enterprise plan reaches businesses with significant numbers of employees by providing features such as ACD Queues access, Call Recording, Webhooks, and integration with CRM software like Salesforce.

Take control of your call recordings by using Enterprise as the only voice service you need. We offer calling and recording in a single bundle, so there’s no external service to purchase or configure. It all works together, and we’re excited to have you join us.

Dynamic Call Routing With ACD Queues on VirtualPBX Advanced

Posted on June 6, 2019   by Casey Houser

Midsize and large business are labeled as such because of their product output and number of employees. They could also be labeled that way because of their inbound call volume, which is why we offer dynamic call routing through ACD Queues on our VirtualPBX Advanced plan.

On the Advanced plan, businesses can add as many queues as they need to their plan. ACD Queues work as an extension to the functionality of the Auto Attendant and offer intelligent call routing based on criteria such as the person who’s the most idle or who has taken the least number of calls.

Queues give administrators fine-grained control over their inbound call traffic by assuring that callers will reach agents in a timely manner and calls will be distributed evenly among a crew.

Let’s take a look at the benefits administrators can gain with dynamic call routing at larger businesses.

Administration on Autopilot

Think back, once more, to your Automated Attendant. It handles your inbound calls by leading customers through a phone tree to reach the proper department.

Callers will reach Sales or Support like they intend, but from there it becomes less exact. If you have 20 Support agents, who will pick up the phone?

Auto Attendant can lead callers to the proper starting place – like a collection of agents in a department. ACD Queues makes sure agents receive calls in an ordered manner. They comprise the autopilot that is your call routing system.

Even Call Distribution

Business administrators can assign individuals to an ACD Queue for intelligent distribution of calls, including:

• Round Robin for random call distribution
• Least Calls to reach an agent who’s been offered the fewest number of calls
• Least Offers to reach the agent who has answered the fewest number of calls
• Most Idle to reach the agent who hasn’t answered a call for the longest period of time

Administration Failsafes

Then phone system admins can make sure their dynamic call routing uses failsafes to keep the autopilot on track.

In particular, they can set and define:

• Escalation Queue to define an alternate queue for when the primary queue is busy
• Wrap Up Time to define a period of time between when an agent ends a call and must start another
• Queue Timeout for defining how long a caller will wait before entering an escalation queue or voicemail
• Agent Connect Timeout to set the length of time a call will wait for an agent to answer

Altogether, these controls and settings make sure businesses can accept inbound calls in a manner that suits them. Whether they want to manage 20 agents or simply handle multiple voicemail boxes in a more intelligent manner, ACD Queues steps forward.

Dynamic Call Routing for Larger Businesses

Why did we decide to offer ACD Queues as a default option for our new Advanced plan?

Simply put: This is the group that needs it most. Queues of this fashion aren’t something that would benefit entrepreneurs or small businesses.

Businesses can add a queue to their Advanced plan for only $39.99 per month. Additional queues can be added for the same amount. And any users on a business’s plan can be listed as an agent in any queue.

A Matter of Volume

Larger businesses accept a number of demands that smaller outfits don’t have to contend with. Midsize and large businesses hire dozens, maybe hundreds, of employees to deal with a range of issues, including specifically handling customer concerns.

That employee volume – and more salient, that expected call volume – doesn’t exist for single-person shops. The smallest of businesses find success in much smaller quantities of products, customers, and calls. Therefore, they don’t yet reach the volumes that ACD Queues were built to handle.

Try For Yourself

If you’re a midsize-or-larger firm that wants a new phone system, you can try Advanced in a Free Trial. Test drive all the features of the plan before you decide to purchase.

And until midnight on June 30, 2019, you can get an extra 10% off the purchase of any VirtualPBX Phone Plan. Click the banner below to accept your discount and get started.

Switch to VoIP, Get Unlimited Calling on VirtualPBX Essentials

Posted on June 4, 2019   by Casey Houser

Businesses don’t want limitations placed on them. They want growth; unlimited reach. This is why, with our new VirtualPBX Essentials phone plan, businesses can switch to VoIP and get unlimited calling.

Essentials takes aim at small and midsize businesses with its plan features, including unlimited phone calls and digital faxing, alongside all other VirtualPBX standard features. It makes its mark, however, by being our most economical plan with unlimited calling within the continuous U.S.

Small outfits can turn to VoIP and unlimited calling to meet their sales goals in early growth stages. They can accept as many calls as necessary to provide ongoing customer support. All it requires is a simple switch to Essentials.

Sales With Unlimited Minutes

While entrepreneurs begin their days thinking about gathering a base of customers, small and midsize businesses want to retain their existing base and grow.

Local retail shops and distributed, remote workforces often take to cold calling and following up with leads lists to expand their bases of customers. They can only do this with a collection of calling minutes equal or greater to their inbound and outbound volume.

How’s unlimited sound for a matching of call volume?

The VirtualPBX Essentials plan offers both unlimited calling – as in unlimited minutes – and unlimited phone calls within that set of minutes.

A five-person boutique can handle customers calls throughout the day, in addition to serving walk-ins, without having to worry about exceeding a cap. Meanwhile, a remote team of 20 can do nothing but call, call, call to leads lists in order to ship more units of its product.

Unlimited calling makes this not only possible, but removes stress from the equation.

Customer Support With Unlimited Minutes

Sales often takes the form of outbound calling. This is especially true when businesses employ a cold calling campaign.

Customer support, however, is primarily an inbound effort where employees wait for customers to call them.

What would happen to the small businesses or midsize firms if their calling minutes ran out? It could be a disaster if, poof, the ability to make calls suddenly stopped. And it could create sticker shock at the end of the month if overage charges blanketed their phone bills.

Essentials VoIP offers unlimited minutes to handle inbound support just as well as it manages outbound dials. Business can accept calls from within the contiguous U.S. for all the users in their support staff. Whether it’s an over-worked team of one on a single desk phone or a polished set of 10 professionals on Web Phones, neither will incur overages or surprises just for doing their jobs.

Get Your Own Unlimited Calling

The new VirtualPBX Business Phone Plans have been designed to meet the needs of varying sizes of operations.

Here, considering Essentials, small and midsize businesses can take advantage of the cost savings VoIP and unlimited calling affords them. No more overage charges, and no more worrying about exceeding the calling limits of their plans.

If you haven’t yet taken a look at a hosted phone system or want to switch from your current provider, compare the VirtualPBX Phone Plans in your search. Get the minutes you need at a cost that works, and consider Essentials as a first step in the future of your sales and customer support goals.

5 Benefits of the New Dash Phone Plans

Posted on May 31, 2019   by Charlie Galaviz

Tired of choosing between business telephone system savings or advanced features? We hear you loud and clear.

The all-new Dash Business Phone Plans features the best of both worlds – so you don’t have to settle.

While we love cutting thousands of phone bills in half, our primary focus has always been to empower businesses by delivering the most innovative technologies to your office.

How much power can one phone system carry? Let’s examine five benefits of the all-new Dash Business Phone Plans.

Sign up your team – it’s FREE

Ready to explore what Dash has to offer? Prospective customers can sign up for a 14-Day Free Trial or call 888.825.0800 to learn more.