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.

VirtualPBX Basic – Phone Service for Entrepreneurs

Posted on May 28, 2019   by Casey Houser

Our recent release of new Business Phone Plans had us consider what types of features fit best with the smallest of companies. The answer for single-person shops – our phone service for entrepreneurs – is VirtualPBX Basic.

While no single phone plan works exclusively for a single group, we believe entrepreneurs can benefit greatly from our most economical package. Weighing in below $20 per month, Basic offers users powerful features like audio conferencing and voicemail delivery to email, alongside 500 minutes of calling to numbers in the continental U.S.

We know entrepreneurs don’t have a lot of extra cash. They’re bootstrapping their way to the top. Now they can grab Basic for less than their lunch bill at the weekly networking meeting.

Audio Conferencing

Often, it’s necessary for startups to complete group calls with investors and clients.

The easier it is for entrepreneurs to set up multi-user calls, the more professional they’ll look. This can make a great first impression on the stakeholders and initial customers businesses will see in their early days.

Those first impressions build the foundation for future growth and influence locally and outside a business’s community.

500 Minutes

Growth doesn’t just occur in an entrepreneur’s home town.

A phone service for entrepreneurs that offers audio conferencing, but doesn’t allow those conferences to reach outside city limits, would be useless. The growth an individual creates through their conferences should extend throughout the country.

Our offering of 500 plan minutes in Basic lets entrepreneurs make contact with anyone in the contiguous U.S. Whether their setting up a business meeting or following up with customer service, they can reach parties anywhere they need.

And when entrepreneurs outpace their plan with more call time, they can always upgrade or see only a modest per-minute fee for additional minutes. Neither will break the bank, but both will let them continue to grow.

Voicemail to Email

One of the most frustrating aspects of our digital world is that we have single applications for everything.

Email sits separate from phone, which is separate from web chat, invoicing software, website management, and databases. And you need all of them to run your business effectively.

We’ve done our part to connect email and voicemail. With Basic, you can have your voicemails automatically delivered to your inbox as soon as they arrive.

Receive notifications like you would normally, and play messages from within your browser. There’s no need to navigate the VirtualPBX dashboard. It’s one step toward a simpler, more efficient business life.

Grab Your Phone Service for Entrepreneurs

If you’re an entrepreneur and need a cost-effective but powerful phone service, using Basic can let you separate your personal phone contacts from your business contacts. Basic can be used through the VirtualPBX Web Phone and any other device, including the VirtualPBX Softphone to run on your smartphone.

Give it a test run with a 14-Day Free Trial that includes full access to all the features available on the plan.

New VirtualPBX Dash Plans Are Live

Posted on May 21, 2019   by Casey Houser

The past several months at VirtualPBX have been alight with activity as we’ve refined our new Dash Plans.

Now the day has arrived, and we’re excited to offer a new set of Business Phone Plans: Basic, Essentials, Advanced, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

This change, from three plans to five, better matches our business customers to calling features. All our new clients can expect to pay only for the features they need, whether they’re a single entrepreneur or global enterprise.

Included Features for All Businesses

Our primary goal with this move is to better address business needs. Therefore, while our set of available options may have changed, we still offer a collection of stock features that are included with every plan.

VirtualPBX CEO Paul Hammond explained that “every customer will continue to receive the same standard of 24/7 customer service and professional care we place behind all the work we do. Each plan begins with a free 14-day trial with no obligation to buy.”

Well-known features like Unlimited VoIP Minutes between system users, Ring Groups, Auto Attendant, Voicemail, Audio Conferencing, and use of the VirtualPBX Web Phone will come standard with every plan. All customers will also get at least one phone number with their signup.

The New Breakdown

“Our new Basic and Essentials packages reach the smallest of businesses, including startups and entrepreneurs,” Hammond continued. “Advanced, Enterprise, and Ultimate give more expansive options to midsize outfits and enterprises.”

Our new breakdown of plans offers its respective feature sets as follows:

• Basic starts customers with 500 minutes of U.S. calling and support for any desk phone or smartphone they wish to use on an account.
• Essentials includes unlimited U.S. calling, 500 toll-free minutes for use with an 800 number, and access to Digital Faxing.
• Advanced upgrades customers to 1,000 toll-free minutes and adds access to ACD Queues, Call Recording, and Webhooks.
• Enterprise’s 2,500 toll-free minutes stands alongside Private Storage for call recordings, access to the VirtualPBX API, and use of VirtualPBX Servers for dual use of Dash and VirtualPBX SIP Trunking.
• Ultimate joins 10,000 toll-free minutes with CRM Integration and access to Priority Customer Support.

Building Upon Each Other

Together, the new plans work like stair steps. Each successive plan uses the VirtualPBX feature set to build upon the last.

Basic provides the foundation with all the included base features. Then Essentials includes every feature Basic offers while increasing its toll-free minutes.

Advanced includes everything in Essentials. Enterprise includes everything in Advanced. And Ultimate includes everything in Enterprise.

Customers can expect to find plans that are priced better to fit their needs as organizations. While many enterprises will want access to the API offered in the Enterprise plan, entrepreneurs can do well with base features and a set collection of calling minutes.

We hope every size business can get what it’s looking for. Our new plans mean to work better for everyone, and we look forward to feedback on this company-wide change.