Tag Archives: RingCentral Inc.

About 1692 days ago Telecom and Wireless

Tech Talk: Marshmallow Maker Unifies Communications

To Your Heart’s Content, of Sherman Oaks, Calif., maker of Plush Puffs Gourmet Marshmallows, has been growing quickly in the four years since launching. Vice President Justin Leavens tells IncTechnology.com that unified communications helped the business better channel customer contacts and unify a company that is primarily staffed by part-timers who may need the flexibility to work from home. Elizabeth Wasserman: Tell us a little about how you started marketing gourmet marshmallows. Justin Leavens: We started four years ago making gourmet marshmallows. We did it first on a small scale and sold to local coffee shops and friends and family and then we started to expand, selling to specialty food stores and coffee shops all over the U.S. and some international locations. We have two full-time employees and four part-time office staff to do sales and office support. But we’ve been growing a lot in the past few years. Wasserman: How have your technology needs changed as the business has grown? Leavens: When we started, the volume of orders was low enough that we could almost be paper based and use QuickBooks for the accounting. We knew who our customers were and we were doing a lot of hand delivering so it was very straight forward. As we started to do some marketing and expand, we obviously had a lot more information to deal with — a lot more customers, a lot more leads to follow up on. We were doing trade shows. Just the volume of work increased. Being a small business with a small office, we had to find ways to make our business as flexible as possible in order to keep growing. One of the things we did was build customer business software that would work either from within our office or our employees’ homes. We also needed a phone system that would support that same kind of organization. Wasserman: What type of phone system did you choose? Leavens: We wanted a phone system that presented our customers with a unified look at our company. Because we had part time people we wanted to make sure that when a customer called up, they would always be able to get in touch with somebody, whether it was the person they originally called or not. The people who answered the phones may not be the ones working in the office that day. We thought about going the route of using cell phones and individual numbers. But it didn’t make sense to us in terms of making sure the customer got the assistance they needed. I did a little research on phone services. I had used a Vonage line in the past. I knew that VoIP was a realistic technology to use. But I wanted something more. I wanted a system that could help us manage our inbound calls to multiple locations. I found RingCentral and gave them a try. They had a 30-day test at the time. I really liked the way that I was able to set up our organization fairly quickly and easily online. I was able to add extensions for various functions, add informational mailboxes that had our company address, fax number, instructions — things our customers could get even if they called us off hours. Wasserman: Many small businesses want to appear bigger than they are, is that what you were trying to do? Leavens: What we wanted to look like was professional because we’re a business. We’re a small business but we want to work with big businesses. Big businesses are not going to tolerate not being able to get in touch with someone. Wasserman: How does it work? Leavens: You can do the recording online or over the phone. Essentially what it let me do was set up individual extensions and voice mail boxes for the people we wanted to have separate voice mails. Most importantly, it less us set up the incoming call behavior so that during the work day, someone who needs to get in touch with somebody as soon as possible was most likely to get their call answered. Someone who hits a voice tree and hits zero can have that call ring simultaneously at multiple locations so that anybody who might be available to answer that call could grab it and make sure that call got answered. Customer service is important to growth and it’s important to us.

About 1875 days ago Telecom and Wireless

Message Pending: Unified Communications

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For Sunny Trinh and his colleagues at 9 Fish Surfboards, in Santa Monica, Calif., a day at the beach qualifies as product research. The problem is, with four co-owners and two minority partners, sometimes everyone’s out riding the waves. “We sort of have office hours,” Trinh says. “But being surfers, sometimes none of us are in the office.” And when customers called with orders or questions, there was no one to pick up the phone. Trinh went searching for solutions online, and wound up selecting RingCentral, a virtual phone system with several key features to help 9 Fish run its business more efficiently. “Now, when someone calls our 877 number, it gets forwarded to several cell phones,” he says. “Whoever’s available can answer.” In addition, Trinh says, “We can get voicemails e-mailed to us. Another nice feature is Internet fax: we can get faxes anywhere without worrying about being near a fax machine, and send Word or Acrobat documents as faxes direct from our computers.” Even better, he says, incoming faxes arrive as PDF documents, which the surfers can read directly on their cell phones, and easily forward to anyone else who needs them. Bringing it all together For small companies like 9 Fish, outsourced unified communications systems such as RingCentral can help make a frequently empty office run like a big one where there’s always staff on hand and the fax machine is always humming. And that’s just the beginning. “Unified communications is an attempt to take all these different communications we use — voice, e-mail, instant message, video mail, conferencing and videoconferencing, and make them easier to understand and easier to work with,” says Greg Brashier, vice president of marketing at VirtualPBX, a unified communications provider. So far, he says, unified communications technology has tended to center around phone service, as RingCentral and VirtualPBX do, or around e-mail, as Microsoft’s Unified Communications efforts do. In time, he believes the channels will completely converge. In the meanwhile, the best strategy is to evaluate which of unified communications’ capabilities can contribute the most to your business and select accordingly. Here are some of the most powerful features: 1. Find you wherever you are. Unified communications systems can try several numbers, simultaneously, or one after another. That means whether you’re in your office, your living room, or out somewhere with a cell phone, the call will reach you. 2. Find whoever is available. A phone call can go out to a group of people simultaneously, as it does for 9 Fish. Or it can work in a queue. “Suppose you have a sales department with five people: a vice president, two trainees and two really good sellers,” Brashier says. “You can set up the system to try whichever of them is available, not on the phone, not out of the office and not away from their desks, in the order that you select, for instance the two top sellers, then the interns, then the VP.” 3. Make sure you get the message. If you don’t answer any of your various phones or cell phone, a good unified communications system will route the call to one central voicemail where you can easily retrieve it. And it will give you a variety of options for doing so: by e-mail or a text message, via a website, or by the traditional method of phoning in and listening. “You do it the way you want,” Brashier says. 4. Manage faxes from your computer, cell phone or handheld. If you send and receive a lot of faxes, unified communications can simplify your work by routing the faxes to and from your computer, cell phone or handheld device, without ever needing to bother with a fax machine. You can also post the fax on the Web as a PDF document, for others to access as they need. 5. Integrate with other applications. Right now, Brashier says, VirtualPBX integrates with an iGoogle gadget that will display the number of the person calling when your phone rings. And the company plans other integrations as well. “We’re working on an interface that will automatically open a CRM package when the phone rings, identify the caller and open his or her account history,” Brashier says. Whoever answers the call will do so with the relevant information already displayed. All for one and one for all Do all companies need unified communications systems? No, and if all you really want is a phone system, there are more affordable ways to get one, Brashier notes. “If you have, say, 100 people in one location, it’s more cost-effective in the long run to buy a hardware PBX, and keep faxes and e-mails separate,” he says. “Although, that will change as hosted VoIP systems develop.” In the meantime, Trinh advises carefully evaluating communications needs before you buy. “Cash flow is critical for most small companies, so don’t waste money on features you don’t need,” he says. In his case, he adds, the system 9 Fish chose precisely fits their needs. “We use most of the features we have available, and the cost is quite reasonable,” he says. And, it lets 9 Fish’s owners run their business exactly the way they want to. “Now we can get an order and take care of it while we’re at the beach. We can run our business from the beach.” That makes all the difference, he says. After all, wanting to stay surfers was what inspired them to start 9 Fish in the first place. SIDEBAR: Unified Communications Providers: Here are some of the unified communications providers available today: RingCentral – This affordable solution offers a wide range of features, including fax-back, real-time call control, click-to-call, and many others. Virtual PBX – Offers many business-directed features, such as queuing and routing based on skills, dynamic operator assignment (the “operator” can be rotated within a group of people) and conferencing. Microsoft Unified Communications – Microsoft combines Office Communications Server, Office Live Communicator, Exchange Server and Office Live Meeting to create a unified communications system that includes VoIP but centers around Exchange. GrandCentral – Google acquired this popular unified communications service in July 2007. Officially, the new Google version of the service is still in beta and its initial offering of limited invitations was used up at this writing. You can, however, “reserve” a number when they become available again.

About 2392 days ago Telecom and Wireless

A Wealth of Telecom Choices

The choices for business telephone services have exploded in the past few years.  What’s more, some of these choices represent completely new product categories that did not even exist until recently.  If you are baffled by all the choices, trust me, you’re not alone. I am going to attempt to cut through the confusion and give you a quick reference guide explaining the differences in some of the most common telephony choices and when and how to use them in your business. Let’s take a look: Landline telephones — Traditional landline telephones once were the only choice we had. Today, landline phone service is just the starting point. My take:  Traditional landline service is still the basic telephony service of choice for most businesses, due to its reliability, sound quality and relative ease of getting started.  Competition from new telephony alternatives like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is driving down the cost of business landlines in many parts of the country. Shop around. Look especially at providers such as AT&T that also offer wireless services. They can bundle wireless and landline services into one cost-effective package, along with convenience features such as unified messaging (the ability to check voicemails from landline and wireless phones in one place). Skype — Skype, which is owned by eBay, is a service that lets you make calls for free over the Internet to someone who also has downloaded the Skype software. But it’s even more versatile: For 2.1 cents per minute (currently free within the U.S. and Canada), you can call individuals who do not have Skype but who use landlines or wireless phones (called SkypeOut). And you can receive calls from individuals who call you from their landline or wireless phones (called SkypeIn).  My take:  Skype is a dirt-cheap long distance substitute, especially well-suited for staying in touch with friends and family internationally. Business use of Skype is also increasing, especially among Web-savvy solo entrepreneurs and microbusinesses on tight budgets.  However, Skype is not a complete replacement for traditional telephone service because it does not support emergency 911 calling. Best use for Skype: Use it selectively to hold down long distance costs. VoIP — VoIP lets you make calls over a broadband Internet connection instead of over traditional telephone lines. Options range from low-cost packaged solutions such as Vonage, which currently offers a small business package with unlimited local and long distance calling for under $50 per month, all the way up to sophisticated IP phone systems that require pricey hardware.  Even traditional phone companies, pressured by the competition, are offering VOIP packages. My take: VOIP gives you a large degree of control over your phone system, letting you reconfigure it quickly and easily to accommodate new hires or changes. VOIP also can coordinate employees in multiple locations under a single phone system. Low-end packages run off the same broadband connection you use for Internet access, and can lead to sound quality issues. Mid-range and higher solutions use private IP connections. Wireless phones – Will the need to count wireless minutes become a thing of the past? Today’s wireless offerings, with unlimited night and weekend plans, calling circles, and rollover policies are inching us closer to that day.   My take:  An increasing number of solo entrepreneurs are going 100 percent wireless. They are eliminating landlines altogether in favor of wireless as their primary phone. Most likely, though, this is not a practical alternative unless you are a consultant or other sole proprietor. For businesses larger than one person, wireless phones are a supplement to the main telephone system, albeit an important, even indispensable one.  PDAs –  Personal digital assistants, palmtops and the latest term-du-jour, smartphones, let you make phone calls like standard wireless phones. Compared with standard wireless phones, these devices add many more functions and features, including larger screens and sometimes typewriter-like keypads. Blackberry and Treo are well-known brands.  My take:  These devices are the tool of choice if you regularly need access to e-mails, documents, or calendars while out of the office. Remember, while it may be possible to send and receive e-mails on a standard wireless phone, it’s agonizingly cumbersome — and who wants to peer at e-mail on a tiny one-inch screen? A PDA or smartphone is a far better choice. Plus, on business trips, a PDA that slips into your pocket or purse can even replace a laptop-that-feels-like-100-pounds-by-the-time-you-get-to-the-airport-gate. Just don’t become addicted to checking messages on your Crackberry, er, Blackberry, and commit a business faux pas, like checking your e-mail in an important meeting with a customer.    Virtual switchboard and voicemail services – In the past few years a whole new category of telephony service has entered the picture. These new software-based services provide a menu of options to beef up your existing phone system: central automated attendant, advanced voicemail features, conference calling, toll-free numbers, fax-to-e-mail, voice-to-e-mail, customized on-hold messages, and more. These new services are layered on top off — not in place of — basic phone connectivity. They work with landlines, wireless, and/or VOIP phones and require no extra hardware. GotVMail,  RingCentral, and Freedom800 are three brands in this space. My take:  For a low monthly fee (as little as $10) these services can make your small business sound bigger and more professional. The services are excellent for businesses with employees and offices in multiple locales, giving the ability to seamlessly transfer calls and forward messages among them. And it’s all invisible to the caller, who does not know what location employees may be speaking from.    With all the choices available today, you can have a more robust telephone presence at a lower cost than most of us would have dreamed possible a decade ago. These alternatives can keep the cost of doing business down and make telecommunications services available to employees throughout your company, no matter where they are, but it is a decision that you, as a small business owner, must make on a case-by-case basis. I think the overall benefits outweigh the risks. Don’t be afraid to go for it. Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.

About 2545 days ago Telecom and Wireless

VoIP Comes Calling

If you haven’t yet heard of VoIP–voice over Internet protocol–you’re probably still using a rotary phone. The phenomenon of running phone calls over an Internet connection, through upstart telecom providers such as Vonage, Skype, and Packet8, is growing like mad. There were more than 4.5 million VoIP users in the U.S. last year, and that number will double this year, according to International Data Corp. But while VoIP is a lot less expensive than old-fashioned phone calls, the service hasn’t always been so good, and there’s been a paucity of features designed specifically for small businesses. Fortunately, VoIP is growing up. Many long-standing concerns–having to do with reliability, sound quality, convenience–have finally been addressed. And scores of new products now make Internet phone systems more powerful than landlines. Here are the six we like best. Best for… The paranoid Zfone Cool features: VoIP calls are routed over the Internet, which means they can be hacked just like e-mails. That’s not a huge problem yet, but such mischief is inevitable, says e-mail encryption pioneer Phil Zimmermann, creator of Zfone. The software, which is available for free download, encrypts and secures your VoIP communications; the only catch is that the person you’re calling also has to have it. In action: Dan Kohn runs FlyDash.com, a website for frequent fliers, without a regular phone, opting instead for his cell phone and a VoIP service on his laptop. Kohn says he’s not paranoid, but he hates the idea of some hacker being able to eavesdrop on his conversations. So when he heard about Zfone, he knew he had to have it. He got it up and running in 10 minutes and has convinced a number of business associates to download it so that his conversations with them will be unhackable. Price: Free Best for… Road warriors BroadSoft Cool features: With BroadSoft, the office is never far away. The system can ring up to 10 numbers simultaneously; in other words, if someone calls your office and you’re not there, the system will ring your home, cell, car, and any other number you have. It also enables your cell phone to work like an office phone–you can transfer calls to colleagues and connect to co-workers just by dialing their extensions. In action: Business trips were always a hassle for Cash Doye, mostly because Doye, the CEO of Denver-based NewPrime Home Loans, hates being out of the loop. Checking voice mail a few times an hour was a pain, as was ensuring that everyone knew to call his mobile rather than his office phone. He recently ditched his traditional office phone system for BroadSoft’s Mobile PBX. He felt the difference immediately. He was on a business trip in Florida, for example, when a potential investor rang his office; instead of putting the call into voice mail, the system rang his other numbers. Doye took the call and answered the investor’s questions on the spot. “He was operating with me as if I was still in the office,” Doye says. Price: About $40 per user per month (includes local and long-distance calls) Best for… Replacing the receptionist Iotum Cool features: Iotum’s software lets your phone know which calls you want to take and which you don’t. It also takes the pain out of setting up conference calls by ringing all participants automatically. In action: Ray Vilis was in a sales meeting when his cell phone started ringing. Damn, he thought to himself, as he mumbled an embarrassed apology. Vilis, vice president of product management and business development for Versatel Networks, doesn’t have that problem anymore. Vilis uses Iotum to manage his calls. It monitors his calendar and automatically knows not to ring any of his six phone numbers if he’s in a meeting–except for callers he specifies. “Iotum gives me back the switchboard operator, only it costs a lot less,” he says. Price: $5 to $10 per user per month Best for… Toll-free numbers RingCentral Online Cool features: RingCentral provides toll-free numbers that can easily be tied into your VoIP, cell phone, and fax line. The easy-to-use service, which is hosted on the Web, also provides a range of call-management features. In action: Charlie Ruddy is CEO of TennisConnect.org, which provides Web-based marketing services to the Tennis Industry Association. Ruddy wanted a toll-free number to better serve his clients. But he was dismayed to learn that an 800 line from an old-school telecom provider wouldn’t work with his company’s VoIP system. With RingCentral, he got a toll-free number that can be set to ring his office or cell phones and all missed calls go into a single mailbox. He also gets a host of other services, like multiple lines for different departments. The price? “Less than $100 a month, for both VoIP and RingCentral,” Ruddy says. Price: Starts at $9.99 per user per month Best for… Boosting sales eStara Cool features: eStara uses VoIP to offer “click-to-call” services. Businesses put a phone number on their online advertising or websites; when potential customers click on the ad, they are connected directly to the company via VoIP. EStara also provides the same feature to customer support centers. Plus, it keeps a record of all incoming calls, creating a database of sales leads. In action: Todd Walrath, executive vice president of Leads.com, specializes in using the Web to generate business leads for clients. He uses eStara’s call-tracking service to track calls generated from clients’ ads on sites such as Yahoo and Google. Not only is it cheaper than purchasing a new toll-free number for each promotion, but customers can also check their logs in real time to see who has called in and from where–and not just the calls they got but the calls they missed. “What’s really cool is that we can use the Internet to drive consumer demand through the existing phone network, which everyone has,” says Walrath. Price: $2,500 to $10,000 a month, depending on call volume and sales conversion rates Best for… Growing businesses Linksys Voice System 9000 Cool features: It’s a fully functioning VoIP system designed specifically for small companies. And it comes in one easy-to-use package–with VoIP phones plus all the back-end networking equipment. In action: Michael DenBlaker’s outsourcing consulting firm, Graypeak Partners, had grown to more than 10 employees, one VoIP phone line at a time. But while routing calls over the Web was cheap, it was increasingly inconvenient. Not only did the firm lack a main number, but employees weren’t connected to one another and transferring calls was impossible. “We looked like a schlock organization,” DenBlaker says. So when Linksys introduced the System 9000 in March, DenBlaker jumped. Now he has his main line, people can transfer calls or forward them to their cell phones, and it’s easy to add numbers as he adds employees. “It makes us seem like a bigger organization than we are, and it’s easy to manage,” he says. Price: $580 to $3,700, depending on the number of lines and phones