Can anyone recommend a virtual phone company? I have independent contractors working with me from their home offices and we would like to forward calls to their cell phone as if they were extensions on the business phone line.
Hello Janine,
Thank you for your question. I used to own a cleaning service and we faced a similar problem. Our managers were constantly on the road inspecting houses, doing estimates, etc.. Since we spent so much money on advertising, we wanted to make sure they didn't miss any calls from potential customers.
While I can't recommend something specifically, I did do a search and found the following results: http://www.google.com/searchso... The solution that I used (and it worked very well) is on this page, cough * at the top * cough.
I hope this was helpful.
Jim
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Honestly, I could see using Google Voice for this kind of thing. I'm pretty sure it's still in beta, so it may take a few weeks to get in after signing up. But you get to pick what location prefix you would like to use (to keep it a local number), and when someone calls that number you can have it forwarded to whatever number(s) you like. You can even have it set up to call 2 numbers at once, and whichever phone picks up first gets the call.. The big sell point to this option is that it is FREE for having both incoming and making outgoing calls.
A bonus is if you have a cell phone like mine (Palm Pre) or Black Berry, you can make outgoing calls right from your phone using that number as well as your normal one. The google voice service goes off your data plan too... So wifi + data call = placing (and getting) calls where there is no cell service on a cell phone. Just throwing that out there. :)
Ringcentral- hands down favorite. It does exactly what you describe. I've tried a few different ones over the years. I've used RingCentral off and on since at least 2005. They have no long term contract so I simply forwarded our main phone line to them during certain times of the year. When I didn't need it, I turned it off.
About 12 months ago, I added an 800 # which I bought outside of them, and transferred to their service, You cannot transfer numbers back out, so only do this after you are certain you want to stay with them. For me, I've had great experience for years, the value is good and I know I'm never leaving them.
As a manager, you'll love that it keeps records of every call, including whether it was missed or not, as well as voice messages. I let someone go after finding out he only picked up about half his calls - the rest were 'missed'.
