VOIP solution for small brick and mortar business
December 27, 2021 3:40 PM Subscribe
I'm overwhelmed with the options. Someone please recommend me a VOIP provider who will (cheaply) allow multiple people to remotely receive calls on a single phone line.
I own an escape room. We currently have an ISP-provided telephone service that works well, with all the features we need, but we would like to change ISPs to one with faster data rates, and the new ISP's phone system is a trainwreck, so I'm looking to third party providers, but there's a million of them and it's a crazy SEO world, and nobody seems to even do what I want without charging me for a lot more.
When someone calls us I would like it to ring on a land-line style cordless phone to on the premises, as well as the cell phone of any of my business parters who's (currently) opting to receive business calls. There's five of us, but we only need or want one line - so for instance, RingCentral's $15/user/month seems awfully pricey for that. We are barely making ends meet, so we really want this to be as cheap as we can do. All the services that seem to advertise aggressively look like they're similarly priced as though every user needs its own phone line - which is not at all true for us.
I should mention that it's essential that, when it rings our mobile phones, we can distinguish whether the call is meant for our personal phone or the business line, before answering. Having it ring on a different app worked well for this for our old ISP. This is one of the main problems with the new ISP's service - it just calls my phone like a regular call and it means I have to answer all junk calls to my personal number, and I don't know whether to answer with "Hello, [business name], this is aubilenon, how can I help you?" or not.
Does anyone know of anything cheap that does this stuff?
I own an escape room. We currently have an ISP-provided telephone service that works well, with all the features we need, but we would like to change ISPs to one with faster data rates, and the new ISP's phone system is a trainwreck, so I'm looking to third party providers, but there's a million of them and it's a crazy SEO world, and nobody seems to even do what I want without charging me for a lot more.
When someone calls us I would like it to ring on a land-line style cordless phone to on the premises, as well as the cell phone of any of my business parters who's (currently) opting to receive business calls. There's five of us, but we only need or want one line - so for instance, RingCentral's $15/user/month seems awfully pricey for that. We are barely making ends meet, so we really want this to be as cheap as we can do. All the services that seem to advertise aggressively look like they're similarly priced as though every user needs its own phone line - which is not at all true for us.
I should mention that it's essential that, when it rings our mobile phones, we can distinguish whether the call is meant for our personal phone or the business line, before answering. Having it ring on a different app worked well for this for our old ISP. This is one of the main problems with the new ISP's service - it just calls my phone like a regular call and it means I have to answer all junk calls to my personal number, and I don't know whether to answer with "Hello, [business name], this is aubilenon, how can I help you?" or not.
Does anyone know of anything cheap that does this stuff?
Response by poster: Good questions.
We need one simultaneous call - on a busy day we get like a dozen calls and want to be able to answer them as much as is convenient, but it's not a disaster if someone gets a busy signal or goes to voicemail now and then. I'm the tech guy of the business, and while I'm pretty savvy, I have enough other business-critical tech to support already, so I'm definitely would rather pay $20 a month to get something off-the-shelf and supported than pay a bunch of time to DIY something. I would rather not pay $75 a month for an off-the-shelf service, however.
posted by aubilenon at 8:03 PM on December 27, 2021
We need one simultaneous call - on a busy day we get like a dozen calls and want to be able to answer them as much as is convenient, but it's not a disaster if someone gets a busy signal or goes to voicemail now and then. I'm the tech guy of the business, and while I'm pretty savvy, I have enough other business-critical tech to support already, so I'm definitely would rather pay $20 a month to get something off-the-shelf and supported than pay a bunch of time to DIY something. I would rather not pay $75 a month for an off-the-shelf service, however.
posted by aubilenon at 8:03 PM on December 27, 2021
AFAIK, you only need ONE account / user if you have only one IP phone line. That phone line can do busy / no answer forwarding to multiple numbers sequentially or even simultaneously. It's mean for one guy owning multiple numbers but needs a central number that will get him at all his various numbers, but it will work for your circumstance, where it will ring the "home phone", then go down the list of all of the other numbers listed if there are no answers. It was also stated clearly that the numbers forwarding to do NOT need to be RingCentral numbers. Up to 10 numbers can be tried
From RingCentral call forwarding page:
From RingCentral call forwarding page:
...You can also program the system to ring your forwarding numbers simultaneously or sequentially in an order you choose. And it’s possible to specify the number of rings before the system moves on to the next number.posted by kschang at 3:47 AM on December 28, 2021
Response by poster: But if it’s just forwarding to my mobile (rather than actually answering ringing a voip app on my mobile), can I tell which calls are business calls before picking them up?
posted by aubilenon at 5:44 AM on December 28, 2021
posted by aubilenon at 5:44 AM on December 28, 2021
Well, you're going to get either the original CID passed, or you're going to see a number associated with RingCentral instance. (Which may be configurable; you might even be able to get it to show the RingCentral CID and text out the original CID to the group -- I don't know how scriptable it is).
You could kludge it by using one of the 'second number' apps like Sideline or Burner on the handsets, but that will add between $5 and $10/mo for each depending on how you set it up.
At your scale, the only way I see you managing this cheaper than $15/mo a user is to run a Linux PBX on metal, in your office or home; so you can pay only for origination and termination and have everyone use free softphone apps. As soon as you add a VPS you're going to be at or near RingCentral's pricing until you exceed five or six users.
You also may want to look into employment law in your jurisdiction. People often ignore it, but many states require some kind of reimbursement if employees are expected to use their personal devices and data plans for work purposes. In that case you may want to consider cheap company phones on a carrier like Visible that will discount the service for each user in a group plan to what you'd be reimbursing anyway, and one RingCentral number to distribute calls to them.
If you're already using Office365, you may want to take a look at Teams for VOIP. I don't know much about it beyond its existence.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:29 AM on December 28, 2021
You could kludge it by using one of the 'second number' apps like Sideline or Burner on the handsets, but that will add between $5 and $10/mo for each depending on how you set it up.
At your scale, the only way I see you managing this cheaper than $15/mo a user is to run a Linux PBX on metal, in your office or home; so you can pay only for origination and termination and have everyone use free softphone apps. As soon as you add a VPS you're going to be at or near RingCentral's pricing until you exceed five or six users.
You also may want to look into employment law in your jurisdiction. People often ignore it, but many states require some kind of reimbursement if employees are expected to use their personal devices and data plans for work purposes. In that case you may want to consider cheap company phones on a carrier like Visible that will discount the service for each user in a group plan to what you'd be reimbursing anyway, and one RingCentral number to distribute calls to them.
If you're already using Office365, you may want to take a look at Teams for VOIP. I don't know much about it beyond its existence.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:29 AM on December 28, 2021
Best answer: We have been using CallCentric for... a decade? maybe longer?... for basically this setup. We pay for 1 DID (that's an incoming telephone number) and then pay per minute (very cheap) when a call is actually connected.
You can have multiple "phones" (we use SIP ATA boxes to connect older analog phones, but you can also use newer VOIP phones) connected to the same external number, and incoming calls will continue to come in and ring the phones that aren't in use. (You can also not do this, and have incoming callers get a busy signal, if you choose.) You can also do multiple simultaneous outbound calls, which appear to originate from the same number. It's very flexible.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:30 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
You can have multiple "phones" (we use SIP ATA boxes to connect older analog phones, but you can also use newer VOIP phones) connected to the same external number, and incoming calls will continue to come in and ring the phones that aren't in use. (You can also not do this, and have incoming callers get a busy signal, if you choose.) You can also do multiple simultaneous outbound calls, which appear to originate from the same number. It's very flexible.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:30 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
Oh nice, I had thought Callcentric went away for some reason. I've used them before, for myself and for clients. No more issues than with any other provider.
If you need more features than this kind of telephony provider offers on their side, then you can stand up your own PBX down the road.
(I presently use Voip.MS for trunking, and it looks like you can do the same with them these days. They were being targeted for DoS attacks recently, but I think that's calmed down.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:54 PM on December 28, 2021
If you need more features than this kind of telephony provider offers on their side, then you can stand up your own PBX down the road.
(I presently use Voip.MS for trunking, and it looks like you can do the same with them these days. They were being targeted for DoS attacks recently, but I think that's calmed down.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:54 PM on December 28, 2021
Best answer: Yep, Callcentric seems to still be trucking along. A few years ago they had a problem where they were being extorted by a DDoS gang, which they rightly refused to pay, and had spotty service for a while. We hung on with them because it seemed like the right thing to do, although it did lead to me having to tell customers "sorry, phones are out, hackers are extorting the phone company again", which is probably the most cyberpunk thing I've actually had to say out loud.
I will note one limitation of VOIP phones that we didn't think about until we discovered it, after switching from analog: when two VOIP handsets "share" an incoming number, it's not like sharing a physical analog phone line. In other words, if you have 1 DID which is routed to 2 VOIP handsets (which can be analog phones, an app on a computer, whatever), they will both ring, but then the call will go through to the first one that picks up. If you then pick up the second handset, you'll get a dial tone—you won't hear the existing call. In a small office environment this was a bit weird at first, because we were used to handing calls off by just picking up the nearest phone, and then having the other person hang up. (There's probably some way to configure this with VOIP, maybe with a PBX, but I'm not sure.) You actually have to transfer the call to the other extension to hand it off to someone else. Just a minor thing to consider in your configuration.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:03 PM on December 28, 2021
I will note one limitation of VOIP phones that we didn't think about until we discovered it, after switching from analog: when two VOIP handsets "share" an incoming number, it's not like sharing a physical analog phone line. In other words, if you have 1 DID which is routed to 2 VOIP handsets (which can be analog phones, an app on a computer, whatever), they will both ring, but then the call will go through to the first one that picks up. If you then pick up the second handset, you'll get a dial tone—you won't hear the existing call. In a small office environment this was a bit weird at first, because we were used to handing calls off by just picking up the nearest phone, and then having the other person hang up. (There's probably some way to configure this with VOIP, maybe with a PBX, but I'm not sure.) You actually have to transfer the call to the other extension to hand it off to someone else. Just a minor thing to consider in your configuration.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:03 PM on December 28, 2021
Response by poster: I picked Callcentric. I tried a bunch of free softphones and eventually just decided to buy some apps for me and my business partners - we're using Acrobits Softphone. They're definitely targeted at power users and I have a lot more control over how my calls are handled and a bunch of other crap than I ever did before, which is nice but also a little fussy to get up and running with. But it absolutely seems to properly support our use case, and, so far, seems to work well in practice.
Thanks, folks!
posted by aubilenon at 12:09 PM on January 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Thanks, folks!
posted by aubilenon at 12:09 PM on January 7, 2022 [1 favorite]
Response by poster:
posted by aubilenon at 2:37 PM on January 7, 2022
They're definitely targeted at power usersJust rereading this I realized it's ambiguou. "They" refers to Callcentric, not Acrobits Softphone. Acrobits Softphone is pretty userfriendly.
posted by aubilenon at 2:37 PM on January 7, 2022
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And how much technical acumen do you have, or have access to?
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:35 PM on December 27, 2021