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One of the biggest problems facing entrepreneurs and small business owners is that of mobility. With recent popularity and advancement of the smart phone, folks have been able to enjoy more in terms of how mobile they can be — e-mail can get forwarded to their smart phone and of course, mobile telephone capabilities allow a lot more freedom now than ever before.

But what about true freedom? True mobility. What happens with the direct calls that the receptionist or assistant answers, or the faxes, or the direct calls that go to voicemail?

Now that virtually any application can be handled digitally and the technology is quite inexpensive, small businesses and entrepreneurs stand to gain tremendously. By using technology to their advantage, savvy business owners can project a Fortune 500 image without increasing overhead. In fact, many can even reduce some of their overall expenses!

The solution works rather cleverly. Your clients call or fax a computer, which translates the data into a digital format and essentially redirects the call or data to any mobile phone, hard-line phone, voicemail, or e-mail inbox (you pick which one). This simplistic description truly affords you the opportunity to work from any corner of the globe using your existing web-enabled smart phone or computer!

The best provider in our opinion is a well-known company called RingCentral. What impresses us most about RingCentral is that this lone company can handle multiple back-end functions (phone, fax, virtual reception, etc.) as well as launch your small business’s image into the big leagues. And since image plays such a large role these days, RingCentral is a company you will want to do business with. Here are some of the tangible solutions they can provide.

Toll Free Number. While this feature is more important for companies whose reach crosses area codes (e.g. consultants, sales & support businesses, etc.), a toll-free number immediately gives the impression of a “large” company. Toll-Free numbers can be arranged through RingCentral, including vanity numbers at a marginally higher cost.

Voicemail and Virtual Receptionist with “hold” music. Call any Fortune 500 company and after you tell the receptionist your party’s extension (or, more likely, key in the extension yourself), you get to wait on hold and listen to fancy music and then find the party’s voicemail. With RingCentral’s program, you get everything including the automated receptionist, the music, and the voicemail. This feature is Free with RingCentral.

Call Queues. This standard option allows you to capture as many callers as possible. Imagine that you are servicing a client over the phone when a prospect calls to solicit your services. In the past, this new client would get a voicemail and have to choose between leaving a message or calling your competitor. With a call queue, this caller gets to listen to that fancy music a little longer while you finish up your call. This feature means you lose less business.

Internet Fax. This may seem like small feature, but fax paperwork typically holds small business owners and entrepreneurs back from being truly mobile. With this standard service, all of your faxes will be transferred to digital format and forwarded by e-mail, meaning you can review them through your smart phone! This feature alone covers the cost of the full system.

The list of free features continues and continues. Our largest disappointment with this provider is that some features likes DigitalLine, which provides VoIP costs extra. For nearly every small business owner and entrepreneur, this feature will probably be worthless anyway, and for those where it is an absolute requirement, the costs are probably irrelevant… still, we had to mention at least one drawback.

Whether you decide to sign up with RingCentral or another provider, the most primary motivator for using a service like theirs comes back to accomplishing true mobility as a business owner. A secondary motivator (and probably the most important for a lot of folks) would be the cost savings; at $24.99, you can’t even talk about putting the hardware and software in place through traditional vendors. For these reasons, RingCentral offers a great value in both tangible and intangible terms.

Tags: VoIP

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