Phone.com Review

Phone.com was founded in 2006 in Livingston, NJ to bring innovative home and business phone services to the Virtual PBX market. With Phone.com you can select an 800 Toll Free Number, a Local US Number, an International Number, Vanity Toll Free Numbers, or even Transfer an existing Local or 800 Number. Phone.com is committed to providing outstanding customer service and listening to what their customers are asking for. This is evident in the features and functionality improvements you see released on a regular basis.

Click to Call/Ring Me Web buttons:

Phone.com and RingCentral are the only two vendors that offer this functionality. You can add a button to your website to easily allow your visitors to call you directly from their PC.

Optional professional greetings service:

that allows you to provide greeting options about anything you want to communicate to your Customers or Sales Prospects. Possible Examples might be: Voicemail and Main Greetings, After-Hours Greetings, Special Services, New Events, Infomercial’s & Promotions.

Conference Calling:

Currently you get a local area code but calls do NOT go towards your virtual office minute. You can of course obtain a toll free number and forward the local number that you get with the conference calling (you can’t control what area code that local number is) but then Virtual Office minutes apply (but no other charges). I’m told that in phase 2 they will add toll free numbers integrated into the conference service.

International Virtual Numbers:

Phone.com offers local numbers in other countries! Say you have a large customer base in the UK, well that’s not problem, add a local UK phone line for only $4.88/month. No international calling rates! Now your customers in the UK can call you without additional charges to them, and reach any of your locations. Let’s say you have an office or employees in the UK that you need to communicate with on a regular basis, well now you can do it without charging up a huge international phone bill.

Call Voice Tagging:

This feature is particularly useful if you have multiple departments within your business that foward to the same phone.com number, extension or cell phone. The phone will ring and the recipient(not the caller) will hear an audio message(“Sales”, “Support”) that has been tagged to that call forwarding rule. With Call Voice Tagging you can be sure to greet every caller correctly.

Schedules:

Schedules allow you to plan ahead for days you will be out of the office, for when the office is closed for a holiday, or just for non-business hours. Each schedule allows you to set up exceptions for holidays, vacation time, or days you may just be out of the office. These schedules can be set up ahead of time and will automatically take effect when the time comes. Set up as many schedules and exceptions as you need.

More for the Money:

Phone.com provides more value for the price. With their new simplified pricing, you can custom design a plan that will meet your specific needs – whether you are a traveling professional, home office, or small to medium sized business. These plans are extremely affordable, offering over 40 custom features at no addional cost.

iNum Numbers:

iNum numbers are international phone numbers not geographically tied to a particular country. Traditional phone numbers are tied to a particular country, so if you move you need to get a new phone number from a new provider. iNum numbers do not have this limitation and therefore allow you to keep the same phone number wherever you go. To learn more about iNum numbers you can go to www.inum.net.

Mobile Office:

is the first app to extend office phone capabilities to Android powered phones, and is available for both Phone.com Virtual Office and Home Phone users and extends all of the features of both systems down to the mobile device. So mobile users now get full office phone features like free (or relatively cheap) international calling, call logs, call blocking from both unwanted and unidentified numbers, multiple call routing options, professionally recorded voices for messages, background music during hold times, and integration of voice calls(and transcribed voice calls) with faxes and SMS text messages in a single mailbox. Learn More about Phone.com’s Mobile Office here.

New, Innovative, Nimble, Deep VOIP/Telecom background:

As mentioned above this company launched in December of 2007, after a 3 month public beta. This is impressive for any company, but when you look at their website, their offerings and services, and combine that with the fact that they provide all their own customer service, development and operations in-house, it becomes very impressive. This is a small, but deeply knowledgeable, technically capable, and nimble company. I think we can expect great things to come.

New voicemail to text email transcription:

Now not only can you get the standard .wav file of your voicemail delivered to your email, but you can get a text version as well. This allows you to read your email quietly in noisy places, or sneak a peak at your voicemail’s during meetings without having to find a quiet place to use your phone. You can also easily forward emails to co-workers without worrying about what exactly was said in the voicemail.
The feature is easily enabled and disabled. The first 4 voicemail transcriptions are Free, then it’s only 25¢ per voicemail after that.

Outbound faxing:

is now available via an easy “Send Fax” button, available on your extension page in the control panel. Phone.com and RingCental are the only two in this space to provide this. We feel this is a big deal as it eliminates the need and additional cost of a traditional fax machine.

Unlimited Extensions:

on all plans. Combine this with the multiple incoming phone lines with Phone.com’s plans and this makes them a very affordable and attractive provider for small businesses. Get both a local number as well as a toll free number and unlimited extensions(future growth ability) at no additional costs.

Call Screening w/Call Tagging

With Call Voice Tagging you can assign a voice tag to either a phone.com phone number or extension. This can be truly useful in circumstances where you may have multiple departments at your company, that are forwarded to the same extension or mobile number. In these cases, it would be extremely helpful to know which department the customer was attempting to contact, prior to you answering the call. This would insure that you are able answer the call with the appropriate greeting – “Hello, ABC Company, this is Tim in Sales, How can I help you?”. When you tag a particular extension or phone number with a voice tag, you will hear that voice tag announced, in this case “Sales”, and you can answer the call with the appropriate greeting. If you have Call Screening turned on with Call Tagging, you will hear the following when you answer a call: “You have a call from [Customer's Number] to [Your Voice Tag here]. Press 1 to Accept. Press 2 to Reject.” . With just Call Screening you will hear the following: “You have received a call to [Your Phone.com number] from [the caller's true number]. Press 1 to accept. Press 2 to reject.”

Ony 1 included Number:

Unfortunately with their new pricing, they’ve opted to include only 1 phone number as their standard – either local or toll free. However they’ve made it extremely affordable to add additional phone numbers/lines at only $4.99/ea/month. So we don’t see this as a huge deal breaker.

No Mobile App for Iphone Users:

Currently there is no mobile app for iphone users – only Android and Blackberry.

No true ACD Queuing:

This, I doubt will be a big issue to the Very Small Business/Home Office/Professional or Small Business space, because Phone.com does provide Hunt group Queuing. This is where a call is routed to a group of people and it will “hunt” through the group until it finds a person who answers the call, or if unanswered for a specified period of time send to a designated voicemail. ACD Queuing on the other hand will allow for different variables(like time of day), prioritization of staff, and real time intervention by a supervisor.

Want to give Phone.com a try? Use the link below:

• Try Phone.com for 30 Days Free – No Credit Card required

Some Final Thoughts:

Phone.com has simplified their pricing and plans considerably. This now allows any professional or business to customize a plan to meet their specific needs, without it costing them the bank to do so. You can go with either a per minute usage based plan or upgrade to unlimited minutes for only $24.99/month per user. Add VoIP phones, additional phone numbers, or even global numbers. Create a plan that suites your business rather than fitting your business into a plan!