Phone.com Review

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Phone.com Review Summary
	Pro's: * Unlimited Extensions * Mulitple Incoming Lines * International Virtual Numbers * Voicemail to Text Translation * Inbound & Outbound Internet Faxing * Top Notch Customer Service * Plans for Home and Business
	Con's: No True ACD Queuing
	Bottom Line: Phone.com provides solid plans with great cutting edge features, more minutes, unlimited extenstions, and additional phone lines per plan. You get all this at fantastic price points combined with outstanding in-house customer support. Phone.com continues to add new features, and improve the services it offers it's customers, easily outpacing other providers in feature and functionaly releases.
Phone.com Review Detail
Rating:		4.5/5
User Rating:		4/5

Phone.com Quick Stats:

Pricing	Professional: $9.88/mo pre-paid annually $14.88/mo non-prepaid SOHO: $19.88/mo pre-paid annually $24.88/mo non-prepaid Small Business: $34.88/mo pre-paid annually $39.88/mo non-prepaid Corporate: $69.88/mo pre-paid annually $74.88/mo non-prepaid
Free Trial	30 Day Phone.com Free Trial
Setup/ Installation Fees:	No
Disconnect/ Cacellation Fees:	No - unless you sign up for a pre-paid yearly plan
Customer Service:	24/7 Great, In-House (provided by company employees)
Included Minutes:	Professional: 300/mo SOHO: 600/mo Small Business: 1000/mo Corporate: 2500/mo
Incoming Lines:	Professional: 1 SOHO: 2 Small Business: 3 Corporate: 3
Extensions	Professional: 10 SOHO: 15 Small Business: 20 Corporate: 50 no charge to add extensions to any plan
Local & 800 Number Transfer Fee:	$25 - one time  Free!
800 Vanity Number Fee:	$25 - one time
True 800 Number Setup Fee:	Professional: $12 one time fee SOHO: $12 one time fee Small Business: FREE Corporate: FREE
More Info:	Make Sure to Compare Virtual Phone System Plans for Additional Plan Statistics
Awards:

 

Phone.com Video Information:

 

Phone.com Review Summary:

Phone.com's Virtual Office is our #1 pick. 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. This company is listening to what their customers are asking for and continually adding features to their product offering that make it a top notch pick for any small business. Add to that their outstanding customer service, and they are a provider that's going to be hard to beat.

Phone.com Likes:

More for the Money: Phone.com provides more value for the price. With their Virtual Office plans aimed at the Very Small Business and Small Business spaces, you not only get more included minutes, more extensions, and additional included incoming phone lines, but you also get lower cost per minute for any minutes you use over your allotted monthly minutes.

New, Innovative, Nimble, Deep VOIP/Telcom 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 operatios 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.

Responsive: In preparing the comparisons and reviews for this site, we have had questions that we have needed to go to the various companies to get answers to. This company has been extremely responsive in answering our questions, with accurate and precise answers - or in other words... NO run-around or fast talking. As the CEO, Ari Rabban, states it.. "we are always on".

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.

Support: Their support is 24/7 - 365 days a year, provided by in-house trained employees. They are responsive, and basically top notch in an industry where this can be problematic at best, and extremely frustrating and costly(in time wasted and potential downtime) at worst. We all have our horror stories dealing with out-sourced help desks - well not with Phone.com.

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 voicemails 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.

New 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, Infomercials & Promotions.

No charge for additional extensions on all plans. This makes them and GotVMail the only 2 providers to offer unliminted extensions on any plan. 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.

Conference calling now available 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 is the only company that offers local numbers in other countries! Have a large customer base in the UK? No 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. Have an office in the UK that you communicate with on a regular basis? Now you can do it without charging up international rates!

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.”

Phone.com Dislikes:

No true ACD Queing: 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 Queing. 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 Queing on the other hand will allow for different variables(like time of day), prioritization of staff, and real time intervention by a supervisor.

Phone.com Bottom Line:

Phone.com provides solid plans with great cutting edge features, more minutes, unlimited extenstions, and additional phone lines, at fantastic price points, and all this combined with outstanding in-house customer support. As you can tell from our blog posts outllining recent phone.com feature updates, adding new and missing features is a top priority for Phone.com. They are a progressive, forward thinking company that's definitely responsive to their customers needs. This is why we rate them our # 1 pick.

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