A Better Virtual – USA Virtual Offices

Junk South. The company does just what it sounds like it does—removes junk from hotels, resorts, student housing, and offices. Junk South has made a name for itself providing removal solutions for large scale renovations, brand conversions, relocations and demolitions.

But when it came to communications, the company wasn’t willing to use a junk phone system. The Athens, Ga.-based division of Athena Enterprises needed a virtual PBX solution that would live up to its reputation for sustainable business. Junk South needed a reliable communications solution that would make it easy for customers to call in their needs 24/7.

Junk South turned to VoiceNation’s virtual PBX service to make sure its high volume of calls is handled professionally. With VoiceNation, Junk South was able to set specific preferences for the virtual PBX solution and have calls routed to appropriate departments. That equaled more responsive call times and greater customer satisfaction.

“With VoiceNation, employees working in the field are reached without any delay, messages are easily retrieved, and faxes are sent from our smart phones and tablets with ease,” says Chris Caswall, president and CEO of Athena Enterprises LLC. “This service is truly an asset to our company and will continue to help us manage our call volume and support our customer base.”

Caswall says VoiceNation gives Junk South “great flexibility and peace of mind” that all incoming calls are managed appropriately. Junk South uses an online dashboard to customize call preferences, listen to messages, send virtual faxes and update contact lists; providing a quick and easy solution for everyday business.

“VoiceNation offers everything we look for in a calling service; affordability, ease of use, customizable interface, reliable customer service, and professional quality,” Caswall says.

SAN FRANCISCO—Need some help scheduling appointments? You may be able to cut the virtual receptionist right out of the mix.

Genbook, an online appointment scheduling solution, just rolled out an analytics feature that allows small businesses to track critical performance data and sales patterns in real-time. Dubbed Genbook Analytics, the feature paves the way for local merchants to better understand their business performance by analyzing the revenue, service and staff data generated by the more than 11 million appointments scheduled on the Genbook platform.

“Online appointment scheduling produces a tremendous amount of very valuable data that can now be organized into useful business intelligence,” says Rody Moore, founder and CEO of Genbook. “This new feature reflects a growing demand from increasingly sophisticated small local businesses who desire timely and useful information on which to base business-critical decisions.”

Accenture SAS Analytics Group, demand for analytics services is expected to increase by as much as 72 percent in 2012 as tech-savvy small business owners seek quantitative insight into how to run their businesses more efficiently and productively. Genbook Analytics helps merchants make key business decisions by identifying sales trends, forecasting future performance and monitoring a series of key data metrics. For example, the data can reveal which services bring in the highest revenue, what time of year is the busiest, and which staff members are generating the most appointments.

By delivering information in real-time, rather than in static reports, Genbook Analytics provides insight and intelligence for small businesses to help optimize their schedules and their staff and service offerings, while increasing their revenues. Appointment data can be sorted through daily, weekly, or monthly views and filtered by revenue or number of appointments, as well as by individual staff members or by services.

“I am now able to see how my business is growing, and from 2010 to 2011, it grew by 254 percent,” says Sirry Berndsen, owner of Spirit Of Light in Brookline, Mass. “I credit Genbook for much of that growth and am so glad I can now see my business’ key figures on one screen.”

SAN JOSE, CA—Virtual PBX is racking up the awards. This time around, the virtual PBX provider is getting attention for its Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere. The virtual PBX product has brought home the 2011 Internet Telephony Product of the Year Award.

Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere is a business phone system with VoIP capabilities. The solution allows customers to use their smart phones and computers as VoIP handsets while full phone system features.

“Our mission is to deliver communications tools that help businesses improve customer service and business productivity,” says Paul Hammond, CEO of Virtual PBX. “This recognition from Internet Telephony affirms the value of Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere, which is making a huge difference for our business customers, who are also able to reduce their operational costs.”

Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere is an attractive offering. It’s versatile and boasts business-grade quality calls. Then there’s the affordability factor. Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere is low cost, which makes it especially suitable for small- to mid-size businesses. Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere also allow small business owners the flexibility to mix and match a VoIP network with any SIP-compliant phone.

VoIP Anywhere capabilities can be accessed through the use of any standard softphone, such as those available for Android phones, iPhones and computers. VoIP Anywhere allows such devices to appear as VoIP extensions in the Virtual PBX system, so calls to and from the softphone have full access to all system features, such as business caller ID for outbound calls, call recording, call transfers, presence management and reporting. Virtual PBX has reduced bandwidth requirements for VoIP calls, allowing high-quality calls to be placed over even modest data connections, including 3G, 4G and WiFi.

“I am happy to grant Virtual PBX with a Product of the Year Award. The editors of Internet Telephony have verified that Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere displays quality and innovation plus provides real needs in the marketplace,” stays Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC. “I would like to congratulate the entire team at Virtual PBX for their commitment to advancing IP communication technologies.”

VoiceNation helped plenty of companies get through the holiday rush, now live answering and virtual receptionist service is helping businesses realize their New Year’s resolution to increase company revenue by maximizing any and all sales opportunities.

VoiceNation’s live answering service helps small business owners capture all incoming calls and qualify each prospective lead. These virtual receptionists hare professionally trained in a variety of industries, including legal, service, real estate, media, and hospitality.

“You know your biggest competitor offers a similar product at an equal price, therefore, you need to be the first to receive the consumer’s call. A missed call means your competitor gets the sale,” says Jay Reeder, president of VoiceNation. “Identifying each incoming call ensures you do not miss an opportunity to cultivate a sale.”

Indeed, today’s business world offers cutting-edge competition. Small businesses can’t afford to miss incoming calls. Think about it for a minute. If you are launching a marketing campaign to generate leads and referrals, you can’t cash in on that campaign if no one answers the phone. Even if you rely solely on cold calling to drum up new business, you could miss the sale if you don’t answer the line when the potential customer calls back.

According to Richard Seppala, “The ROI Guy,” many small business owners fail to understand that marketing and advertising is just the first step in the sales process. If the company doesn’t have an effective system for the leads generated, marketing can be a vain exercise. VoiceNation offers live answering solutions for lead capture, after hours on call, disaster recovery solutions, and much more.

VoiceNation serves more than 40,000 customers including FEMA, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Dell, AIG and the U.S. Coast Guard. They leverage the very latest in proprietary technology solutions in order to deliver quality call answering services at the lowest cost to their customers.

If you were wondering if Voice Carrier is really an innovator and  leader in hosted VoIP business communications systems, now you have more proof.

Internet Telephony magazine just handed Voice Carrier Office its 2011 Product of the Year Award. This marks the second consecutive year Voice Carrier has won the magazine’s coveted annual award.

Voice Carrier Office got the attention of the magazine with its combination of communications features and a unique pricing model. With Voice Carrier Office, customers get unlimited worldwide extensions for a low fixed monthly price.

“An exceptional combination of features and a unique pricing model enable Voice Carrier’s customers to achieve tremendous business efficiencies,” says Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC, the parent company of Internet Telephony magazine. “Congratulations to the entire team at Voice Carrier.”

Voice Carrier Office does have a clear differentiator: it’s the only cloud-based PBX provider to offer unlimited extensions and anytime, anywhere calling for one low price. Essentially, that means small businesses pay for only the number of concurrent connections they need to support the required simultaneous calling capacity as they connect with employees around the world. Voice Carrier calls it a “point-to-many” capability.

Voice Carrier Offices also offers features such as follow-me, voicemail-to-email, a customizable electronic switchboard, and a built-in conference bridge. All this allows entrepreneurs and small business owners to manage their business communications from the office, home or even on the road using their cell phone.

“We are proud that Internet Telephony’s 2011 Product of the Year Award recognizes Voice Carrier’s unsurpassed innovation,” says Gary J. Johnson, president and CEO of Voice Carrier. “Our customers continue to be extremely satisfied with Voice Carrier Office as a very easy-to-use, affordable and full-featured hosted VoIP business phone service that runs in the cloud and can be set up in minutes to reduce their phone bills by up to 70 percent. Voice Carrier Office delivers tremendous benefits and ROI to every customer.”

Voiceserve has a new product for the new year. Dubbed CalltoPBX.com, the service targets small business owners who want to virtual telephone system that lets them communicate—for free—through the Web. The virtual PBX service includes video conferencing up to five extensions, and the firm promises calls to landline and mobile phones are competitive with VoIP rates.

Voiceserve’s VoIP system is SIP-based. That means the service can be downloaded to  PCs, cameras, iPhones, iPads, Android and Blackberry phones and other mobile phones using Microsoft Windows operating system, and offers IP security. Some of the features include text messaging, faxing, music on hold, dial by name from contacts, voicemail delivery via email and call queuing.

“CalltoPBX.com brings the benefits of Internet telephony to individual users and small businesses, enabling account holders to initiate communication sessions between each other for free, wherever and whenever,” says Michael Bibelman, Voiceserve’s CEO. “Once an account is created, users can personalize greetings, receive voicemail, send voicemails to recipient’s e-mail, put calls on hold while answering another call and play music for the call on hold, and use auto-attendant to automatically forward calls or transfer calls to an extensions.”

Here’s how it works: You can create a CalltoPBX for free. You don’t even have to enter a credit card when you register. Once created, each account can have up to five users. If you need to add more users you can do that for a small, one-time fee.

When you want to enable calls to landlines and non-CalltoPBX.com mobile phones, you can purchase minutes using a credit card. Rates for calls to land lines and non-CalltoPBX.com mobile phone come with per minute charges as low as 2.1 cents to the UK, 9 cents to Peru, 3 cents to India, and 1 cent to Hong Kong.

“The economies and convenience of VoIP, especially on a peer-to-peer basis, have catapulted its use, worldwide,” Bibelman says. “Juniper Research projects mobile VoIP minutes to grow from 15 billion in 2010 to over 470 billion by 2015. This represents an incredible growth market for Voiceserve.”

With statistics like that, you can see why there are so many virtual PBX players getting into the market. This is good news for consumers, because opportunity drives competition and competition drives innovation.

CHICAGO-IL—Zaplee. It may sound like a newfangled app for your iPhone, but it’s actually a cloud call center system—and it’s gaining traction with small businesses looking for a cost-effective virtual PBX.

Zaplee is a young company, but it’s not a brand new face on the virtual PBX scene. The company opened its virtual doors in 2007, aiming to help small- to mid-sized businesses operate their virtual call centers via cloud technology. Zaplee lets you take phone calls from anywhere you happen to be so long as you have a mobile device.

Online retailer Just Almonds has been using Zaplee for more than a year now. The company’s vice president says Zaplee’s customer service—specifically, always having someone available to answer questions and offer technical assistance—makes the company stand out in the crowded virtual PBX marketplace.

“We were with Zaplee already for our local phone number and loved it, but once they started offering service to toll free 800 numbers, we decided to port our 800 number over to them as well,” says Just Almonds Vice President Kurt Mattingly.

“The guys at Zaplee have always been there and been so helpful throughout the process. I don’t know a whole lot about computers or their components, but Zaplee makes it easy to set up and use. Their excellent customer service is reassuring because I know that I can always go to them with questions or problems and get help.”

Zaplee recently introduced the ability to provision toll free 800 and toll free numbers internationally, including in the US, Canada, Spain, Austria, New Zealand, Mexico, Australia, the UK and Austria. Zaplee boasts more than 300 satisfied customers in over 20 countries.

For its part, Just Almonds uses Zaplee as a replacement for the traditional PBX system to handle phone calls to their toll free 800 number. Customers are able to call in and place their orders, no matter where Mattingly or his other two call center representatives happen to be at the moment. The team handles between 10 and 20 calls per day, whether it’s from their headquarters in Nevada, their farm in California, or even their own homes. Mattingly says Zaplee’s virtual call center is the best mobile toll free solution he’s ever used.

“Since it’s all web-based, it makes us be able to make our toll free 800 number mobile and accessible to multiple staff members all at the same time so we can do our jobs everywhere as opposed to being tied down by a landline,” Mattingly says. “I want to be on the beach taking these calls someday.”

Zaplee’s virtual call center integrates with Skype, Google Voice, regular phone lines, or SIP. The cloud call center works with toll free 800 numbers as well, and a business can port its existing 800 number over to the system.

ATLANTA-VoiceNation must be doing something right. The live answering and virtual receptionist service has grown 400 percent in the two years since its launched its calls centers in 2009.

VoiceNation’s growth is so strong that the company recently renovated its call center to quadruple the size of its space just so it could staff up to answer phone calls and continue growing in the future.

VoiceNation reports that incoming call volume has more than doubled. The growth, in part, signifies how more companies are looking to virtual solutions in a down economy.

“The demand for live answering services is only increasing, as companies find that live answering services have less overhead costs associated than hiring their own in-house receptionist,” Jay Reeder, president and CEO of VoiceNation.

VoiceNation attributes much of its success to its proprietary virtual PBX technology. The live answering service developed the technology and continues tweaking its systems to improve the quality of its customer service.

In addition to its virtual PBX technology, the company also boasts trained call center representatives. Each new employee undergoes a six-week training boot camp in VoiceNation’s brand new, advanced training facility before they ever take a live call from one of your prospects or customers.

I can’t prove this, but VoiceNation claims it has the lowest hold times in the industry, in part, to its training. VoiceNation also uses its training facility during its four-step quality assurance program to guarantee that new accounts are set up specifically how you want them.

VoiceNation opened its virtual PBX service in 2002. Today, the company has more than 40,000 customers, including FEMA, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Dell, AIG and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Virtual PBX, the company that claims to have invented hosted PBX service, is now doing some major cost cutting on international dialing rates. By major cost cutting, I mean up to 80 percent of the usual virtual PBX calling rates. That’s massive!

With the new rates, calls to land lines in London and Buenos Aires and mobile phones in Hong Kong are as low as 1.9 cents per minute. I’ll admit it. I was waiting for the catch, something that sounded like “when you upgrade to our premium plan.” But that’s not at all the case. The new rates are available without any extra fees or plan changes to all existing and new Virtual PBX customers on all plans. That just about covers everybody.

“Virtual PBX is always working to find ways to save money for our customers,” says Paul Hammond, CEO of Virtual PBX. “We already offer local numbers in over 40 countries for clients that want an international presence and want their callers to avoid the high costs of international dialing. Now we’ve made it possible for our customers to call out to international destinations with very low costs as well.”

Beyond the hype, Virtual PBX does have a history of offering cost-effective voice services for virtual office users and mainstream corporations alike. The launched its first virtual PBX in 1996. With its latest innovations, you can make calls out to international numbers or receive calls on non-U.S. phones at a much lower rate—sometimes even free. Virtual PBX has built what it calls an Open Systems Initiative that routes calls to VoIP phones anywhere in the world for free.

Another cool feature Virtual PBX offers is local  inbound numbers in various cities around the world. This allows you to publish local numbers in whatever city you want while maintaining your business headquarters in a separate location. With the combination of low outbound rates to international phone numbers, free VoIP calling anywhere, and local inbound numbers in both the U.S and other countries, Virtual PBX just proved yet again why it’s one of the industry leaders.

SAN FRANCISCO—I’ll admit it. I had never heard of Genbook until today. But once I checked out this cloud-based platform I could quickly see how the company has already managed to schedule more than 10 million appointments for local businesses across North America: more appointments, less hassles.

Genbook is sort of an alternative, or at least an online supplement, to the virtual receptionist. The software promises to fill your calendar while you are doing more important things. Essentially, you install a BookNow button to your Web site, your Facebook page, your blog, your e-mail newsletter, etc. That sets the stage for 24/7 online scheduling.

When potential customers click on the button, they are escorted to a Scheduling Webpage with your business details, logo, Google Map, Customer Reviews, service offerings and other information. They can privately schedule an appointment in real-time and get instant confirmation.

“In an economy where each customer is vital to the success of a local business, merchants are searching for cost-effective ways to book more appointments and connect with new customers,” says Rody Moore, founder and CEO of Genbook. “Consumers increasingly want to do everything online or via their smartphone or tablet, and that includes scheduling their next massage, bikini wax, haircut, or chiropractor appointment.”

More than 5,000 local merchants such as massage therapists, salons, spas, photographers, chiropractors, consultants and other appointment-based small businesses, are using Genbook’s cloud-based online scheduling solution. Genbook’s internal data show merchants who this virtual receptionist software increase revenues, and drive higher customer and loyalty. And this virtual receptionist costs only $1 a day.

“During the first year of using Genbook, my day spa’s sales increased by 400 percent and I have added hundreds of new customers,” says London Elise, owner of Soothe Spa in San Francisco. “I now have a database of 3,000 customers and 90 percent of the appointments are through Genbook, which customers easily access from my website.”