SMB Phone Service Recommendations

by a searcher from University of California, Berkeley - Haas School of Business

2 years ago

Hi everyone,

Does anyone recommend a simple SMB phone service? 

Our current phone infrastructure is a landline and our General Manager's cell phone. His cell phone is a single point of failure in our business, so we are looking for a way that our office manager can text employees/customers from that one phone number via a desktop dashboard, even if our General Manager is out. Is there a way to do that without getting an overly complicated service?  

Thanks for the help!

2 likes
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5 comments

professional from University of Akron

I like mighty call. you can set up call wait queues and such. 5 toll-free or local lines for $40 a month.

2 years ago | like reply | 1 like

professional from University of California, San Diego

We love Google Voice when it's direct lines to people (owner phone for administration/vendor accounts), but it doesn't really work well for shared queues (eg, when you want your office manager to cover the general manager), unless you disconnect it from forwarding to his cell phone and manage it solely via the web UI (and also schedule coverage so you know who's managing it, and when).

Used Ooma Office (https://office.ooma.com/) in one of my businesses, and one of the highlights was that we could easily set up a virtual receptionist that provided a menu. You could pre-record messages for each menu option, so that you can easily provide answers to commonly asked questions and screen the phone call altogether, or route phone calls to different people based on rules you set for business hours, etc.

There's an option to enable SMS messaging on the desktop app too, though we had to request it directly with support to get it activated.

2 years ago | like reply | 1 like

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