SMB Phone Service Recommendations

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by an investor from University of California, Berkeley - Haas School of Business
in Bend, OR, USA

4yrs ago

SMB Phone Service Recommendations

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!

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reply by a professional 4yrs ago
from University of California, San Diego in Los Angeles, CA, USA

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 (redacted) 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.

reply by a professional 4yrs ago
from University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN, USA

+1 for OpenPhone. I've been a user for years ever since running into one of the founders on Reddit and it keeps getting better. Great app works on your phone or desktop. Texting, group texting, calls, and I think it's still $10/month plus $5 each for additional lines. I love it.