Hosted PBX Guide

Inexpensive for medium size businesses. Cutting costs is good business sense, and Ringcentral has very competitive pricing for about ten to fifteen extensions, if you use the right number of minutes. And have your phone service configured the way they want you to. For everyone else they're significantly more expensive than other services.

Accessible and easy to use. Both from what has been said by others and based on their website design, Ringcentral's service appears to have a comfortable layout that can be readily configured without having to hunt for information or call technical support. Over the next few weeks, much more information about this should be available.

Rollover Minutes. I know what you're thinking: rollover minutes are good. I want to be able to keep what I don't use for later. But Ringcentral does not actually provide rollover minutes. They have a program they call rollover which really only provides 50 or 100 minutes over the year as flex minutes in case you go over your regular limit. Unused monthly minutes are still lost. This is a deception designed to mislead people who think of the standard usage of the term.

Poor Customer Service. A hosted PBX service should have a quality inbound phone team. Ringcentral had a mediocre virtual attendant that I was unable to successfully navigate to their sales department. When I went to their general help, I was answered by a bored-sounding man that introduced himself, thanked me for calling the ultimate provider in the industry, coughed, then started his spiel over from the beginning. That said, he was able to answer my questions readily enough, but didn't take the step towards being helpful, friendly, or engaging. I have also heard stories from other hosted PBX customers that tell of being unable to change account settings, getting no assistance from the company, and having to just cut off payments and get a new phone number.

Expensive for Small Businesses. This is particularly bad because they market themselves to appear to be a great deal for this group of customers. But while their costs appear low, they require a year-long commitment in order to get the low price and do not provide all their services for these low-cost contracts. If you want all their features, they can cost twice as much as their competitors for companies of five or less extensions.

No ACD Queue. I called twice for information about this. The first time, I was informed they had no queuing services. The second time, I was told that all of their extensions can be used as queues, because if six phone lines are listed and one is busy, it will try the next one. The agent said these "queues" are even configurable to either call in order, randomly, or with a few other basic methods. If the 2^nd agent was right, and if this "make my extension a queue" works, it's really just a hunt group anyways. We're definitely going to look into this when we try out their service.

Advertising over advantage. Designed to pull in new customers at a high speed, Ringcentral appears to spend more money on selling their service than improving it. They're a venture capital company, and are running through that money buying advertising, adwords, and offering people like us lots of money if we'll send people to buy from their website. I could concievably make a good chunk of money if I were to tell everyone that Ringcentral was the best provider and send them new customers - around twenty-five dollars per referral, which is nothing to sneeze at. Because of this, pretty much every other hosted pbx comparison site out there is singing Ringcentral's praises. Now you know why there's a difference between what I have to say and what they have to say.

Glitzy. Ringcentral made a flashy website with stylish graphics, plenty of reviews and testimonials, limited time offers, and smiling people. These are all good things when taken to the appropriate degree. It struck me as a bit much. It was still an excellent site, with plenty of information readily available through several menus so as to intuitive to any searcher, but it struck me as overly showy.