Hosted PBX Guide

Quality and reliability. The technology is their baby. They don't want it to be any less than its capable of being. Their entire system is built with multiple levels of redundancy so when something breaks, the system stays up. And you can get the quality of phone call that you want- use the PSTN and copper wires for high quality or VoIP and cell phones for cost or convenience. They say that even though many of their competitors are rolling out a VoIP package that includes phone service, they haven't gone that route because they feel VoIP quality to the user can be spotty. This loses them some customers, but they just accept that. They'll still put calls to VoIP phones, of course, if you acquire them elsewhere.

ACD Queues. The company's original name was actually Advanced Queuing Sytems, AQS, and this is one place where they stand distinctly ahead of the pack. They use smarter, more feature-rich queue systems than anyone else. Since ACD queuing is so important to large businesses and makes even small businesses more flexible and appear more professional, this is fairly important.

Recording system. Let's face it, customers spend time on hold. And they spend time punching buttons through the virtual receptionist. If it has to be done, Virtual PBX decided it may as well be done well. Their recording manager looks like it has the best feature set from those I've looked at so far. So up until someone on your end picks up the phone, you get to control precisely how the call is handled, with plenty of options.

Scalability. Some of the hosted PBX services have you buy packages by size. Virtual PBX lets you add or drop extensions whenever you feel like it, and just tacks on or drops off the price on your next monthly bill. They still have different sized ‘plans', which appear to simply be better pricing sets for startups or bulk business. We'll see how this works for sure soon.

Customer Service. I've put in phone calls to each of these companies, asking about obscure details. With most groups, I can usually find something that the representative on the phone simply knows nothing about, or, worse yet, no one answers and no one returns my call. Virtual PBX never answered with a standardized corporate greeting, and never ended the call with "I don't know". When the person on the phone didn't know something, he asked his manager. When I called again and the agent wasn't authorized to discuss certain information about upcoming products, they said they knew who had more information, put me on hold for a moment to ask her, and I came away with what I wanted to know.

Inexpensive for startups. For really small companies (up to three people), Virtual PBX gives a really great deal. The only people that stay in their price bracket are Ringcentral (if you take a year-long contract) and GotVMail (if you're not using many minutes). The only thing they cut to give this deal is their ACD queuing service, which is not as important when you have less than five employees.

No free trial. Which is compounded by the:

Setup fee. While neither of these are entirely uncommon in the industry, most of their competitors have only one of these two issues, so it does mean you want to make sure you're interested in what Virtual PBX offers. At least there's no long-term obligation to continue the service, or this would be a major source of concern. Fortunately, the setup fee is fairly small, so even if you decide to drop the service after the first month, you're not out much. Also, they are pretty clear about what they can and can't do (particularly over the phone, if you aren't sure from the website) so you generally know whether or not you want to use them before you sign up. In general, if you keep their service this isn't a problem, and there are not many reasons to drop it.

No outbound faxes. They tell me they're working on this technology, and that it's one of their major development projects - which is to be expected, no matter what we were talking about. Personally, I don't use faxes anyways. A scanner/printer hooked up to a computer with email does just a good a job, as far as I'm concerned. But for anyone who does need this for their business, you'll need to pick someone else or wait for their nebulous timetable.

Money. While they're a steal for the small office, there are cheaper alternatives once you move into large numbers of extensions. On the other hand, their advanced features, particularly their queuing service, mean that the money might be well spent. When I discussed this with an agent, they indicated that the ‘cheap for small businesses, features for large businesses' style was their official business strategy. Just check and make sure you're actually going to use the extra features they offer before handing off the dough.

Their ‘parachute' plan. One of their more unique services, but which probably doesn't see much play. It's essentially a system backup option for hardware PBX services, so that if a premise based PBX suffers some sort of system failure, the hosted PBX is activated and they can still get their calls routed to the right employees. It's not designed to cater to the usual hosted PBX crowd, and feels almost like a gateway for a hardware to hosted transition.