Sophisticated, Centralized Telephony Services–On the Cheap

Many web workers collaborate online from home, hotspots, and on the move, relying solely on basic cell phone and VoIP features for their telephony tasks. If you’re not an office nine-to-fiver, and you want to upgrade the professionalism and feature set of your workgroup’s telephony options, definitely look into some of the online, virtual telephony providers. Especially for small workgroups with far-flung employees, they can make it seem like you’re all in a big office with a full-blown PBX at your command.

Online providers such as GotVMail, Virtual PBX, and Onebox can centrally direct calls to any location, provide centralized auto-attendants offering multi-level menu options to callers, online tools for tracking call data, conference calling, departmental queing, dial-by-name directories, and more. I’ve used these services, and my experience is that even the small things they do well—like offering a workgroup a professional-sounding main greeting to callers—make a difference.


The services I’ve mentioned all have plans that can create a robust, centralized telephony solution for small workgroups of three to five people at about $10 a month, and $20 a month tends to serve about 25 employees. There is no hardware or software to futz with, and they even offer useful universal mailbox features where you can have your faxes, voice messages, and e-mails all in one inbox.

In several kinds of cases, the virtual telephony services can boost company image and save small businesses significant money as well. For example, you can get plans for about $100 a month that give you a toll-free and local number with about 20 mailboxes and far more monthly calling minutes than you’re likely to use. A toll-free number that’s inexpensive to maintain is a very professional calling card for a tiny business to have.

Keep in mind that these services will start to deliver costs that escalate if your needs for services like huge numbers of monthly calling minutes escalate very quickly. But for small groups who want to sound professional, and go with the kinds of feature sets that PBX systems offer in offices, these are good deals.

Do you have any good tips on telephony solutions for web workers?

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