Virtual Phone Service for Wedding Professionals

We get asked a lot of questions about our phone service.  Usually we hear “It is so professional” or “It was really easy to reach you!”  So today, I thought we would share with you our phone service and how it has helped us.

We use RingCentral.  We have used it for several years and it has been such a positive thing for our company.  Since we have three wedding and event planners and we don’t have a central office, we needed a central line for all clients and other wedding professionals to reach us.  With RingCentral, you can choose a 1-800 number or a local number.  We chose a local number that also acts as our fax number too (although who really faxes things anymore, right!)  We pay $24.99/month and it is one of the best things we spend money on. So here are some of the great things about our phone system:

1.  Fully Customizable: You can pick the music that is played, record what is said or you can use the defaults (although I would recommend customizing it to fit your company.)

2.  Separate Lines: Heather-1, Jennifer-2, Rachel-3 and Web/Fax/Mailing Address-4

3.  Call Forwarding: We have a greeting that everyone hears when you call Outstanding Occasions and you can leave a general voicemail or you can be routed to Jennifer, Rachel or I.

4.  Business and After Hours: You can set your business hours and after hours.  We are closed on Sundays and Mondays and open 10-6 Tuesday-Friday and 10-4 Saturday.  If someone calls us on Sunday or Monday or after hours, they only have the option of leaving a message on the general voicemail or one of our direct voicemails.

5.  Notifications Via Email: Our voicemails and faxes come directly to our email.

6.  Mobile Apps: There is a ringcentral app for the iPhone, Blackberry and Android.

For those of you who do not use a virtual phone service and want to get your own asap, we want to make sure you know all of your options.  Here is another company that we have heard a lot about and actually got to meet one of the co-founders, David Hauser recently:  Grasshopper.  We haven’t tried this phone system out, but after meeting David and hearing about the company, we are sure it is as great as he is.  Not only does the system sound great (and work very similar to RingCentral), but I also love their company message:  empowering entrepreneurs.  We will be writing more about the day we met David and how he inspired us in a future blog post.  Honestly, had we known about this company prior to using RingCentral, we probably would have used it instead.  I also love the added feature of transcribed emails from Grasshopper.

So, do you use a virtual phone service?  If so, which one?  If not, what are you waiting for?