If you’re looking for a phone system that can support your mobile staff, and you’re considering Vonage or similar options – think again. For agents who routinely spend time in the field, Vonage’s SimulRing (and other competing VoIP services too) has major flaws, not the least of which deals with its cell phone forwarding, simultaneous ring feature. Imagine this example: Two staff members are in a meeting and one of their cell phones is turned off or loses service connectivity. A client is tries to call him on his cell phone directly to schedule a last-minute appointment and the call is passed straight to the person’s cell phone voicemail box. So, the client decides to call the main number and the call is routed to the cell phone again – and through the simultaneous ring feature is immediately picked up by the out-of-order cell phone’s voicemail. This happens all too often with competing VoIP technologies, including Vonage.
If you’re looking for a phone system that can support your mobile staff, and you’re considering Vonage or similar options – think again. For agents who routinely spend time in the field, Vonage’s SimulRing (and other competing VoIP services too) has major flaws, not the least of which deals with its cell phone forwarding, simultaneous ring feature. Imagine this example: Two staff members are in a meeting and one of their cell phones is turned off or loses service connectivity. A client is tries to call him on his cell phone directly to schedule a last-minute appointment and the call is passed straight to the person’s cell phone voicemail box. So, the client decides to call the main number and the call is routed to the cell phone again – and through the simultaneous ring feature is immediately picked up by the out-of-order cell phone’s voicemail. This happens all too often with competing VoIP technologies, including Vonage.
Lifter? What a silly invention! Go Yealink or go home, we say.
SoundLine Communications’ MBX service has a solution. With our simultaneous ring feature, every time you answer a call on your cell that was directed through the main number, our system will tell you who the call is from and prompt you to press ‘1’ to answer the call. This way, if you don’t hit ‘1,’ it will continue to ring the other staff member’s cell phones. This also allows you to know when a call is coming through the system versus a call directly to your cell.
Unless you can guarantee all of your phones will be on and in service at all times, SimulRing will not work for your business. Vonage, and other companies too – could fix this simultaneous ring feature for their customers but they have a reason. SimulRing is designed to ring up to 5 single user devices. Most people have an office phone, cell phone, and maybe another office phone, so they can make sure their own devices are on and can remove the phones that are offline from the ring queue in advance. Since they are personal phones, this isn’t really an issue. Also, Vonage’s support of a feature like SoundLine’s simultaneous ring would encourage users creating virtual offices, like most people want when they imagine the possibilities put forth by simultaneous ring – but more importantly, would create simultaneous usage of more lines. Due to the possibility of higher expenses, Vonage cripples this feature. We don’t.
(Awesome!)