As some on you may know from my conversations on twitter, this weekend my oldest is getting married. And thanks to a lot of great individuals, we are running guest post this week. I have and will contribute as I can, but it is with the help of these guest bloggers that has enabled me to not worry about coming up with content this week.
And today is no exception. Tina Hilton who is a regular on Home Office Virtual Assistant has provided today’s guest post about Onebox.
by Tina Hilton:
When I started my small business, I knew I was going to have to choose how to spend my tiny budget in the most effective way possible. I believe that my choice of Onebox Virtual PBX Phone System to host my business phone/fax service was an ideal example of doing just that.
I needed a system that would route my business calls to either my home phone or my cell, depending on just where I might be working. It needed to also deliver my faxes to my e-mail in a format that made it easy to share with my clients, and also allow me to fax files on my computer to clients when I was away from my home office fax machine. Onebox provided me with that and more.
The computerized auto-assistant answers all phone calls to my business number with a very professional sounding message. It announces itself as my personal assistant and asks the party to wait while ’she’ connects them. You also have a choice of recording your own message and uploading it for free or having Onebox professionally record one for you for a fee. I’m a one woman operation, so I didn’t need the additional extensions, but you can add up to four for no additional cost. Each extension acts independently, and has separate forwarding options, etc. I can set up a schedule, for example, perhaps I’m in my home office in the morning, but heading out to the coffee shop to work remotely during the afternoon. I can go into the call forwarding settings and specify which hours I want calls forwarded to my home phone and which hours I want it forwarded to my cell.
If for some reason I’m not available, the system prompts the caller to leave a voicemail. It then forwards the voicemail in mp3 format attachment to my e-mail, along with the originating phone number.
The system automatically recognizes faxes and forwards them to your e-mail in .pdf format with the originating fax number. It will even send you an e-mail if the fax is incomplete. In order to send a fax through Onebox, you have to log into your account online and send it through the web interface. Since the majority of items that I find myself faxing are saved as files on my computer, it works fine for me. For people who prefer to fax directly from word processing applications, etc., it could be considered a bit cumbersome to save the file and then log into their account, open the interface and send the fax that way.
You are also given an e-mail address @onebox.com, which some might find useful, and conference calling capabilities for up to 32 people. There is also a Calendar, Bookmarks, To Do List, Contact storage and Onebox Wireless for your WAP enabled phone. These are features that I haven’t had the opportunity to try out as of yet, although now that I have my new Blackberry I’m looking to test out the Onebox Wireless soon enough.
And what do all of these nifty features cost? Plans start as low as $16.95 a month for 100 free minutes. I started out on the 400 free minute plan for $19.95 but upgraded to the 2000 free minutes for $29.95 plan in order to compensate for the large amount of faxes I receive in relation to one of my clients. For most, the 400 free minutes plan would be more than sufficient for a small business.
This Virtual PBX worked so well for me, my biggest client decided to forgo having an expensive in office phone system installed and uses it for his business. One of his four lines is forwarded directly to me, allowing me to answer calls in relation to the task I complete for him. I can easily differentiate his calls from my own, because his Onebox business number shows up on my caller ID. This allows me to answer in a professional manner with the name of his business, just like I would in a traditional office. No one that calls is even aware that I’m not actually in his offices.
As I said, I feel that Onebox not only gives me a lot of bang for my buck, it also presents a very professional image and provides a huge amount of flexibility for my business. I give it two thumbs up!!
Categories: Product Review, Technology
14 Comments
How does outbound calling with Onebox work? Can you get a phone number that shows up on caller id or is it mainly for inbound calls only?
Larry,
Although I don’t utilize it, you can dial your Onebox number from any phone, input your password and use the system to make an outbound call. Because I haven’t personally used it, I’m not sure if the onebox number shows up on your recipients caller ID, but I believe it would, since the number shows up on outgoing faxes.
That’s pretty interesting. Thanks for the great information! How does the quality compare to say, Skype?
The call clarity is fantastic, no different from calls made directly to my land line.
OneBox has some problems as well. I was going to change over to it in my business because it was the cheapest service out there with the features that I wanted. I did not because OneBox could not or would not transfer my existing phone number. Instead it wanted me to maintain my existing service (Vonage) and have the number call forwarded, but this only increases my costs. OneBox’s representative told me it could not transfer the number because OneBox technically does not transfer numbers as they “buy” numbers. This created two stumbling blocks in my case. First, they did not have an agreement with my provider to “buy” numbers, so they would not “buy” it and they could only tranfer it, and the company was not willing to do that. Second, I learned the difference in transferring numbers and “buying” numbers was that OneBox would own my number and I would not have legal possession to it or have a right to it in the future. OneBox let me know that as long as I was with their service they would let me use that number, but if I left they may either (1) not sell it back to me or let me port it away, or (2) they would charge me a steep fee to buy my number from OneBox. What I learned was that OneBox would not agree to sell you the number at the time they acquired it and you signed up for their service, and would only state that presently if they sell a number to you that presently they charge hundreds of dollars. Whether they agreed to sell it to me at a future date was purely their decision. I am just now getting through a nightmare of trying to switch away from Vonage where it literally takes a couple of months to get Vonage to transfer a number. You have to look at and think of these issues when deciding on a service.
A couple of similar services I’ve seen in the 4-Hour Workweek were ringcentral.com and angel.com .
I wonder how these compare? Has anyone tried the other services?
@Chuck- Number portablity should be one of the first things anyone should ask about when looking at a virtual pbx service. It’s good you found out about it before you signed on for service with them. Too many people don’t find out until they want to switch their service and they are not able to take a number with them that they have had for years, have established as their business number, used in advertising, etc.
Here is an article on 7 Questions You Must Ask Your Virtual Phone Service Provider
Oh - they are bunch of players in this space. Ringcentral.com, Gotvmail.com, 800PBX.com and VirtualPBX.com. All the above players including OneBox has good features.
+Ringcentral is known to have good fax features. They started as a fax company and developed from there. Be prepared for some downtime and quality issues. They are big player but suffer those scalability issues in the quality.
+800PBX - my favorite player right now. They have the best features and hard price to be bet. Relatively new startup but their panel is one of the best in the industry and it constantly upgrows.
+Gotvmail - one of the first players to get in the industry. Little expensive, support is outsourced. I never tried as they are expensive but heard that they have a good system.
VirtualPBX - grand dads. Impressive first plan with ACDs but charge per extension.
My bet would be RC, Onebox and 800PBX at this point.
But the industry evolves.
Kumar or anyone, do you know if any of those three let you take your phone number with you when you leave?
PS - I just phoned 800PBX and their service sounded VERY outsourced.
Freedom800.com allows you to take your number with you as well as has all of their customer and technical support in house locally in Southern Cal.
VirtualPBX.com is our favorite. They will let you port both local and toll free numbers to them or away from them.
Besides which - they look to be the cheapest for the soho brand.
They include dial by name directory, email delivery and lots of stuff the others charge for. We love the SmartID for caller ID. Allows me to have a custom caller ID displayed showing the call is from VirtualPBX and the end users caller ID - all before I even answer the call. The price is 9.99 a month without commiting to anything more than 1 month of service. They will charge more as you grow for things like ACD.
Ha, they should rename this blog entry “virtual PBX throwdown”! But, some really great insight here. I think it’s interesting how this landscape is changing but when you get right down it the differences between these providers to the average consumer can be pretty difficult to discern. I think there’s a few criteria in particular that I hold above the rest:
- reliability. You don’t want clients getting a busy sig or having their call dropped or mishandled.
- outsourcing. No offense, but companies that outsource live help outside the US are digging themselves a customer service grave. I haven’t seen a single successful model of this yet.
- professionalism. It all comes down to how you look. The first two criteria are included in this one but this is my catch-all rule. How easy is it to “brand” the virtual PBX? How professional does my company come across?
Last year I shopped around for a service and decided upon the aforementioned gotvmail for the issues above. They aren’t a Voip-based service so there’s no reliability issue there, and we got some strong referrals in this regard. Contrary to other comments, they also don’t outsource their customer service — it’s all US-based, and very user-friendly. And the price tag seemed more than reasonable.
Another thing to bear in mind is how important a live receptionist is to your company. I went with gotvmail because I prefer an automated forwarding system; in my experience they’re more efficient. I’ve heard good things about onebox but one turn-off was their live receptionist help, which I believe is outsourced (I don’t know this for a fact though)? Can anyone comment on that?
Hello. We are also looking for a virtual system and were very intrigued with Gotvmail. However, the do not port numbers and rely on the local phone company to forward and release the number. This is fine. However, we are in upstate new york with Verizon. Our plan would be to completely eliminate the Verizon side of things except for the FIOS connection we would have thus reducing costs. If we have to have Verizon handle forwarding calls to Gotvmail I am sure there will be a cost involved to Verizon as well to keep the published phone number of our business and forward all calls to Gotvmail.
From a purely cost perspective it does defeat the purpose for us. Verizon is very expensive. Any thoughts on this? Does anyone else have input on Verizon costs in such a situation?
Thanks
Dave
Sorry…I was not thinking. Obviously I still need a local phone service for outbound calls from our office since gotvmail is not a voip system. So I guess I need Verizon to handle our main number and forward incoming to gotvmail. But then we have the outbound per minute charge from Verizon.
Thanks
Dave