Marketing Insider Group published the post 4 Ways to Measure Brand Awareness.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Erin McShea
Title: 4 Ways To Measure Brand Awareness
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/measure-brand-awareness/
Published Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://internetlib.org/how-to-write-a-blog-introduction-as-a-professional/

Marketing Insider Group's post How to Reach Your Target Audience through Text Message Marketing appeared originally on Marketing Insider Group.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Emma Bentley
Title: How To Reach Your Target Audience Through Text Message Marketing
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/marketing-strategy/text-message-marketing/
Published Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

If you are frustrated with your current business phone system, it’s worth checking out your options. 

You could save money, get a more useful set of features for your employees, and deliver a better experience for your customers.

But there are a variety of ways to implement a new phone system. You want to be smart about this. 

To help you understand what’s out there and play the field intelligently, my team reached out to experts who deploy business phone systems for a living and  manage intense call centers. 

You can go anywhere on the web to find generic advice, like “choose a system that has the features you need.” That helps nobody. 

Here, you're going to find insights for buyers from a range of people that know what really matters. I talked with:

• Matt: A network engineer with more than 20 years of experience helping companies manage their IT.
• Nikhil: A founder of two cloud service companies and former managed service provider for unified communications.
• Lawrence: A network operations center engineer working for a cloud business phone system provider.
• Guy: A call center veteran with more than 15 years experience in keeping operations efficient.
• Terry: The head of IT for a midsize software company who has deployed and scaled contact centers for numerous use cases.

We talked in-depth about how the underlying technology actually works to give companies a real-world edge they don’t have today. The end result being my recommendations and this buyers’ guide. You don’t have to be an IT pro to benefit from hearing their perspective on what a “one-click” integration really means, or how to keep a phone system from getting hacked.

Take a break from the run-of-the-mill guidance. Keep reading to find out which business phone systems are really delivering value and how to decide between the top options.

#1 – Nextiva Review — The Best for Remote Teams

Nextiva helped so many companies keep their operations running while offices were closed. It’s a safe, proven business phone system that works as well in an office as it does for on-the-go and work-from-home employees.

Since the platform is entirely cloud-based, it’s extremely easy to deploy. Get set up in minutes and every employee will have unlimited voice and video calling.

You can add texting for a few bucks a month or look into their contact center solutions if you want to unify communications with chat and email, as well. Whatever setup you choose, there’s no new equipment to buy and it’s effortless to upgrade if you want more channels or features down the road.

I like it for offices with remote workers because Nextiva isn’t a one-way street—it will work with landline phones if you need it to.

You have the flexibility for people to be in or out of the office without disrupting productivity or the customer experience. 

New users will have hardly any trouble getting on board. They just download the Nextiva app and they can start making calls.

“It’s easier to just download the app and connect to the servers,” Nikhil explained about why both employees and administrators liked softphone apps. All the security is baked in, and your employees “can work from their mobile, tablet, or desktop without configuring as much.”

Keeping your phone system secure is a huge concern if you have remote workers signing in from home and public networks. 

Lawrence told me you want a provider using TLS and SRTP to encrypt traffic so that no one “can see what you're doing, or listen to any of the calls that go over that line.” 

Nextiva uses both of these protocols to secure voice traffic, and also has fraud mitigation to detect and block suspicious calling activity on your account. 

“A malicious actor can use your phone lines,” Lawrence said, “and you regularly see that there are multiple lines open to a faraway country with an expensive pay phone number.” 

Nextiva constantly monitors your account for such toll fraud and other types of hacks, giving you peace of mind while workers are consistently outside your firewall.

There’s just a lot less to worry about with Nextiva providing your phone service. Your admins won’t have to provision specific phones or ensure that calls get to the right place. Because users are on softphones, that number follows them wherever they go. 

This is important, as Matt noted, because it can get pretty tricky trying to route calls when people are moving around with a number tied to a specific phone. 

Nextiva lets you avoid those headaches altogether. As long as someone is signed into their Nextiva account, all their preferences are stored and they’ll receive calls just fine.

In fact, Nextiva recently redeveloped their extension provisioning so that you can start a call flow from an extension:

This lets you route internal calls without having to pay for extra numbers, which is sometimes unavoidable with other providers. 

Plus, look how easy it is to add an extension—if you can order food online you can configure the Nextiva phone system.

This makes it easier to take advantage of the flexible routing features, like Find Me/Follow Me, and your employees can guarantee that calls find them no matter where they’re working that day. 

As Matt explained, Follow Me features are a big step up from simple call forwarding. 

“Sure, back in the day, you could forward calls to your cell, and you would get to answer,” he said, “but you wouldn't see who it was.” Now that the feature is digital, “it’s just a lot more robust,”

Follow Me lets you set answering rules that redirect your call to multiple places—your office, your cell, your home—before sending someone to voicemail. You can even set rules based on what day or time of day it is. 

“It guarantees that the person on the other end could possibly get you rather than just get your voicemail, which nobody listens to nowadays,” said Matt.

There are other features designed to make the lives of administrators and supervisors more manageable. The admin portal makes quick work of adding new users, and admins can edit active call flows. Switch up your phone menu, greetings, or reroute calls without shutting off your phone system to make changes.

Your supervisors have access to a rich set of team collaboration tools, including:

• Team calendar
• Screen sharing
• Persistent chat (team messaging)
• Multi-site support
• Real-time status alerts
• Video conferencing

Be it sales, service, or just general business needs, everyone benefits with team messaging and an auto attendant that gets calls to the right place faster.

Perhaps the chief reason companies opt for Nextiva is its highly available customer service. You can reach out by email, chat, or phone, 24 hours a day. This is very attractive, as phone support is usually something that only comes with other providers’ premium plans.

On-demand technical support is a boon to teams that aren’t always in the office. Additionally, Nextia offers superior guidance and training to help your team get the most out of your new system on day one. 

Nextiva actually took home multiple Stevie awards in 2020, which recognized the company’s consistently high quality of service. 

The company will also help you migrate your existing phone number to ensure that your entire system is working as planned. With all but the entry-level plan, Nextiva includes professional implementation as part of the price tag.

Let’s take a closer look at how to buy Nextiva, as the company supports a wide range of businesses with their flexible pricing pricing structure:

The above prices are for annual subscriptions. You can opt to pay a little more per month if you don’t want to sign up for a year.

Essential is one of the cheapest plans on the market that offers voice, video, text, and fax. If you are looking for an affordable business phone system that supports multiple channels and remote collaboration, this is it.

That said, the Essential plan lacks video conferencing and many of the integrations that make Nextiva such an easy option for remote work. You get integrations with Outlook and Google Contacts, but you have to upgrade to Professional in order to tie in CRM software like HubSpot, Zendesk, and Salesforce.

The other major perk of upgrading to Professional that makes a lot of sense for remote teams is that you get full 24/7 customer support. With Essential, you are limited to support during business hours.

For companies that don’t have a CRM already, Nextiva includes one for free at the Professional tier, which is only marginally more expensive than Essential.

The Nextos CRM, which is built right into the platform, has special applications for both sales and service. It’s native, so you don’t have to spend time getting the apps to talk to one another.

This is very appealing, because you get the CRM functionality without having to pay for an additional service, or “jump through hoops” trying to make the integration work, which Jason said can be pretty challenging. 

He also highlighted difficulties getting multiple CRMs to work on the same network for different departments. Say your sales team is using Sugar CRM and your service team is using Zendesk. Nextiva has integrations with both of those applications, so you have a lot less to configure on your own.

Enterprise and Ultimate tiers include a longer list of integrations, richer analytics and survey tools, and a deeper set of features with the Nextos CRM platform.

I want to call out the Enterprise plan, which starts at $32.95/month per user, as being extremely affordable compared to similarly feature-rich plans from other providers.

In short, Nextiva is a full-bodied business phone solution that delivers top-quality communications for businesses of any size. In the office, out of the office, it doesn’t matter. Nextiva has you covered.

You can try the Essentials plan free for seven days or request a demo of a premium plan.

#2 – RingCentral Review — The Best for Integrating Phones With Your Business

RingCentral has become one of the most popular service providers in the business communications space. They offer every feature a growing business needs at a competitive price. Unlimited calling, texting, and video don’t hurt either.

It’s my top pick for businesses that want to integrate their existing business software with their new phone system. 

It doesn’t offer a built-in CRM like Nextiva, but it has pre-built integrations with a much longer list of apps. Most users will be able to keep using the software that has helped them get to the point where they are now—you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

And because RingCentral is so widely used, all of these integrations have been tried, tested, and improved under a range of conditions. 

This is really important—not all integrations are equal. As Terry pointed out, some integrations involve a lot of development work on your end, to actually get “the systems to communicate with each other the way you want.” 

RingCentral has taken as much of that work off your plate as possible. There’s still going to be some initial setup, especially if you’ve customized your CRM or ERP to the nth degree already. But you’ll quickly find out why so many users describe the integration process as seamless, and ample documentation online should you encounter issues along the way.

And the benefits in terms of streamlining the workday for your employees are hard to overstate.With Salesforce integration, for example, you can click-to-dial contacts, schedule video meetings, connect the phones to your sales cadence—all within your Salesforce account.

Think of how much time this saves for every call. 

Plus, you're going to be able to track metrics that really matter. With the CRM integration, your analytics are going to reflect information about your customers, not just call times. 

You can get really crafty with the segmentation to look at sales goals in different buyer brackets, geographies, or whatever you think is worth tracking.

That’s just one example, but RingCentral offers far more pre-built integrations than any other platform I reviewed. 

You want to be able to share information throughout the company, and it really grates on employees when they have to manually move data between apps that don’t play well together. 

From my experience and from talking with experts, I recommend demoing these products, if not reaching out to RingCentral to get a reference from a similarly situated customer. This will give you the best possible sense of the quality and depth of each pre-built integration.

But when you’re thinking about connecting your other software, integration is only one part of building out a more efficient process for your teams. RingCentral gives you an extensive range of call handling and administrative features, which will let you tune your system perfectly for each part of your company. 

As Terry explained, customer service CRMs tend to be “a little more complicated from a phone system standpoint” than those for sales. 

Why? Because sales is generally about getting incoming calls to people as quickly as possible. In a support situation, “it’s not the opposite, but it’s kind of close,” he said with a little bit of a laugh.

Terry’s not arguing for service teams to give customers the runaround, but you do need to make sure that the person calling actually has a problem. From there, you want to direct them to self-service resources first. 

Maybe they can reset their password without speaking to an agent, for example. Both parties are going to be happy about that outcome. This keeps your lines clear and lets your service agents focus on customers with really thorny issues.

RingCentral provides everything you need to manage call queues and set up your phone tree to direct customers however you need. 

Integrate your phone system with live chat software and have bots provide automated responses that allow customers to answer a question on their own. Or let the bot triage incoming chats and gather info for when a rep takes over. Incorporate that with skills-based routing that gets a Spanish-speaking caller to the appropriate agent.

There are a ton of opportunities to streamline workflows and improve the overall customer experience because RingCentral is so easy to connect to the other parts of your business. 

Some of the platform’s other highlight features include:

• Single sign-on
• Visual voicemail and voicemail to text
• Team messaging
• Real-time analytics
• Developer platform
• Quality of service reports

RingCentral is cloud-based and hosted, so your agents are going to be able to work from the office and home without much of a hiccup. It’s secure, dependable, and well within the price range for many businesses.

The entry-level Essentials tier is capped at 20 users and comes at a fairly attractive price for very small businesses. But I want to focus on the other plans, which include integrations with the popular software I’ve been describing.

Standard comes with unlimited voice, video, text, and online fax, as well as essential administrative features to stay organized. At this tier, you get integration with productivity suites, like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, as well as collaboration software, analytics tools, bots, and more.

Premium includes multi-site administration and management, as well as a multi-level auto attendant to route calls more effectively across sites. You also get advanced in-call features and CRM integrations to help sales, customer service, and general customer success.

Premium is still a very competitive price, and the CRM integration is well worth it. You’ll also get access to industry-specific integrations for healthcare, manufacturing, and other verticals. It’s really worth digging into their extensive App gallery to see what’s available.

The Ultimate tier comes with unlimited automatic call recording, which is a boon for organizations with compliance concerns or potential legal exposure. It also includes device and status alerts to assist admins and supervisors with monitoring critical KPIs at scale.

At the end of the day, companies love RingCentral because it can be molded to suit the way you do business. It makes everyone’s workday a little more streamlined, every interaction a little more productive. 

Try out RingCentral free for 15 days and get access to Essentials, Standard, or Premium. Test the phone system, integrations, and discover why so many businesses choose RingCentral.

#3 – Ooma Review — The Best for Companies That Want Deskphones

Want to keep all the things you like about traditional phones and get rid of all the annoying parts? That is Ooma Office, my number one choice for people who want the hardware without the headaches.

Use your analog phones, mobile phones, computers, laptops, conference phones, fax machines—whatever you have—and Ooma will work beautifully.

The Ooma softphone app can be used as soon as you sign up. If you choose to order desk phones through Ooma or use the ones you already have, the entire activation and setup process takes about 15 minutes.

By purchasing phones directly from Ooma, they’ll come preconfigured. As soon as you plug it in, the phone will automatically establish a secure connection with Ooma and you can start dialing. 

The company actually uses the same technology governments use to encrypt classified data, including a VPN tunnel and SRTP. This is exactly the type of security that Lawrence and Matt told our team to look for.

Go ahead, ditch the old PBX and discover how easy Ooma makes it to personalize your phone system. You get full control over configuration through the Ooma Office web portal. 

It’s not as sleek as Nextiva, but it’s very clean and straight-forward. Most people who switch from a traditional PBX wind up being able to do way more themselves at a fraction of the cost.

You no longer have to know anything about how the underlying technology works in order to set up a virtual receptionist to greet callers and route them to the appropriate department. You can opt for all phones to ring in the department, or have them ring in a particular sequence if your primary contact can’t answer.

Creating a ring group like this used to be difficult, but it’s just a few clicks in Ooma. 

The same goes for hot desking, which allows Ooma Enterprise users to make calls from any phone. Lawrence described how his company—which doesn’t have fixed workspaces for individual employees—really benefited from the ability for employees to go up to any phone in the office, enter their extension, and start making calls.

“Even if you have multiple branches and you work from a different branch,” said Lawrence, “you can just go there, and know that the phone system will work.” Any one of your employees can use any phone and once they connect, all of their preferences and settings will be right there. 

One reason I really like Ooma for small business is that you don’t need to sign a contract to get the best deal. They will port one number per line for free and there are zero hidden charges.

So that’s transparent pricing, no contracts, and access to a robust business phone system with features like:

• A conference bridge for each user
• Call management tools
• SMS messaging
• Ring groups
• Extensions, and extension-to-extension dialing
• Intercom

And that’s not even the full list of what’s included with Ooma Office, which starts at $19.95/month per line.

Like the other providers I looked at, you’ll get unlimited calling in the US and Canada, but Ooma’s unlimited coverage extends to Mexico and Puerto Rico as well. 

The company also has lower than average international calling rates. For example, a call to China would be 2¢ per minute with Ooma Office, whereas the same call would be 3¢ per minute with Dialpad or 3.9¢ with RingCentral. 

That 1-2¢ savings adds up quickly if you have a lot of customers abroad. 

As I mentioned, the pricing is extremely straightforward.

If you choose to upgrade to Office Pro, you get video conferencing, call recording, voicemail transcription, and access to the Ooma desktop app.

Ooma Office is going to be more than enough for many businesses, unless of course they absolutely require one of the key features that come with Ooma Office Pro. 

The price of upgrading is very reasonable, and well below the price of other companies that offer a similar range of services.

Ooma Enterprise (which does require a contract) gives you access to more channels. But it’s not quite as turnkey as other unified communications platforms, like you can get through RingCentral, Nextiva, and Dialpad. 

I say this because a lot of the integration and functionality that comes baked in with those platforms has to be done custom with Ooma Enterprise. 

This could provide a better end result for companies struggling to fit their workflows into pre-built integrations from those other providers.. Ooma has worked with restaurants and retail to streamline order tracking, payments, and reporting through integration. 

As much as I like the pre-built integrations, there’s a “cookie cutter” aspect that comes from trying to make them work generally. So it’s worth giving Ooma a call if you aren’t wowed by the integrations offered by other platforms.

Enterprise subscriptions also come with a greater range of features, like hot desking, advanced call flows, and team messaging. The Enterprise Call Center solution is billed as a complete UCaaS, but neither I nor the experts we talked with had any experience with it, so you’ll have to investigate yourself.

For small businesses, though, Ooma Office is a tried and true way to keep the phones working with minimal complexity. It’s a true plug-and-play solution that works with a wide variety of phones. Analog, IP, wireless, and conference phones are all going to work just fine. 

Keep your equipment if you have it, or buy new phones at a price that often beats the local dealer. Ooma offers open standards phones from manufacturers like Yealink, a favorite among the experts, so you can mix new phones into your old system with minimal frustration.

Hang on to your existing number, pick a new one, set up a toll-free number, connect online fax—none of this takes any time at all. 

Now you have a cloud-based phone system that unites all of your tools within a business phone system that works in the office or on-the-go.

If your current business phone system isn’t getting it done, give Ooma a try, risk-free, today.

#4 – Grasshopper Review — The Best for Businesses That Need Fewer than 10 Lines

If you need a very simple phone system, Grasshopper can provide it for a lot less than some of the other options I’ve reviewed.

It’s not as deep in features as some of the more expensive packages from other providers, but small businesses get the essentials of a modern business phone system. 

Plus, unlike other options, every Grasshopper plan comes with every feature the company offers—so you’re not having to purchase more than you need just to solve one particular issue.

The most basic plan comes with a business number that works on any device and three free extensions. Bear in mind that extensions aren’t always free, especially with budget-friendly options. 

With Grasshopper, on the other hand, you can outfit a small team for the price of a single line.

It’s really a complete package for the small office. Scaling up remains affordable, though I wouldn’t push it too far over ten lines, as the call administration is really geared towards smaller business phone systems.

Grasshopper is a perfect low-cost, all-in solution for a single brick-and-mortar, a small warehouse, a company with a few different locations, or a toll-free number for an ecommerce site.

Grasshopper isn't as elaborate, but that helps teams get comfortable with it more quickly. You don’t have to have an IT wizard on staff in order to add a new user or extension. Because of the simplicity, even your most tech-averse users are going to be fine managing business calls from their personal cell.

Nothing is going to be tied to a hard phone with Grasshopper, so you don’t have all the headaches Matt talked about with regards to people moving from station to station. There’s no backend provisioning necessary if personnel get shifted from one desk to another, which you’d have to do with deskphones in many cases.

Despite the flexibility, you still get the core phone system functionality small businesses need. Transfer calls and set extensions to forward calls to any device with a phone number. Send calls to a landline if you want.

You get the core phone features without the IT drama or security concerns. Some of the most useful for small business include:

• Business texting
• Call forwarding and transfers
• Virtual fax
• Voicemail transcription
• Free extensions
• Simultaneous call handling
• Call screening
• Custom greetings

For someone trying to run their business off a cell phone or struggling to manage an outdated phone system, Grasshopper is a revelation. Instantly, you’ll be able to screen calls and know whether it’s a personal or work call.

On your end, you’ll be able to choose which number you want to call from. No more carrying two phones or anxiety over which type of call you're getting.

And when callers dial in, they’ll be welcomed by a professional greeting. Answer questions about business hours or let them select which department they’d like to speak with.

Because you get free extensions with every line you purchase, you’re not paying for dozens of extra numbers just to route calls.

One of the other features that I think is critical for small businesses today is texting. That’s included with Grasshopper, which makes the system a very cost-effective way to open additional channels of communication with your customers.

Set up instant responses to new callers when you’re on the line or in a meeting. Read a voicemail transcription, respond with a text, and you won’t even have to make a call.

Grasshopper plans include unlimited calling and texting. You’re looking at a flat rate each month. The prices below reflect an annual subscription, and are a few dollars higher if you choose to pay month-to-month.

Since every feature comes with every plan, you’re really buying based on how many phone numbers and extensions you need. Solo comes with one number and three extensions, which can be routed to your cell, home, other colleagues, or different locations.

Partner comes with three numbers and six extensions, which is ideal if you’re trying to grow beyond a single location or manage teams in the field. Small Business comes with five numbers and unlimited extensions.

With Partner and Small Business, you won’t have to ask employees to give you their personal number or buy them a phone. They’ll be set up with everything they need to receive, screen, and transfer calls.

You can purchase extra numbers for $10 per month each or hire a Ruby Receptionist, which is a live US-based agent who can answer calls and speak with customers. It starts at $135 per month for 50 receptionist minutes, and the cost per minute goes down the more you purchase.

This could be huge for a small company that’s struggling to man the phones. For a tiny fraction of what it would cost to hire a full-time person, you can stop worrying about missing calls and know that it’s handled.

I really like Grasshopper for small business. It’s all the necessary parts of a phone system without tons of features aimed at call centers or larger businesses. You can’t get too fancy—there are no direct integrations with other platforms and there’s no easy way to add additional channels—but it excels at the essentials.

OpenPhone is similar, but people that are looking for a more traditional office phone experience will like Grasshopper because it handles things like virtual fax and extensions with forwarding rules.

If you want a stress-free business phone system for small businesses, you should try it out. Grasshopper offers a 7-day free trial, no credit card required.

#5 – Dialpad Review — The Only Way To Deploy A Contact Center in 10 Minutes

I like Dialpad because it takes the complication out of call center work for employees and delivers a great experience to customers. Everything about the platform is streamlined, clear, and made for the way communication happens today.

You can (and should) check out Dialpad for individual channels, but if you’re looking for an all-in contact center system that works out of the box, this is it.

“Nobody goes out of the way and says, ‘Hey, I can't wait to call into this contact center,’” Guy told my team, drawing on years of first-hand experience. “However, when they are going to do it, you want to make it as seamless as possible.”

Dialpad gives you everything you need. Deploy in minutes and continually improve your system over time with Dialpad’s unique set of integrations, AI-powered analytics, and speech recognition technology.

These features deliver meaningful benefits to your agents during every interaction. If an unknown caller says their name, Dialpad will pin it to the call screen and apply it to the real-time transcript of the conversation. 

Agents talk to dozens of people before lunch each day. Having names and a running transcript of what was said is going to make each conversation that much easier. Agents aren’t asking people to repeat information, and they can refer back to past conversations with the same client in a click or two. 

Once the call is complete, Dialpad pulls action items out of the call for review. No more scribbling notes or logging into another platform to check boxes. 

Agents can actually share these call highlights with coworkers or supervisors with a couple clicks, leaving a short note for context:

The entire experience seems like a step forward to me. From the agent perspective, everything is centralized, regardless of what channels they are using. The platform minimizes the number of clicks each action takes, which boosts productivity and resolves problems for customers faster.

When an agent clicks to record a call, for example, an automated message plays that says the call is being recorded. This is a big deal, because companies can face steep fines if they don’t let a caller know the conversation is being recorded. Such violations range from $500 – $2,500, or even jail time.

The laws vary in different states and countries, but agents don’t have to remember to say anything with Dialpad. It happens automatically.

You’re completely covered in terms of call routing and administration features. Get as crafty as you want standing up your call center, tie in every channel, integrate your business software, and Dialpad remains easy to manage.

Reviewing call recordings, for example, is much easier for supervisors when every conversation has been transcribed and time-stamped. Add that to the deep analytics features, and you have a phone system that allows team leaders to take action when they see an agent in trouble.

Guy was long on supervisor features that help train agents. In call centers, employee burnout is a reality. Yes, Guy said, people get tired of taking tons of calls, but another factor is that “agents don't get a lot of very specific, detailed feedback about how they can improve.”

With Dialpad, there are so many opportunities to intervene. Supervisors can listen in to live calls, “whisper” to agents so the caller can’t hear, or “barge” in and take over the call. Alternatively, they could listen in and reach out through the chat app.

“If I'm able to monitor my agent live, and I can see that their handle time is really going past eight or nine minutes, I can drop in and listen in,” Guy said, “and maybe I can co-pilot and help land the plane.”

Another way to increase agent productivity (and happiness) is skills-based routing, which assigns calls to agents based on their areas of expertise. Guy said agents get overwhelmed when their supervisor just throws them on the phone and says, “You need to start knowing a lot about everything.” 

You’ll also see that skills-based routing will increase your first call resolution because your agents that are specialized are automatically fielding calls in their area. It’s a real win-win, and you’re not purchasing any extra hardware or writing complex scripts to get this done.

It’s a really deep platform and you should absolutely investigate the whole of what it lets you do. But let’s quickly highlight some of the other standout features you get with Dialpad Call Center:

• Customer sentiment tracking
• Custom hold music
• In-queue callback
• Manager alerts
• Real-time agent recommendations
• Pre-built integrations with Salesforce, Zendesk, Kustomer and more

Dialpad acquired TalkIQ, a company that specialized in speech recognition and natural language processing. It’s just a cut above, and during conversations, Dialpad will pull from your knowledge-base to make real-time recommendations to agents. 

For example, if a customer says they want to apply for a loan, all the relevant SOPs and documents pop right up on the agent’s screen. “Yes, I’d be happy to help with that,” a relatively new agent can say, confidently guiding the customer through each step of the process.

You’re going to have to get in touch with Dialpad to get a price for their call center solution, though there is a three-license minimum for the Pro plan and a 100-license minimum for the Enterprise plan.

Dialpad’s basic business communication service is about $5 less per month than both Nextiva and RingCentral. You still get unlimited talk and text, so this might be a good option even if you’re not just looking to use it for a contact center.

I’d take a hard look at Dialpad if you’re having trouble finding a solution that accommodates all the integrations and channels you want. The company has a rich app marketplace, as well as an open API and Zapier integration to connect virtually any tool teams use today.

Request a free trial of Dialpad contact center today.

#6 – OpenPhone Review — The Best for Single Teams and Sole Proprietors

OpenPhone is designed with freelancers, founders, and entrepreneurs working alone or with small teams. It gives you a separate business number on your mobile phone, but unlike other apps that do the same thing, it has very few limitations.

When we’re talking about “second line” solutions like Google Voice, it’s handy, but primitive. You’re not  giving incoming callers a menu of options or the ability to transfer calls. But with OpenPhone, you get both plus so much more.

Instantly, you can establish a professional business identity—no more handing out your personal number. People who call your number are greeted by an auto attendant that lets them press one for sales, or two to hear business hours. It’s easy to configure and a major step up in terms of how your business appears to prospective customers.

OpenPhone will get you a new local or toll-free number, and their team will help you port your old number over if you want to keep it.

Starting at $10 per month, OpenPhone is less than half the cost of other basic business phone systems. You’re not getting video conferencing, sure, but you have unlimited talk and text on any device.

If you have employees or partners, you can set them up with a business number for $5 per month. They’ll be able to use their own number, but you can also set up shared numbers and inboxes to keep everyone on the same page.

This is a big deal and where OpenPhone really stands apart from the competition. There are much more comprehensive (and expensive) phone systems that don’t let you do this. 

With OpenPhone, you get threaded group messaging to communicate within the team, and the ability for multiple users to call and text from a single number.

As David Sacks, the investor from Craft Ventures who led OpenPhone’s most recent round of funding told VentureBeat, “OpenPhone puts the business phone inside a collaborative app that anyone on the team can use from wherever they are.”

For the busy entrepreneur or small business owner, the end result is that it’s much easier to communicate with people in and out of the organization. Everyone can see what’s happening, what needs to get done, and has the tools to respond immediately.

You’re not getting some watered down system with limited capabilities. Attach files and send SMS, MMS, or even GIFs:

I feel like a lot of the budget-friendly business phone solutions leave a lot to be desired in terms of user experience, but not OpenPhone. Yes, it’s just the bare essentials, but the app’s not freighted by legacy phone technology in the slightest—it’s perfectly designed for small business communication in the 21st century.

As Guy pointed out, smaller companies benefit from having the ability to work on multiple channels. “You have to depend on more of your folks to do more things in the smaller desks,” he said. But it’s not enough to simply open up more channels—employees have to be able to “easily navigate in between them.” 

OpenPhone has a simple, intuitive interface that gives your team the ability to chat with colleagues, or text an answer to a customer who left a voicemail about something they emailed you. It’s all right there.

Some of the other features that are going to make a difference include:

• Auto-texting snippets if you miss call
• Call screening
• Setting business hours and do-not-disturb
• Call recording
• Call transfers and forwarding
• International calling
• Zapier and HubSpot integration

To get the full range of features and integrations, you’ll have to purchase an upgraded plan. 

All OpenPhone plans are flat rate with 1,000 calling minutes and texts per month. It’s billed as “unlimited” but, like many providers, this is within the acceptable use policy, so I wouldn’t use this service to run drip campaigns or anything like that.

Standard includes most of the features I’ve described, including Slack, Zapier, Google Contacts and email integration. If you want the ability to transfer calls, a more complex IVR, or integration with HubSpot you’ll have to go with Premium.

Right now, HubSpot is the only CRM integration, but integrations with Salesforce and Pipedrive are in the works.

OpenPhone is a young company that’s constantly upgrading their service and adding critical features. I like where it’s going, but I already like where it is today more than any other lightweight business phone app.

Try OpenPhone free for the first week and never look back.

What I Looked at to Find the Best Business Phone Systems

All my top recommendations for business phone systems are cloud-based, which means you make calls through the internet instead of a landline. They’re also hosted, which means you sign into a service to use the system rather than build the infrastructure yourself. 

For most companies in 2021, a cloud-based hosted phone system is going to be your best bet. Here’s why:

• Unlimited Calling: Say goodbye to per minute charges for calls or a set block of text messages each month. Every provider I’ve reviewed offers unlimited calling in the US and CA. You’ll also get unlimited texting and video conferencing, if that’s included in your plan. Where there are limits (or free calling in additional countries), I’ve called it out in the reviews. 
• Lower IT responsibility: Your provider will host the phone system, so you have a lot less to worry about in terms of security, maintenance, and keeping the network up 24/7. If you host your own system, you have to buy all the equipment and manage the system yourself.
• Remote work ready: People can sign into the system securely wherever they have internet. If you host your own system, there are a ton of security issues that crop up when you have people trying to access your system from unknown or home networks.
• Cost: Running your phone system through the cloud is cheaper per month than using a landline. There’s also much less equipment to buy, which decreases your initial outlay for a new system—no PBXs, routers, switches, upkeep, or need to have additional wires to your location.
• More functionality and control: You get all the call handling features that you get from a traditional PBX—like call routing, conferencing, and voicemail—but these can all be managed by non-technical people. Admins and managers are going to be able to make changes to the phone system themselves, which was not always possible with older systems.
• Scalability: You can add new users without purchasing additional infrastructure. You can also upgrade plans to access new features without any sort of downtime or migration headaches. 
• Future-ready: Nothing is truly future-proof, but cloud-based phone systems are definitely the direction that things are headed. Each year, these systems get less expensive and more powerful, whereas the traditional PBX/landline setup is becoming harder and harder to accommodate.

You can still make calls over landlines or host your own phone system on premises, but I don’t recommend it for most people. 

Landlines make sense if there is no way to get fast internet to your business—but it’s not really a choice in that case. 

In terms of hosting a system yourself, you 100 percent need IT staff to troubleshoot issues and keep it up 24/7. And even then, pulling your IT team away to resolve issues at all hours might end up being more expensive than getting the phone system you don’t have to think about.

Personally, I can’t imagine going back to a landline, trying to run my business off a second cell phone, or hiring a fleet of techs to manage my phone system for NP Digital. You couldn’t pay me. 

But I’ve got marketing ventures and millions of readers in different continents—my communication challenges aren't the same as everyone else. To help my readers, my team reached out to five experts from different quarters of the business phone system world to gather perspective for prospective buyers.

These conversations confirmed for me that cloud-based phones are the way to go, and I learned some really great ways to approach the different decisions that businesses face. 

No one is using landlines any more, according to Matt, a backend IT veteran. Right now, he handles all the communications for a nonprofit healthcare provider that has several clinics spread across a major American metro area. 

Every dollar counts for these clinics, so one of his first projects was helping them switch over to a cloud-based system. “With voice over IP, you can take your existing internet connection and basically slap a phone system on top of it,” he said. “It's just like a layer,” rather than having to find someone familiar with wiring new cables to the office.

Nor are people managing their own phone system as much as they used to. I spoke with Nikhil, who helps small businesses install open-source phone systems that they can manage themselves. He noted that a lot of people who start out managing their own phone system wind up buying managed plans. 

“It’s the support plus SLAs,” he said. Instead of hiring people, these companies decide to let someone else handle the backend. 

“They don’t have to mess with the technology at all,” said Nikhil, “and they’re basically not seeing any downtime.”

Lawrence works for a VoIP (voice over internet protocol)    provider that actually built their own network. He emphasized how you really need to know what you’re doing if you host your own system on premises. 

For example, you’ll have to deploy the phone system behind a firewall, which regularly causes all sorts of trouble for cloud-phone systems, like one-way audio. “This can be fixed by configuring your firewall correctly,” said Lawrence, “but it can be difficult because most of the problems don’t occur all the time—it’s hard to reproduce issues.”

Every phone system is going to have things go wrong—with a managed plan, you’re not on the hook for solving these mysteries. As Lawrence said, people can stop worrying about the phone system and more about taking calls.

But of course it’s not just making calls any more. Guy talked with my team about the “big shift” in how customers are making contact with businesses. He started working in call centers more than 15 years ago. Now the contact centers he manages connect with customers through talk, text, chat, email, and social media. 

Guy’s question for companies is, “Are you gathering demographics about your customer base, figuring out age-brackets and trends?” 

You can do this easily with VoIP, which gives you a lot of ways to connect your communication data to reporting tools and other business software that lets you harness these insights. Doing this with a traditional phone system would be much more expensive, if it is possible at all.

Terry, who ran the IT backend of call centers rather than administration like Guy, emphasized how painful it is to switch from one phone system to another. “It’s worth your time to really weigh your options before making the switch and making sure that it's not just enough.”

It’s probably a lot smarter to get more than you need today, or to find a system that will more likely accommodate future changes. 

You definitely don’t want to find yourself “in a situation where you're on a system that can't handle what you need it to do from day to day,” Terry said. “Trying to find a quick fix to work around that is very hard.”

Running your business phone system on the internet is definitely the least risky, and likely least expensive way to go. But even among this particular type of business phone system, there are things you want to pay attention to.

Here’s how you decide from among the best options.

Requirements for Cloud-Based Phone Systems

Because you are calling over the internet instead of a landline, you have to make sure your network can handle it. 

Now VoIP doesn’t require a ton of bandwidth on its own, but the connection has to be stable. Any delay or issues with the data being transferred and real-time voice/video communication becomes choppy. 

You’ve probably had your internet bug out during a call. It really ruins a conversation, which is a death blow for sales, customer service, or really anyone using the phone system for business.

So what do you need? 

It’s going to depend on how many people are using the phones (or other channels) and what else is happening on the system. 

Nextiva lets you test your internet speed on their website. You can simulate up to 200 phones, and you’ll find out all the important metrics—upload speed, download speed, latency, jitter, and packet loss.

Ideally, you have (or can get) fiber internet as opposed to cable or DSL. The latter two “high-speed” internet options are fine for home users, but VoIP is simply not going to be reliable for business on DSL. 

Cable is better, but you still could run into issues if you have a decent number of people making calls. “For one office it could work,” Matt said, “but if you have multiple offices, a cable modem is just not going to cut it.”

He had to convince the healthcare clinic he worked for to switch to fiber, which was over three times more expensive than the cable service they were using. Yes, it was going to cost more, but both customers and employees were reporting issues with the current service. Call quality was not great, and there were dropped calls from time to time. 

These are important, timely conversations with patients. Matt and his team prioritized voice traffic on the network, which made sure that calls got as much bandwidth as possible, but it slowed down the internet for all the employees. 

“It was ridiculously slow,” Matt said. Although it allowed the phones to work, “the internet traffic was much, much slower until we put the fiber in. Now we have no complaints.”

With fiber, the upload/download speeds are the same, whereas cable they’re different. You may have 100 down, 40 up. So, if people are uploading a lot of documents or using heavy-weight CRM software, trying to make calls over cable is going to get problematic.  This is what happened to the company Matt worked with. Definitely something to avoid.

One other thing to pay attention to, according to Terry, is trying to run that CRM software plus a phone system on low-end computers. 

“You can run into some issues for a computer that's probably pretty good for browsing the web and doing basic stuff,” he said. But once you integrate the CRM, “all of a sudden it’s stretched to its limits.” 

This can cause problems with connectivity and performance loss, “where you get an echoey call or other weird issues that are pretty hard to deal with.”

My advice is to address the requirements of any system head on, especially if you are integrating powerful software with your phones. 

At some point, any savings from low-end equipment or cheap internet is going to start to blow back on you. “Just as people have factored in electricity or insurance, it's a cost of doing business,” Terry said. “You have to have a strong internet backbone if you want to have that stability and uptime.”

Desk Phones, Headsets, and Softphone Apps

You’re going to hear that some of these business phone systems are “no hardware required.” Is that for real?

It’s true enough that cloud-based systems don’t require routers, switches, PBXs, or even desk phones—you just need the internet. With the options I chose, you can set people up with a softphone, which is just an application that allows people to make calls through your system from a tablet, mobile phone, or their computer with a headset. 

A lot of people are using softphone apps these days, Nikhil said, because of the flexibility. 

“It’s easier to just download the app and connect to the servers,” he said, talking about why cloud-based phone systems are so attractive to customers. Their powerful softphone apps offer “flexibility without the maintenance and troubleshooting.”

Still, you have to think about the environment where these phones will be used. As Terry pointed out, you can’t just get the cheapest headset for every user planning to use a softphone.

Investing in high-quality noise-cancelling microphones is really valuable if you have a bunch of sales folks making calls in the same room. Otherwise, “it's harder to build trust with customers” who can hear the other conversations in the background.

For my part, when someone calls me from a number I don’t recognize and I can tell the speaker is sandwiched between a bunch of other folks blasting out calls, my reaction isn’t positive. 

A little bit of extra money on some good noise cancelling headsets is definitely going to increase your conversion rate, whether you’re serving or selling to customers. RingCentral has a great selection of headsets that work really well with their system. So does Nextiva. 

The other big advantage to softphone apps is that they are much easier to configure. For the most part, you are just signing in to access an account—so you can work from anywhere, and your number follows you around. 

Desk phones, on the other hand, “create more headaches for me,” Matt explained. “As people move around, their extension follows the phone, not them.” When staff get shuffled around from one health clinic to another, Matt has to re-provision them on different servers. 

For employees that just use the softphone app, it’s easier because they have a single extension, “and that extension follows them no matter what office they go to, because it only requires an internet connection.”

But some offices still want desk phones, retail stores need wall mounts, hotels have to have a phone in every room, and so on. If you are in the position of needing so-called “hard phones,” there are a few things to pay attention to.

“I would really look at something that supports open standards,” Lawrence said. If you go with phones from certain providers—like Cisco, for example—those phones are only going to work on a Cisco system. 

On the other hand, Lawrence explained that open-standards phones, “can be used with most PBXs that exist, and you can easily switch from one provider to the other.” This is going to give you a lot more flexibility and control, not to mention being better positioned for an uncertain future.

The other big thing that Lawrence said buyers should pay attention to is the provisioning system. You want to make sure that the phone manufacturer offers a provisioning and redirection service that makes it simple to add new phones. “So if you have to configure hundreds or even thousands of phones, you can just plug them in, and they will work.”

Providers like Ooma can be a great choice for companies that still want phones. As people needed to work remotely, folks with Ooma office just took their desk phones and plugged them in at home. Everything worked fine—calls were still secure and all the routing features worked like people were still at the office.

For the most part, the providers I selected will let you keep using whatever phones you have. If you already have IP phones, great. If you have analog phones, most providers will sell you an adapter that will let them call through the internet. 

In terms of manufacturers, the experts consistently cited Poly and Yealink for consistently delivering phones that have good voice quality, are easy to use, and work well with a lot of other technology. Poly (formerly Polycom) received especially good reviews from the experts as a source for conference phones. 

As Matt said, “they just seem to have better microphones.” The standard base conference phones work pretty well for a small room, but you may want to get additional microphones for a room that’s large enough for 12 or more people.

If you still use fax machines, look for a provider that offers that specifically. Fax machines use a different modem than phones, so you can’t just layer it on top of VoIP. Providers like RingCentral and Ooma have all the adapters and capabilities you need for stress-free faxing.

In the end, cloud-based business phone systems require less hardware than traditional set ups—it’s no contest. But at the same time, you may need headsets, desk phones, and conference phones, and you want to get high-quality equipment.

Voice and Unified Communications

Other channels are gaining ground, but voice is still a critical component of business communications.  “I just want to speak with an actual person,” is a feeling we’ve all had as customers. But it’s simply not enough to only have voice communications these days.

A lot of the solutions I like give you multiple channels with your service. OpenPhone and Grasshopper both give you texting with voice to connect with customers. RingCentral, Nextiva, Oooma, and Dialpad support other channels as well—like chat, video, fax, and email—which is why these providers are able to offer truly unified communications.

This is ideal for reps, service agents, and other employees because all of their communications are centralized in a single platform—no switching accounts, forgetting passwords, or losing track of conversations.

People simply aren’t using the phone as much as they used to—although it is still really important—and increasingly using other channels. As Lawrence noted, new research has shown that younger people are especially hesitant. “They'd much rather go to a website and click on a chat button than pick up the phone,” he said.

And it’s not just Millennials who appreciate other opportunities to connect with companies. Over 15 years, Guy watched the call centers he managed become contact centers. He’s noticed multiple age brackets interested in chat, text, and making contact through social media platforms. He said the latter is “definitely something that you want to look at when you're upgrading, changing, or purchasing your business phone system.”

Every business is different, and Guy encouraged companies to use surveys and outbound campaigns to get feedback about how they’d like to make contact. “You have to know your customers’ tendencies and hone in on what they want to do.”

But it’s not just consumer preferences driving the shift towards unified communications. For the healthcare clinics Michael supports, the automatic texting feature is an important complement to phone service. He explained, “Once the appointment is made, we can then automatically text patients, reminding them of their appointment, as well as any future appointments.” 

This ability to automate texting is an advantage to any business that books appointments, confirms orders, or wants to update customers about new offers.

Staying competitive is likely going to mean being available on more channels for your customers. “Make no mistake,” said Guy, “You want to open up other options in order to communicate.” It’s going to come at an added cost, but there wasn’t a person I talked to who thought that the phone alone was going to make companies fit for survival in the 21st century.

Now, what if you’re a company that just needs voice as a way to communicate internally? Or be generally reachable for things like deliveries and meetings? If that’s all you need, the benefit of the trend towards unified communications is that you can get a basic phone system for a steal.

OpenPhone and Grasshopper are limited to talk and text, but they are going to cost considerably less than unified communications products. 

You can also go with basic plans from some of the other providers, which include excellent voice capabilities for a bargain. RingCentral and Nextiva are great for this, and if you ever want to add more channels, it’s as simple as upgrading your plan. 

Integrating Phones With Your Business

A cloud-based phone system can integrate with your other business software. This is an opportunity you should absolutely take advantage of.

Many of the best hosted options include pre-built integrations with popular apps, calendars, CRMs, ERPs, and other tools. This is going to streamline employees' daily workflows and make staying organized so much easier.

Within a CRM like Salesforce, for example, your employees will get click-to-dial capabilities. This saves so much time on every call. On top of that, all call recordings, notes, purchase histories, and so on are stored automatically with the customer account, which makes it much easier to track down info later.

Lawrence said that the CRM integration was far and away the most valuable aspect of their phone system for most customers. 

“When a customer calls, you don't just see a number,” he said, you see everything that’s in their CRM profile. “Who they are, what kind of services they subscribe to, when they last called, and what the call was about.”

Say there’s an ongoing issue and the customer has called five times. The agent picking up that call can see what’s happened already. The customer doesn’t have to re-explain themselves—which everyone hates doing. 

It puts your customer at ease to know that the person they’re speaking with knows what’s going on, and the agent is on a much stronger footing to help.

That's just the basics in terms of what CRM integration can do, and I haven’t even mentioned what’s possible with other business apps. 

Chatbots can start conversations and gather information before switching the conversation over to a relevant agent. Integrating your phone system with your knowledge base software will automatically provide agents with the right script and information, or provide your customer a fast answer without an agent having to pick up the phone.

So there’s a lot you can do, but as a buyer, here’s what you should be thinking about.

Unless you have a team of developers, you are going to want to stick with the pre-built integrations from providers like RingCentral, Dialpad, and Nextiva. 

Yes, some vendors offer an open API that lets you build out your own integrations, but getting these to work properly (and efficiently) is going to be a lot of trial and error. 

This is something where you’d want to use a hosted phone system, Nikhil told us. He has a lot of experience helping companies build out their own phone systems. “With open source it’s kind of a black box,” he said, “so use a managed service provider if they want the integration.”

Finding a phone system that integrates with the tools you use is a critical consideration. But it’s not enough to just confirm that a vendor offers pre-built integrations. 

“Some of them are easy and out of the box,” Terry said. But it’s not always the case. Sometimes, “you have to do a lot of complicated development work, or just jump through a lot of hoops to make systems communicate with each other the way you want.”

You really need to test the integration to see how it drives. But how many integrations are you going to demo? That’s a lot of work, time, and effort.

Terry said it’s definitely worth your time to reach out to your account rep and ask for a reference. If you use Zendesk, for example, ask your rep for the contact of another company that’s about the same size as yours and uses the service platform in a similar fashion. 

“You can have a pretty candid conversation with someone in the exact same position that you’re in,” said Terry. “Generally they’re pretty real about what works and what doesn't work.”

Securing Your Business Phone System

Security is one of the big reasons I’m such a fan of hosted business phone systems. 

When you host the system yourself, you’re responsible for securing everything. This is hard enough if everyone is working in the same office, and much more difficult if people are working from home, multiple branches, or signing in from unprotected networks like coffee shops and hotels.

Why not go with a hosted solution? All of the providers I picked handle security so you don’t have to.

You don’t have to worry about provisioning the phones correctly, ensuring that calls are encrypted, and that your phone system is hardened to outside attacks. 

I really agree with Lawrence, who said that one of the biggest questions you have to ask about any potential provider is, “Do they offer a secure connection for the phones that are connecting to that system?”

This is a must for me. Toll fraud is a serious issue. Nearly every expert I talked with highlighted the importance of security for business phone systems because each year, there are millions of dollars lost.

“There are always systems on the internet that are looking for vulnerable  VoIP systems, and those are actively being abused,” said Lawrence. It’s happened to some of Lawrence’s clients, but fortunately his company has systems to detect and prevent that behavior. “Ideally what you want is a provider that has the phone system in their network, that can do the maintenance and security of that system,” he said. 

This removes the responsibility of security from your plate. All you are on the hook for are the standard security considerations when doing anything online: using strong passwords, enabling two-factor authentication, de-provisioning old users, and so on

Because he’s doing the IT backend for a healthcare provider, Matt has to be ultra-conscious of security and privacy. A single HIPAA violation can cost thousands of dollars or even result in jail time. 

But because Matt uses a secure business phone system, there is a lot less to worry about. “It’s impossible for someone to barge in on a call without somebody knowing what’s going on,” he said. “So there’s no concern of a HIPAA violation.”

For companies with compliance and security concerns, going with a hosted business phone system is going to give you the protection you need out of the box. 

All communications that go through RingCentral, for instance, are protected by TLS and SRTP to prevent a bad actor from listening in. They also manage all the firewalls, session border controllers, fraud analytics, and systems hardening. It’s like you get enterprise-level security simply by signing into their service.

If you deploy on premises or host your own solution in the cloud, all the backend IT legwork is on you. “You're responsible for securing that system,” Lawrence explained, “making sure that communications with the phones are secure, and that no outside actor is abusing your phone system for any kind of reason.”

Security is critical, and you will have a lot less to think about if your users are signing into a cloud-based system rather than trying to connect to a traditional on premises system.

Summary

To say you have lots of options to consider for a business phone system would be a drastic understatement. 

But, by using this guide, you’ll be equipped to make the right decision based on your needs. Use the perspective from the experts I spoke with to round out your search and make sure you’ve considered every angle that’s going to impact the experience for your employees and customers.

By going with one of the above systems, you know you are getting a secure solution that’s built for the way the world works today. There’s no equipment to purchase, and all but the lightest options will work fine with your existing infrastructure.

In a market that’s saturated with phone systems for businesses, I really like the seven options I reviewed:

1. Nextiva — Best for remote teams
2. RingCentral — Best for integrating phones with your business
3. Ooma — Best for companies that want deskphones
4. Grasshopper — Best for businesses that need fewer than 10 lines
5. Dialpad — The only way to deploy a contact center in 10 minutes
6. OpenPhone — Best for single teams and sole proprietors

So start your search there, and use the buying guide I outlined. This will steer you in the right direction. 

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: Best Business Phone Systems
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/best-business-phone-systems/
Published Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

Do you want to skip the read and get right to my top pick? The best VOIP phone services for most people are Nextiva, Ringcentral, or Ooma.

Simple tasks used to be really hard with old phone systems. You probably had to call your vendor to re-route a call path or set an employee up with a secure at-home workstation.

With the best VoIP phone services, these actions take a few clicks.

Buying VoIP for your business is going to save you money over a traditional phone line. And if you are using a clunky VoIP service from an ancient provider, you may be able to switch to something sleeker without losing anything except the frustration.

To write a really helpful post for my readers, my team got in touch with leaders who have used VoIP in different ways. You can find about 80 percent of what you need to know about VoIP anywhere on the web—here’s the 20 percent you can’t find anywhere else.

We spoke with:

• Gregg, who manages IT services for a living. He knows the good and bad of different VoIP options and helps businesses stay protected from hacks.
• Jason, who has been working in call centers for nearly 30 years and just bought VoIP for his enterprise organization. He’s attuned to what’s important for your employees, whether they’re remote or in an office.
• Makan, who’s set up dozens of high-volume telemarketing teams. He’s learned how to reduce the risk of regulatory fines and identify top performers in an industry with exceptionally high turnover.
• Sarkar, who manages sales teams in the B2B SaaS space. He walked us through how to sync VoIP and CRM software with the fewest possible headaches.

Look, I know what works for a company like mine. By speaking with a range of experts, I figured my team could help more types of buyers. 

There are companies looking to outfit offices in 20 countries. Others have to protect patient data. Some folks just want to stop using their personal mobile number for work. 

Here are the seven best VoIP phone service providers you can start using right away. After the reviews, you’ll find an in-depth buyer’s guide.

#1 – Nextiva Review — The Best for Offices with Work-From-Home Employees

I hear a lot about the trends of working from home, but I don’t think anyone can say for sure what “office life” is going to look like two or three years from now. If you want your teams to stay functional no matter which way the wind blows, Nextiva is a solid choice.

It’s cloud-based VoIP, so your employees can come into the office, set up a desk at home, or use their phone on the go. Unlike an on-premises phone system, employees can use their phone without a VPN because they’re calling through Nextiva.

So, you have way less to worry about with security—which is definitely on the minds of managers who have people calling from hotels, coffee shops, and their home network.

The experts my team spoke with categorized it as a true plug-and-play system for businesses that want a dial tone without IT headaches. If your system is built on ten phones or fewer, you will have very little trouble getting Nextiva installed. 

One thing that Jason pointed out, however, was that you’ll need to put some thought into compliance if you plan to take credit card numbers over the phone. But, for the most part, security is handled by Nextiva because everything is routed through their cloud.

Nextiva can scale to hundreds of phones if need be. There will be some backend configuration to get everything going, but Nextiva will help you deploy with a guided installation process.

And unlike some of the other companies that offer this type of flexibility, Nextiva can outfit your entire office. Whatever your setup, you’ll be able to transition it to Nextiva’s modern platform. 

Level up your business phone by connecting it with email, text, and video—or centralize every channel within a single window for your employees.

All the call handling and user administration features you’d expect are included. And when I say they are easy to use, check out the Call Flow Builder that lets visualize how routing is set up:

It can be tricky to configure auto attendants in some platforms, but it’s drag-and-drop easy with Nextiva. 

The company has done a lot to make everything as easy as possible on end users. If you’re wondering whether or not you have the necessary internet speed at your office, you can test it right now on Nextiva’s website. Simulate the traffic required for two or 200 phones. You’ll get info on speed, but also jitter and everything that goes into whether or not you can reliably make calls.

You can also use the site to test the speed of remote workers who need to be on call, which Jason highly recommended. If their home network doesn’t support VoIP, you may be looking at an expensive hiring blunder.

Nextiva offers 24/7 support for every plan. That’s not typical, especially for VoIP at such an affordable price:

• Essential: starting at $18.95 per month per user
• Professional: starting at $22.95 per month per user
• Enterprise: starting at $32.95 per month per user
• Ultimate: starting at $57.95 per month per user

These are the annual prices—it’s a little bit more per user to pay month to month, but you don’t have to sign a contract.

The Essential plan is going to work for many teams. It includes unlimited voice and video calling, a free local and toll-free number, and 1,500 toll-free minutes. That’s a lot more than you are going to get with other entry-level plans.

Unlike RingCentral, there’s no user cap for the Essential plan. This means you can offer more people unlimited voice and video at a low price, rather than having to upgrade once you hit 20 users.

For conference calling and business SMS, you’ll need the Professional plan. This comes with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk integration. Essential only has integration with Outlook and Google Contacts.

At the Enterprise tier, you get integrations with CRM software and single sign-on, which is a huge boon to remote workers. 

Nextiva One is the company’s omnichannel solution. If customers reach out to you through a variety of channels in addition to phones, this might be a good idea. 

Your employees can see all communication with each account, which is really helpful if people are logging help desk tickets, chatting, reaching out on social media, and so on. 

Jason argued that omnichannel also makes administrators' lives easier. “I don’t have 10 systems to manage,” he described to us, “it’s all within the same system.” 

You can coordinate ecommerce with a call center or tie multiple brick and mortar stores into a single system.

You also have one bill as opposed to dozens and you’re not chasing down information across multiple platforms. If a customer has an issue, you can go back through the entire record quickly, regardless of how they got in touch.

Organization is just easier with Nextiva. Staying on the same page with customers and your employees is as simple as logging into the system, no matter where you are.

For teams that don’t have an office to coordinate activity, Nextiva is the best VoIP solution. 

It’s a product that employees new and old can start using immediately on whatever device they have. Should they ever have an issue, Nextiva’s reputable customer service is there to provide support.

If you are looking at the way features break down in the different packages and you don’t find a perfect fit, just reach out to Nextiva. You can purchase any feature a la carte. 

Build your system, your way, in less time with Nextiva. Get in touch for a seven-day free trial of the Essential package, or a demo of any other package they offer.

#2 – RingCentral Review — The Best for High-Volume Outbound Calling

RingCentral gives you unlimited calling, texting, and video conferencing at a competitive price. If you just need the phones and texting, you can get an even better deal.

Forget about per-minute charges and set up employees with VoIP that’s easy to use. For call centers, customer service, sales—anyone who has people on the phone constantly will appreciate RingCentral. This is especially true if you have to train new employees all the time.

First off, they’ll be able to use the interface. It’s intuitive to anyone who has used a computer. Administrators and managers will find they can shorten the time it takes to turn rookie hires into skilled ambassadors for your company.

“You save a lot of money because you can identify hires that aren't doing a good job and wasting their time,” Makan told us. He’s set up a lot of telemarketing call centers with RingCentral and has really valued the ability to “tell right away who's worth the money.”

The ability to track calls, KPIs, and listen back to recordings was like night and day for him compared to working on a landline. Teams can listen back to calls that went well (or poorly) to get a sense of how to better capitalize on each opportunity.

The reporting features aren’t going to take a data scientist to glean insights from. Find your top performers and figure out what they’re doing. Identify people who aren’t a good fit and let them go.

I hear a lot of marketing word salad like “this tool optimizes performance,” all the time. RingCentral walks the walk. 

“You can actually predict your sales,” Makan said, “I know it's difficult to fathom, but it’s true.”

He was able to figure out that 2,500 calls lead to one listing. This told him the number of minutes people needed to be on the phone in order to stay profitable. Over time, he could see how many listings an employee should be generating in their first month, second quarter, and so on.

You’re likely going to measure different KPIs, but it’s the same idea. With the kind of visibility that RingCentral provides, you can distill the numbers to simple metrics that hold employees accountable. You know ahead of time what your sales are going to look like, and you can scale up or down accordingly.

There’s a lot about RingCentral that’s well suited for large-scale calling. Admins don’t have to be IT wizards to add new users and give them access to specific resources. They’ll be able to provision new hires quickly. When someone leaves, they’ll be able to switch around accounts and recycle the number, so you don’t wind up paying for lines you're not using.

If you have turnover—as many high-volume calling occupations do—you need to be mindful of your database integrity. RingCentral makes it easy to limit access to resources and revoke it if need be. 

You're definitely going to be using a CRM (or some form of database) to call at scale. RingCentral integrates with a lot of them. You want to keep that information private.

Another liability for call centers that RingCentral helps you navigate is compliance, which is crucial if you are making a lot of cold calls or using an auto dialer. There’s a TCPA safe dialer, which helps agents avoid bringing a “robo-call” lawsuit down on your company. Instead of worrying about messing something up, they can focus on the person they are talking to.

The DNC list features are also easy to use. Integrate with third-party tools to constantly update your list, and quickly show your employees how to maintain your own internal list.

RingCentral is HIPAA compliant, which means the standard for privacy and security is incredibly high. Fines for HIPAA violations are very steep, and that’s not the worst that could happen.

Selecting from RingCentral’s range of packages, you can replace your phones with VoIP and save a little money or completely outfit an omnichannel call center. 

RingCentral MVP (formerly RingCentral Office) has four tiers to choose from:

• Essentials: starting at $19.99 per month per user
• Standard: starting at $27.99 per month per user
• Premium: starting at $34.99 per month per user
• Ultimate: starting at $49.99 per month per user

These are the prices if you sign up for a year of service, which reflect a 33% discount on the monthly rate.

The Essentials plan is capped at 20 users. You get unlimited talk and text, as well as document sharing, which can be helpful for sharing sales and customer service scripts. You also get team messaging, which is especially helpful in the days where not everyone is coming into a physical office.

With Standard, you get unlimited fax, video conferencing and integrations with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365. There’s no cap on users, either. 

But if you are going for high-volume calling, I really recommend getting Premium. You get the CRM integration that is so important for dialing into your metrics and communicating effectively at scale.

At $10 above the average cost of VoIP, Premium is a steal. Remember, that VoIP average is for voice only and with RingCentral MVP you’re getting texting, video, and advanced call handling features that other “average” plans do not include. 

Managers will be able to listen in on live calls and “whisper” advice. The employee can hear them, the caller can not. From what I found, features like this from other vendors were usually reserved for plans that cost upwards of $50. So in that sense, I’d consider RingCentral MVP well below the average price-wise.

RingCentral offers contact center software, as well, which will unify your communications. Your agents will be able to see a complete record of a customer's history. When did they call, when did they chat? It’s all right there. You’ll have to get in touch with RingCentral for Contact Center pricing.

This is my number one pick for people who have to make a ton of calls. RingCentral helps you protect yourself from a number of the liabilities that come with outreach at scale. It also gives you the viability and tools to stay efficient and maximize each employees’ ability to contribute.

Try RingCentral for free today.

#3 – Ooma Office Review — The Best for Adding VoIP to Existing SMB Phone Systems

If you are holding off on replacing that aging phone system, Ooma can help you install business-class VoIP with minimal disruption to your work.

Any phone you have that’s still working—analog or IP—is going to hook right into your new Ooma system. You can also buy phones from them at a great price and they will be preconfigured, ready to go out of the box.

Ooma Office is going to work fine for most users, coming with 35 VoIP capabilities and a really powerful mobile app. Employees can make calls and collaborate with their colleagues in the app, whether they are in the office or on-the-go.

One thing Gregg pointed out was how expensive it can get to customize your setup if you have to pay per extension. With Ooma, every user gets a number of free extensions: one for conferences, one for online faxing, and one for a Virtual Receptionist.

Virtual Receptionist is Ooma’s term for an auto attendant. You can set it to play custom messages about business hours, let callers dial by name, select a preferred language, or route the caller to another extension.

With other vendors—especially ones that cost as little as Ooma—you often wind up paying extra to enable online faxing. Some VoIP phone service providers don’t even accommodate it. 

When Jason sent his business requirement document to vendors, “two companies bailed out right away” because they weren’t able to set up fax machines. Most of the other vendors told him “they don’t really do that,” but they would try in order to get the business.

With Ooma, each of your users can set up their own fax extension for free. Problem solved.

When it comes to integrating VoIP with existing equipment, Ooma minimizes the steps you have to take and maximizes your flexibility. Connect to Ooma Office via WiFi, ethernet, or use the base station to get analog devices on board.

Think of it as a cloud-based VoIP solution that’s really good at accommodating your existing equipment. It might take some time to configure a large office, but the administrator portal is straightforward. It’s not the prettiest interface of all time, but it’s stupid simple to use.

While Ooma offers solutions for enterprise, their VoIP phone services for small businesses really stand out from the pack. There are no contracts, affordable pricing, and the customer service is fantastic.

Usually to get the best price on VoIP, you need to sign up for a year at least. Ooma’s price is what it is. For small business, Ooma pricing breaks down into two tiers:

• Ooma Office: starting at $19.95 per month per user
• Ooma Office Pro: starting at $24.95 per month per user

Upgrading to Pro, you get the desktop app, video conferencing, call recording, enhanced call blocking, and voicemail transcription. You’ll also be able to host conference calls of up to 25 people, whereas Ooma Office has a limit of 10.

You don’t have the choice of selectively upgrading users with Ooma Office—it’s all employees on one plan or all employees on another. But, at just $5 per user to upgrade, you’re still falling in the average range for VoIP.

And, if you upgrade, you can set people up on their computers with a softphone, which means you have less hardware to buy. 

You can avoid buying phones without upgrading by having people call from the mobile app (which is included with Ooma office), though Gregg warned us that VoIP can be hard on a cell phone. “Yes, you save money because you're not buying physical equipment,” he said, “but it can drain the battery life right out of the device.”

Transition to the cloud at your own pace. Keep your equipment and manage it yourself with way less work than a traditional set up. Get a quote, sign up with Ooma, and start saving money today.

#4 – Phone.com Review — The Most Affordable Professional-Grade VoIP

Phone.com is a smart choice for businesses that are looking for budget-friendly VoIP. You can have unlimited calling or pay less for a set block of minutes each month.

One of the really cost-effective features of Phone.com is that you can mix and match plans. Give the sales team unlimited plans and save money on each employee that only uses the phones occasionally.

And, with the Basic plan, you’re still getting most of the standard VoIP features like call handling, auto attendants, hold music and so on. You’ll have to upgrade to get HIPAA-compliant video conferencing, for example, but you can host up to 10 people in a regular session with Basic.

With most other vendors, you have to upgrade the plan for all your users. Phone.com can really help you keep costs down by giving users the features they need. This is one of those licensing irregularities that Gregg told us about, where it can work out well if you know what you’re doing.

Phone.com lets you pick what you need. Call recording and inbound faxing is extra, though you’ll be able to send faxes from your phone with any plan. 

Nextiva and RingCentral are a little bit more robust, especially when it comes to reporting and analytics. In terms of CRM integration, Phone.com is limited to AllProWebTools and Zoho.

But some businesses just need a reliable phone with call handling capabilities they can manage themselves. Phone.com does more than that, and it’s just enough cheaper than those other options to net a sizable savings.

Offer your customers the ability to text when they have questions. Phone.com keeps all of your employees' messages organized. Come for the phone system, stay for the messaging.

To use IP phones, you’ll have to be on an upgraded plan. The company offers really great prices on popular phones of all styles. You can use what you’ve got, too, as Phone.com supports a range of hardware.

Using your own equipment will definitely lessen the initial outlay, but in talking with Gregg we learned that older phones can get hacked. Just make sure that the processor isn’t too far behind what Phone.com is trying to sell you, and get ready to do some of the configuration yourself. You really can just plug and play if you buy equipment through Phone.com.

Pricing for Phone.com is low across the board:

• Basic: starting at $10.39 per user each month
• Plus: starting at $15.99 per user each month
• Pro: starting at $23.99 per user each month

To get these prices, you’ll have to sign up for an annual subscription, which saves you 20 percent of the month-to-month price.

Basic comes with 300 minutes, which are pooled for all your users. This just means Basic users share minutes instead of having to worry about going over individually each month. 

Each user also gets 1,000 pooled text segments. A segment is limited to 160 characters, which is way less than most phones can send in a normal text message these days. So it’s not 1,000 texts per month, unless you like to keep things brief.

Volume licensing brings the price down, both for users and for additional phone numbers. With 25 or more users, the price of Basic drops down to $8.99, Plus to $14.99, and Pro to $21.99. 

Considering that Pro can hold its own with many of the call center VoIP solutions I’ve looked at, it’s worth checking out if you need a lot of phones on a tight budget. With HIPAA-compliant voice and video, it could be a good option for medical practices looking to support telehealth.

You really have to get input from every person and department using the phone system. Figure out the technology and functionality you need to support. If Phone.com fits the bill, it’s going to be a smaller one than you’ll find anywhere else.

Phone.com gives you a low price that scales up much better than OpenPhone, Grasshopper, and other lightweight VoIP solutions.

I wouldn’t use it to set up a call center—you’re going to have to fully rely on your CRM for all but the most basic reporting and analytics—but you’ll be able to get plenty of phones set up for normal business needs. 

If you are thinking about cutting the cord with your traditional phone line, this option is going to save you the most money. Sign up with Phone.com today, no contract necessary.

#5 – Grasshopper Review — The Best If You Need More Extensions than Phone Lines

Grasshopper is a great option for small companies that want to establish a professional identity without buying a very complex system. 

I’m thinking about the restaurant owner that wants numbers for a few locations without having to pay for a traditional phone line going to each one. Or maybe the law firm that wants a few numbers with lots of extensions.

If you outline your business requirements and it turns out you only need the essentials, don’t pay more for things you don’t need. Grasshopper is going to set you up with everything you need for one flat rate each month.

You’ll get a suite of features designed for the daily work of a modern business, without the clutter aimed at larger organizations. There’s no need to upgrade just to access a particular feature. Every Grasshopper plan comes with unlimited calling, as well as every feature the company offers, such as setting up a phone tree, personalized greetings, call routing, and more.

There are even a few features, like instant response, that you won’t always get with other providers. If you miss a call, Grasshopper will automatically send a text message.

Simultaneous call handling and call forwarding lets you pass off calls to teammates when you’re busy. Voicemail transcription makes it easier to catch up on calls after hours.

Manage everything I just listed directly from the mobile app. Route calls exactly where they need to go—it’s just a few swipes on your cell.

You also get unlimited extensions with Grasshopper Small Businesses plans, and several free extensions with their other plans. Route calls to other numbers, mobile devices, informational extensions to answer FAQs, or a polite out-of-office voicemail. 

Getting charged for extensions was something Gregg said people should watch out for in the contact they sign. The total cost can “go up real quick” if you have to pay for an extra line just to set up a voicemail extension.

With Grasshopper, you don’t have to worry as much. The entry level plan comes with one number and three extensions—perfect for the sole proprietor or founder to greet their callers with a professional menu and connect them with the right person.

Let’s take a closer look at your three options with Grasshopper.

• Solo: starting at $26 per month for one number and three extensions
• Partner: starting at $44 per month for three numbers and six extensions
• Small Business: starting at $80 per month for five numbers and unlimited extensions

As I said, it’s really just the basics. There’s no CRM integration or call recording, so think about Grasshopper as a way to replace your phone system rather than revolutionize it.

That said, if you’ve been trying to work magic with free VoIP like Google Voice, the ability to set up call routing may feel downright revolutionary.

It’s also going to cost less and be way easier to set up than it’s more robust competitors. Toll-free numbers might take a day to start working, but typically your number is ready to go when you sign up.

If you want to add an extra line, it’s $10 per month. That’s a lot more than Phone.com for extra lines, which is why I don’t recommend Grasshopper if you need a ton. Plus, the interface isn’t built for handling a big system anyway.

But for the small office, it’s perfect. It doesn’t matter where you or your business partners work—people can be out in the field when a call comes into the office, or in a different city altogether. Grasshopper makes it easy to ensure your calls get where they need to go.

Try Grasshopper for free.

#6 – PhoneBurner Review — The Best Off-The-Shelf VoIP for Sales Teams

PhoneBurner is ready to rock. Are you?

This product is a little different than the other VoIP options on my list. It’s a sales engagement platform, so it’s not designed to replace your phone system. Rather it’s designed to give outbound reps the perfect tool for prospecting, selling, and closing deals.

Is the team remote? Do people like to work out of the office? Not a drama. Your users can phone in from anywhere and start working through your hottest contacts.

It contains a CRM and auto dialer software built into the platform. You’re not trying to make technology play nice—it’s all set up when you open the box. You can integrate with your own CRM if you want, or simply import your leads and start making up to 80 calls an hour.

I don’t know what your reps’ pace is now, but 80 calls per hour is smoking. There’s no “telemarketer” delay when the call connects, just crisp conversation like it’s over a phone line.

And, because the CRM is tied in, reps can see exactly who they’re talking to, what stage of the pipeline they’re in, and any notes left in the account.

Sarkar said that pretty much everyone in the B2B SaaS game is telephoning through sales engagement platforms now. The auto dialer makes your agents far more efficient by eliminating the busy work of dialing. “You barely have to click anything,” he said.

With PhoneBurner, you’re not manual dialing, tabbing through pages to find a number, or copy/pasting emails frantically before the next call. Instead, you can drop voicemails without waiting for the beep, send an appropriate email, or move a prospect to another folder with a single click.

For Makan, auto dialer software was crucial for large-scale outreach in telemarketing, but it was a pain to set up. You have to specifically program the CRM and the auto dialer. From there, it’s expensive to get the CRM software tuned to your industry. He mentioned one popular CRM option that cost $25,000 and $50,000, “just to get you all set up with the phones.”

With PhoneBurner, a lot of that work is off your plate. It’s not going to groom your database for you, but the fundamental CRM/auto dialer integration is already in place.

The company takes it a step further by offering one of the most comprehensive onboarding packages that I have seen for any product. Their team works with you on goals before you set up, runs you through a test session, and then trains your team on how to use the platform.

You also learn how to build reports so you can track performance. It’s easy to do this wrong, on any platform, but your PhoneBurner advisor is walking companies through the process, week in week out. They’ll get you set up with dashboards, leaderboards, and all of it is going to be customized to your goals.

Leads are distributed automatically, based on rules you set. Toggle between pre-set configurations, like Round Robin or First Come First Served, or customize your own settings. Make sure leads get to the right agent every time, with only a small amount of work on the manager’s part. 

PhoneBurner isn’t cheap, but remember that this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison with the other VoIP providers because you are getting the auto dialer and CRM built in. 

• Standard: starting at $126 per user each month
• Professional: starting at $152 per user each month
• Premium: starting at $169 per user each month

These are the prices if you sign up for a year, which are discounted 15 percent compared to paying monthly. You're getting unlimited dial minutes, which is obviously important if your reps are making a thousand calls each week. With PhoneBurner, that’s not hard to do.

Call recording is stored free for 30 days with the Standard plan, 60 days with Professional, and there’s no limit for Premium plans. There are also limits on the number of contacts you can store, which start at 10,000 on the Standard plan.

You’ll need to upgrade to Professional to get softphone capabilities. It’s not a big deal if you already have phones, but I imagine that’ll bother folks that want to use their tablet or computer.

With Premium, you get a dedicated inbound line, as well as some of the handling features. I would not recommend using PhoneBurner for serious inbound traffic—the other VoIP options are going to be way cheaper—but some teams will appreciate having a custom voicemail and the ability to forward calls.

On average, a rep can make 233 percent more calls with PhoneBurner than they can with a regular line. Does the math pencil out for you? For Makan, it took 2,500 calls to generate a listing. What’s your metric?

If doubling or tripling your rep’s productivity sounds like a good idea, start a free trial with PhoneBurner today.

#7 – OpenPhone Review — The Best Way to Run Your Business From a Mobile Phone

Jason warned us about going with the “newest and cheapest option,” so I was a little bit skeptical when I heard about OpenPhone. It’s only a few years old and it’s $10 per month.

That’s way less than the average cost of VoIP, cheaper even than some of the “budget” options I looked at.

But the more I discovered about the company, the more I liked it. OpenPhone is new, but certainly not fly-by-night. It’s a recent graduate of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that helped launch AirBnB, DoorDash, DropBox, and Reddit.

Like those companies, OpenPhone has come to market with a new set of assumptions about how people are living and working. Instead of trying to replace a business phone system, as many Cloud-PBX’s claim to do, OpenPhone simply turns your mobile into a better phone for business.

It’s really aimed at the modern startup or small business, especially if the owner is one of those people who steers the ship from their phone. You’ll get a business number for your mobile phone. Go local, toll-free, or keep your own number, you choose. Porting your old number is 100% free.

Set up an auto-attendant so callers can get the information they need and connect with the right person. Establish a professional identity for your business in minutes. You’ll be reaching people on a stronger footing because you always know if an incoming call is business or personal.

There’s no hardware necessary and no more giving out your mobile number. Keep your privacy. Get numbers for your team and let them keep their privacy, too.

Where OpenPhone really steps away from the crowd is the shared inbox. You can have multiple people call and text from the same number. They can even make calls from that number at the same time. 

A lot of phone systems don’t include text messaging, let alone allow multiple users text in the same thread. With OpenPhone, you can text the way you normal humans do:

Tag users with @mentions to bring the right people into the conversation quickly. Group messaging is really helpful for collaboration, especially since you can send files, videos, and GIFs.

You’re just not limited with texting the way you are on a lot of other VoIP phone services. You can send snippets from templates as part of a campaign or auto-reply to missed calls and texts.

Managing contacts isn’t hard either, as you get limited CRM integration with Google Contacts or via Zapier. You can use HubSpot for a more robust CRM solution as well, which allows you to store recordings and view message histories with ease. 

Keep in mind this is not going to be a full-blown CRM solution the likes of which I’ve described with PhoneBurner and others. You’ll need to get into HubSpot to make changes to contacts, for example.

Because it’s a young company, there will be additional and deeper integrations “in the future,” which I know can be frustrating. But if you are a young company as well, HubSpot’s free CRM software plus OpenPhone is just about the cheapest way I can think of to deliver the essential benefits of connecting VoIP and your CRM. 

• Standard: starting at $10 per user each month
• Premium: starting at $25 per user each month
• Enterprise: contact sales

Standard has most of what I’ve mentioned already, along with unlimited calling and texting. Bear in mind that it’s unlimited within the fair usage policy. According to the terms of service, for the Standard plan, you’re looking at 1,000 texts and calling minutes per month. 

Though it’s not truly unlimited, that’s pretty generous. Phone.com caps their entry level plan at 300 minutes and 1,000 text segments, which is likely a smaller number of texts.

The Premium plan comes with HubSpot integration and more collaborative features, like the ability to transfer calls and an advanced auto attendant that gives you a wider range of call routing features.

Extra lines are $5. So, for the price of standard VoIP (around $25 pretax), you could get a company of four set up on the Standard plan.

There are other free ways to get a business number for your mobile phone. Go for it. Getting off the ground you need to save every dollar—I get it—but there’s a point where the inconvenience of trying to work around something like Google Voice starts to cost you money.

OpenPhone solves most of those problems for $10 per month. 

How much does a single missed opportunity cost you? For a barber, maybe it’s a call from a stranger who would have spent thousands of dollars as a regular over the next few years. If only you’d been able to catch them.

It’s well worth checking out, and I have a feeling you’ll be hearing a lot about this company in the future. Try OpenPhone for free today.

What I Looked at to Find the Best VoIP Phone Services

I’ve been a small business owner who needed the cheapest possible business line for the “Contact Us” button on my Facebook page. I think it was still called TheFacebook.com, back then. 

Now I’ve got people reporting to me about our VoIP options in Brazil.

Growing from a one-man show to NP Digital, I’ve been on a few sides of this conversation. We’ve built a marketing machine and I know how we use VoIP—but my team wanted to get a wider picture of what’s going on to help more of my readers.

Some of you have on-call IT support and months to demo the best options. Others are completely on their own running a business and can’t sacrifice more than a weekend in order to find the best VoIP phone service.

Either way, you need to be able to separate the options that are working well for other businesses from the one that’s going to work best for you.

My team reached out to other leaders in the field to see what things looked like from their perspective. We don’t sell VoIP, for example. So, it was really interesting to think through buying VoIP with Gregg, who runs a managed services provider. 

VoIP is just one of the IT services Gregg’s company manages, but over a few decades, he’s seen plenty of things go wrong, helped people out of bad contracts, and restored their business integrity after hacks. He offered a lot of insight on VoIP security and what people can do to make sure they’re not spending money on stuff they don’t need.

Technically, Gregg is a competitor with some of the services I recommend, but he was very frank and offered advice you are not going to find on any review site.

We also talked to Makan, who set up call centers for telemarketing in real estate. These are call centers where each employee is making something like 1,000 calls each week. His practical advice is hardwon in an industry that has a staggering attrition rate. 

“You’re going to let go of eight out of every ten people who work for you,” Makan told us. New hires have to be brought up to speed, coached, and—when they have to go—be safely de-provisioned in order to prevent your database from leaving with them.

And simple employee mistakes can cost thousands of dollars in legal fines because telemarketing is so highly regulated. 

But if you can do it right, the payoff is huge. Makan was able to use call center analytics to surface important metrics that guided his hiring, onboarding, and training. “We no longer have to keep employees for like a year and a half to see if it works or not,” he said.

In searching for the best VoIP provider, you’ll read a lot about using analytics to optimize performance. It’s not just marketing lingo. Makan explained how you can basically predict your sales with VoIP tied to a CRM, and scale hiring up or down accordingly.

Sarkar, a sales manager in B2B SaaS, also pushed the importance of VoIP/CRM integration. We talked a lot about how your sales strategy informs the buying decision. 

Are you in a mature market that needs to handle inbound inquiries, or are you selling a novel product that requires you to hit the phones and educate prospects over a cold call?

Configuring a general purpose CRM to work with your VoIP, can be a ton of work. Sarkar helped us see how some companies save a lot of time and effort by using a sales engagement platform like PhoneBurner. It has all the outreach capabilities built in. That means less setup and fiddling to get up to speed, with a better experience for your sales teams and customers.

There’s just a lot to think about, depending on where you’re coming from. Jason has worked in call centers since 1992. He’s seen the market evolve from deskphones to headsets to AI. His eye for distinguishing meaningful advances from shiny objects that get you nowhere is unrivaled.

Jason also recently purchased an enterprise VoIP system for the company he’s with now. Talking through his experience was extremely helpful in understanding how enterprise buyers have to work through their options methodically and coordinate with multiple departments in order to find a VoIP service that works across the entire organization.

And even though the scale is different, a lot of his guidance serves as practical advice for the small business owner. How do you know if remote workers have good enough internet for VoIP? How do you evaluate the quality of integration between VoIP and your key business software? 

You may not have to buy as many phones or connect as many locations as Jason, but these questions still matter.

We covered a lot of ground in the interviews and research. Here are the three biggest takeaways that I think will benefit anyone shopping for VoIP:

1. The ability to self-manage is crucial: It used to be that you had to call your service provider to make any changes to your phone system. Want to add a user? Change a call path? The options I chose are simple enough to administrate without having to loop in IT. Small business owners without an IT staff can see why that’s important, but large businesses benefit too. It keeps overhead down as they scale. Admins won’t need technical support to accomplish their daily work.
   The problem is that some of the “bigger names” in the industry are stuck in the past. “It's very cumbersome and convoluted,” Gregg told us. “End users are not making changes to it.” Avoid those and go with something you can manage yourself.

2. Identifying all of your business requirements early will save a lot of pain: Check in with every department that’s going to be using VoIP. If you are a small business, check in with every team. What do they need, what would be nice to have, and what’s superfluous in their eyes? Leave no stone unturned. Your solution has to cover executives and receptionists, who will be using VoIP in different ways. You may be able to replace equipment like fax machines and conference phones—or you may have to find something that plays nice with inventory you want to keep.
   Jason created a detailed business requirements document and sent it to vendors. A few dropped out right away, which saved everyone time. Yet a simple oversight by his IT team delayed the deployment of their new system by half a year.

3. VoIP plus your other software and channels is the key: I’m really going to hammer on the CRM integration below because it was so important to almost every expert we talked with. But let me emphasize here the opportunity you have by connecting VoIP to your other business software. You can really dial in with analytics—some providers offer voice recognition technology that pulls all sorts of insights about your employee’s conversations. 
   And if your voice communication is tied in with live chat, email, texting, video, and social media, employees have everything in one place. They are looking at a complete relationship during every conversation, regardless of where it started. It also makes your billing a lot less complicated, especially if you have multiple offices. One bill for all your communications.

I looked for VoIP you can use right away. Admins will be able to make sure everyone is set up, and new hires will gain fluency quickly in the modern system. No more six-month deployments. 

Companies like Ooma, RingCentral, and Nextiva can set up large offices very quickly. And if you have a small office, you may be able to get started this afternoon. 

I wanted to find a few different products that work across every channel. These omnichannel solutions are more expensive, for sure, but they were worth it for virtually every expert my team talked with. It makes everyone more efficient because they're not logging into different accounts and losing track of conversations. 

I also looked at products that have a more limited selection of integrations and channels. These are way cheaper. Not everyone is trying to run a call center with VoIP—it could just be they want an 800 number on their ecommerce website. As long as their callers are routed correctly or greeted by a professional voicemail after hours, it’s all good.

Really, a lot of people get VoIP because they don’t want to give out their personal number for business anymore. OpenPhone will do just that. Grasshopper is perfect for the small office that needs the essentials covered and nothing more.

Alternatively, you can find a great deal on basic plans from some of the larger VoIP service providers. Ooma Office is a good deal no matter how you slice it. The Essentials plan from Nextiva is well within the small business price range, and can completely remove the need for an expensive traditional phone line.

Let’s walk through the big factors you have to consider. Evaluate your options like an expert by taking in the perspective from industry veterans and sales leaders.

Baseline VoIP Features

I want to focus on what makes these products different, not overwhelm you by describing every feature for every product. Once you start digging into VoIP, you’ll find that 30-40 different features is the low end in terms of what you get.

Every option I picked covers what I consider the baseline VoIP features, with some minor exceptions. You won’t hear me call them out unless there’s something superlative about how a vendor does it.

To be make my list of recommendations, the providers had to include:

• Call handling features like call forwarding, call transferring, call waiting, and extensions, so that you never miss a call, no matter where you are.
• Menus and auto attendants that let callers dial a certain department, listen to business hours, and so on.
• Call recording that provides a history and playback of all calls, which is useful for training and sometimes necessary for legal reasons.
• A mobile app that turns your cell phone into a business line
• Online fax to replace the need for traditional machines while also digitizing documents automatically.
• Softphone capabilities to let you make calls from desktops and tablets with just a headset.
• Video calls and conferencing for meetings, webinars, telehealth, and more.
• Voicemail transcription that turns your missed calls into a quick read by text or email

Some of the “entry-level” VoIP packages aimed at companies with five to ten employees only come with limited versions of these features. You may have to pay extra for call recording, for example, or go with a more expensive plan to get unlimited online fax.

Plans vary between basic business phone systems and premium solutions for call centers. The latter come with much more customizable call handling features, multi-level auto attendants, and deep reporting features that a small team isn’t going to miss.

Making a Cost-Effective VoIP Purchase

Traditional phone service, after tax, would be somewhere around $50 – $70 per month. In my research, I found many users switching to VoIP because they were paying a lot more than that.

I think this is how people “cut their phone bill in half” by switching to VoIP. They were getting dragged over the coals by their current phone provider. For people with a reasonable phone bill, the savings may not be so dramatic.

“It's not some magic savings,” Gregg told us. “You'll be saving a little, but not as much as you would think with your monthly phone service.” 

But, since you’re probably going to be paying per-phone, even a $10 savings each month will add up quickly. The more intelligently you can select a provider, the greater your savings will be.

Let’s run through how to assess the sticker price, the real price, and everywhere you can cut costs by finding a system that fits your business.

Gregg said VoIP costs about $25 per user per month on average, which is basically what I found in my research. This is if you are paying for the phones outright or using softphones. If you’re renting desk phones, it’s typically about $10 per month extra, bringing the cost of VoIP to about $35 per user each month. 

Call it $40 per month after taxes and fees. It’s not providers padding the bill, just the unavoidable government-mandated surcharges for the Universal Service Fund, which brings telecom to rural parts of the country and supports 911 emergency numbers. 

Now you are definitely going to see VoIP for cheaper than $25 per line. I’ve included simple VoIP solutions like Phone.com and OpenPhone that are less than half that. 

Typically, the tradeoff with the really low cost plans is that you’re getting a set block of minutes per month, whereas plans of $25+ tend to come with unlimited calling in North America. 

For sales, customer service, and other use cases that require people on the horn all day, unlimited calling is a must-have. When you go over your set block of minutes, your VoIP savings can disappear.

If you are using auto dialer software over VoIP, you really need to avoid per-minute pricing. Makan did the math out during our conversation: if you have 100 employees expected to make 200 calls a day, you're looking at 100,000 minutes per week. That's way too much call volume to survive being billed by the minute.

Some providers, like RingCentral, Ooma, and Nextiva, offer plans in the $20 range for unlimited calling. So you can pay below average, but not have to worry about massive overage charges.

Another factor that can potentially lower the total cost of VoIP is understanding the licensing. For instance, is it going to cost you extra to add an extension? Are you paying per user, per line, per call path? Vendors don’t all charge the same way.

Gregg cautioned us that a lot of people don’t understand exactly how they’re paying in the contract. They go to customize something on their end, thinking it's free, and then get shocked when the bill comes at the end of the month.

With Grasshopper, even the cheapest plan they offer comes with three extensions for free. This is great for a small business that wants one line for a few departments, or a startup that needs a basic phone tree. 

Phone.com costs less to add a new number than Grasshopper, but you don’t get free extensions. The different arrangements can be confusing, but if you take the time to understand what you need, you can play it to your advantage.

If you are really trying to get VoIP on a budget, Jason warned us that you have to be a little cautious. It’s really easy to spin up a VoIP company these days—the technology is not new—and he laid out some horror stories of badd apple vendors pretending to offer reputable service and dropping clients as soon as they get their money.

“And since it takes about 30 days to port over a number, you're kind of out of luck if that happens,” he said. The U.S. Department of Justice has prosecuted these cases, clawing back millions of dollars from phony VoIP fraud schemes.

Better to be safe than sorry, and use a VoIP provider like Grasshopper or Ooma that’s been around awhile. Or, a household name like RingCentral that is a publicly traded company. “I can't imagine they would dump you in 10 days or anything like that,” Jason said.

Cloud-Based or On-Premises System

You can get VoIP infrastructure installed in your office (on premises), or use the internet to connect to the service (cloud-based). Either way, you’re paying less than you would for a traditional phone line, but there are important differences to understand.

There is a much higher initial cost of equipment if you go with an on-premises deployment. You have to buy the PBX, phones, routers, switches, etc., whereas a cloud-based provider hosts all of that themselves.

You can buy desk phones with a cloud-based solution and many people do. But, you don’t have to so long as you outfit employees with a softphone or a VoIP mobile app.

“When it’s cloud-based, you don’t have the big outlay,” said Gregg. “But you’re not really missing out by not getting the equipment because these systems come with a ton of functionality.” Some of the key capabilities he talked about were:

• Your employees can work from anywhere in the world with internet 
• You’ll be able to self-manage features menu systems and call routing
• You can scale up without buying equipment, and scale down without waste
• You don’t have equipment to maintain and monitor

These are four of the top reasons why I only recommended cloud-based solutions. 

Like any solution someone else is hosting, you do sacrifice a little backend control. You are limited to the features they provide, whereas an on-premises system can be completely customized to fit your exact needs.

But the end user can do the vast majority of what they need to with Ooma or Grasshopper. A shop-owner with zero IT experience can add an extension for a new employee or make changes to information about holiday hours provided by their auto attendant.

Most people get the control they need without the responsibility that comes with maintaining a system. If you need hundreds of phones and super customized configuration, an on-premises system may be your only option. That’s going to require IT overhead—hiring an MSP like Gregg to install, maintain, monitor, and replace your equipment—or hiring an in-house staff.

For many business owners, it would be a dream not to stress about the phones. The cloud-based providers I looked at offered nearly 100% uptime, and some offer financially-backed SLAs.

Like Gregg told my team, “You’re not so worried about the end at the main office being up at all times because your employees are connecting directly to the cloud-based server.”

The simplicity here is even more important if people are telecommuting or working out of the office a few days a week. It’s much harder to secure communications between external users and an on-premises system.

I’ll say more about that in the security section, but modern employees need access to company services at all hours. As such, cloud-based is becoming a lot more popular. 

Greg told us flat out, “If you’re SMB in the ten phones range—give or take—it’s not worth it to do on-prem anymore.”

Larger companies will have more to think about, but VoIP providers like Nextiva, RingCentral, and Ooma can help you get set up regardless of what kind of deployment you need. With these vendors, you can really get the best of both worlds or make the transition to cloud at your own pace.

What Kind of Internet Speed Do I Need for Clear Calls?

Calls have to be clear. You can’t compromise on that, or you’ll wish you had your landline whatever the price.

So how do you make sure your setup handles VoIP?

Here’s the nuts and bolts of what I found: VoIP is not going to work on DSL. Cable might be okay for a small office, but it won’t be the greatest. 

Fiber is what you want. It has the bandwidth you need and the upload/download speeds are the same, unlike cable. 

Everyone we talked to about VoIP told us that running low on bandwidth is going to start causing issues—dropped calls, echoing on the line, and terrible conversations.

Here’s the thing, VoIP doesn’t need a blazing fast connection. 

Gregg said that 100 kbps is good. 140 kbps is “like the most ideal, pristine phone call.” 

So, if you’re on a 1 mbps line, you could potentially make ten phone calls. “Granted, you always wanna overcompensate for fall offs and whatnot, but that's all you need speed wise,” he added.

Nextiva and RingCentral have VoIP plans aimed at smaller companies that don’t have commercial office infrastructure. They will let you test your connection right on their website. You’ll get all the information you need to figure out if you’re ready for VoIP, or you need to upgrade your internet first.

We’re not talking about a massive pipe here, the problems you run into are the stability of the connection. If you’re downloading a song, who cares if it takes two or three extra seconds? You wouldn’t notice. But when you’re having a conversation, even a slight delay is going to be a huge pain. 

Any delay over 150 ms (that’s milliseconds) and your meaningful conversation is now impossible. For reference, a call over a landline has a delay of about 45 ms, so 150 is definitely the upper limit of what you want. 

Any higher than that, you’re talking over someone or they missed what you said. 

Making cold calls, helping an irate customer—it’s hard enough already. No one wants to repeat what they’ve said. And it’s not going to be good if someone mishears a credit card number.

“Where it becomes an issue,” said Gregg, “is if you have a cable modem that only has 5 mbps on your upstream, and everybody in the office is uploading stuff to Dropbox, OneDrive, and things like that, eating up that bandwidth.”

Remember the dark days where someone couldn’t be on the internet and the phone at the same time? Don’t go back. Make sure you’ve got the bandwidth to accommodate all of your users with all of their tasks.

Network and Hardware Considerations

Now you can have all the bandwidth in the world and still get bad VoIP quality if your network isn’t configured properly. 

Small businesses don’t have to worry so much about this. According to Gregg, “If you only have five phones, maybe even as high as 10 phones, sure you could just dump them in on a network.”

He advised running a separate VLAN for anything beyond 10 phones in a single location in order to avoid quality issues. Separate the phones from the computers and prioritize voice traffic in the routers. This way, whatever your employees are doing won’t affect the quality of your calls. 

Even with the so-called “plug and play” systems, you’re going to want to put some thought into network configuration if you are putting in more than 10 phones. “I mean you can just plug them in,” said Gregg, “but I wouldn’t be too hopeful about the quality.”

But it’s not just phones to think about. “The fax machines in the conference rooms really threw me for a loop,” Jason explained. “I’m like: I'm just buying a phone system!” 

You have to be methodical. Where do the phone lines need to go? Are they connected to the security system? If you have PoE, you can just plug the ethernet cable into the phones, but if not, you’ll have to make sure there’s power running everywhere you want a station.

With a cloud-based service, you’re going to have to let the vendor behind your firewall. 

Jason had an issue where one of his guys missed a key thing about the firewall requirements, and it delayed his VoIP deployment by about six months. “I was not too happy,” was all he said about that.

If you have a lot of traditional phones and fax machines that you want to keep using, I’d recommend Nextiva, RingCentral, or Ooma. They offer analog telephone adapters (ATAs) that allow you to VoIP-enable landline devices.

This allows you to phase out your old system gradually, instead of trying to Hercules your company through a massive (and much more expensive) transformation. It’s going to be painful to switch no matter what, but how long can you justify investing more money in an old PBX that’s twice as hard to use for half the functionality?

One last thing about using old phones. It’s great if you can use what you have or get a deal somewhere rather than going through the vendor. 

Yet Gregg has encountered problems with aging phones. Hackers will try and log into the phones to start making spam calls. “We were seeing upwards of 100,000 attempts a day on a single phone system,” he recalled. The processors on the older phones weren’t powerful enough to withstand all the incoming requests, and the attack crashed the system.

So, definitely be on the lookout for deals and try to make the most with the equipment you already own. But just be cautious about buying a phone that has an older processor, because it might be a vulnerability. 

Plus, when you buy a phone directly from your VoIP vendor, it’s pre-provisioned. It’s got a secure connection out of the box. When you start piecemealing things, you may lose that desirable plug-and-play functionality.

Make Sure Remote Workers Are Up to Speed

Cloud-based VoIP gives you complete freedom to go remote with ease. Connecting external users to an on-premises system has a lot more hurdles in terms of cost and security. 

But even if you go cloud, which I highly recommend, there are a few things to be thinking about.

Remote workers need a solid internet connection for VoIP. When Jason hires someone working from home, the job post says they have to have a locked and secure WiFi. 

He also has them take a speed test to make sure that their connections are robust enough to be able to take phone calls. He requires a minimum of 20 mbps download and 10 mbps upload. 

It’s just a generic speedtest, nothing fancy. He sends them the link, they send back screenshots to verify. Jason said most people “blow those upload/download times out of the water,” but you need to be sure.

With telecommuting employees, you also have to think about training and management at a distance. I know I’ve said that the premium VoIP plans from vendors like RingCentral and Nextiva are aimed at the call center crowd. Well it’s also true that those features become really important for collaboration when there is no office.

Sharing documents within the platform, like phone scripts, or the ability for a manager to listen in on a new hire’s first live calls—you can provide more support to develop your employees, even when people are working from home.

For a small team, OpenPhone can work really well. People can share an inbox, tag calls, leave comments, and ensure that no opportunities are missed.

People love to be able to work on the go, even if they’re not fully remote. One thing that surprised Jason was how important the mobile app was to the executives. They wanted everything forwarded to their cell.

Mobile apps are great, but they’re not without their downsides. Gregg said VoIP on mobile was great for saving money, but he wasn’t so keen on it as a full-time stand-in for using a computer or desk phone. “It’s nice in a pinch,” he said, “but if you wanna watch a cell phone battery drain out before your eyes, that's a great way to go.”

Integration with CRM

My team asked Jason what the biggest thing you can do to help reps and agents is, and he said integration with your CRM. 

This was a tune we heard from everyone, and it dovetails with my own experience. CRM software is a total game changer when it comes to growing your business and providing service to customers.

Look for a VoIP phone service that has integration with your CRM. If you don’t have one, Nextiva and PhoneBurner have one built in that you can start using immediately. 

The technology’s not new by any means, but CRM software has gotten really good in the last couple of years, and a lot less expensive. When you combine a CRM’s ability to track customer information with quality voice communication, the resulting experience for your employees is amazing.

A customer calls and their account information pulls right up on screen. There’s no digging for a file or asking for a customer to provide their name, ID, order number, etc. 

Sarkar talked with us about how it increased his sales reps’ efficiency. “You get to have more conversations by cutting out the extra time you spend figuring out who’s calling.”

Really, every interaction is streamlined, which makes your reps and agents way more productive. If a customer has an order, the rep can see where it is. There are no extra steps to verify who’s calling, or ask them to dig up a purchase order number.

Saving seconds on every repetitive task adds up quickly. Employees can click-to-dial numbers within the CRM. Account information is centralized and agents can leave notes about calls. Everything is stored in a way that makes sense. 

Makan put it well when he said, “Compared to a traditional phone system, voice over IP integrated with the CRM is hands down like: before iPhone [versus] after iPhone.”

The ability to record calls within the CRM was a huge factor for a lot of the people we spoke with. “In the past,” Jason said, “the systems that I've had for recording were kind of separate from the CRM, so I had to go chase that down. If somebody called in, I'd have to be like who do you talk to? When did you call? And that would be kind of a nightmare.”

When Jason moved to a new VoIP provider, integration with their CRM was the deciding factor. His company communicated on so many channels, all of which are recorded. The integration makes the process of listening back much easier. 

“If you complain about a rep or something like that,” Jason said, “I can take your phone number, plug it in, and find every single call you've ever made over the last year, every chat, every email, every contact. It’s super simple. [It] saves me on time tracking down calls.”

For Makan, call recording was essential for assessing employee performance. “Traditionally, you give someone a dummy phone,” he said. “You don't know how many calls they made, who they talked to, or what the level of conversation was.” 

With VoIP, you can do quality control much easier. Listening back to the calls is easy. What went right? What could be improved? Identify who needs training and who’s not a good fit.

Makan explained how it really helps managers conserve their time and energy for quality candidates. They know who to invest in and who to send on their way. “I mean, you can tell in like 60-90 days. Any excuse they give, you can just listen to the quality of the calls.”

Be on the lookout for VoIP providers that showcase direct integrations with your CRM (and other software, for that matter). You absolutely have to demo it to see how that integration drives and works on a day-to-day level. If you want that “super simple” experience Jason was talking about for recording calls, the integration has to be tight. 

Also be aware that the initial setup of your CRM and VoIP is going to take some time, especially if you are tying in multiple channels like talk, text, and chat. You need to customize it to fit your industry and use-case because the software is fairly general purpose out of the box.

“You can really geek out on it,” said Makan, “and that’s the challenge.”

Sarkar was a big fan of sales engagement platforms because they have the CRM built-in and they are already tuned for the job. Obviously you don’t want to use them for customer service, but something like PhoneBurner is going to supercharge a sales team with a lot less configuration required.

Convenient Compliance Tools Employees Can Use Without Thinking

There are a lot of regulations protecting consumers from getting robo-calls or having their credit card information stolen. So if you are making a lot of calls or taking financial information over the phone, there’s going to be telemarketing and privacy laws you don’t want to mess with.

I’m glad those regulations are there, but new hires (or just plain carelessness) can break a law by accident and get your company a heavy fine. I found that a single call to someone on the national Do-Not-Call registry could result in a five-figure penalty.

A single slip up could cost anywhere from $11,000 to $43,000. And that’s per call, as in you could get multiple fines if one of your employees screws up. If it happens multiple times, I doubt the government’s going to hit you with a smaller fine.

Or think about HIPAA compliance for healthcare providers. Accidentally exposing a patient’s protected health information can result in jail time. This is true even if the company didn’t know a violation had occurred.

And yet companies make calls and share private information all the time without going bankrupt or winding up in the slammer. This is because they use good VoIP providers that make compliance convenient for employees. Your agents get the proper tools so that they can focus on the customer instead of how to stay in the clear of arcane compliance laws.

Regardless of how big a business you are, if you are making a lot of outbound calls (especially if you’re using auto dialer software), you need to update your DNC list and use it to scrub those numbers from your call lists.

RingCentral, Nextiva and include easy-to-use features to make sure your DNC list is up to date. PhoneBurner has integrations with DNC.com in order to keep people safe.

Makan, whose agents made thousands of calls a week, said that Zoho CRM in conjunction with RingCentral was the cheapest possible way to set your employees up for success. You just have to keep up on your DNC list grooming, “because that's something you're gonna run into a lot, and they need to scrub the numbers that they call up.”

Recording calls is another area where compliance is important. These laws vary state to state.  In New York, you don’t have to tell people the call is being recorded. In New Jersey, you do. 

Products like RingCentral let you automatically notify people that the call is being recorded, so you’re covered. This allows your teams to think less about how to make legal calls.

Jason told us about one of the features that sold him on going with their VoIP provider. It’s illegal to record credit card numbers, so employees need to remember to pause the recording while they take that information. 

“And as you can imagine,” he said, “if you take 1,000 or 1,500 calls a month, you're bound to forget that a couple of times, or miss it, or forget to pause, or forget to unpause, which is a big no-no in our area.” 

The VoIP service he chose automated this process within their CRM so employees didn’t have to think about it. As soon as their cursor was in the payment info box, the call stopped recording. 

“So my reps don't have to remember to turn that off, and that's just super easy,” Jason said. “I don't have to worry about PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance. I don't have to worry about, ‘Hey, if you forget, tell me so I can go delete the call out of the system.’ What if we delete the wrong call?”

Take every opportunity you can to automate compliance. The potential liabilities from a single oversight are enough to justify the cost of spending a little more each month on your VoIP, CRM, and training.

Security

No one wants to pay for $20,000 worth of phone calls they didn’t make. That’s what happened to a client of Gregg’s before they properly secured their VoIP. Someone hacked it and used it to start blasting out scam calls. 

Security is a major concern for any internet-based service, and VoIP is no exception. 

It’s pretty straightforward for on-premises systems if all your phones are in one location. Set rules in your router so that no one can connect to the phone system except the phone service provider. 

Gregg said, “As long as that's configured you're solid, and you can't get hacked because the traffic can't get there from anybody else.”

Securing an on-premises system gets a lot harder if you have people working from home, which is why a lot of companies are opting to go the cloud-based VoIP route. Residential addresses don’t have static IP addresses, so you can’t set rules in your router. 

“The only appropriate way to do it is using a VPN service,” explained Gregg. “If you leave the ports open so that anyone can connect, you'll see that the phone system will get hammered constantly.”

With cloud-based VoIP, the provider is ensuring that the right people are calling into their system. You still have to maintain good security hygiene at your company—long passwords, principle of least privilege, and de-provisioning old accounts.

These last two points are really important. You need to make sure that employees only have access to the data that they absolutely need. If possible, they should have read-only access. And when employees leave, you have to de-provision them.

For one thing, you don’t want to pay for old accounts that aren’t in use. If you have high turnover, be careful to re-use old numbers you’re already paying for, rather than buying extra ones. You don’t want to be shocked by a bill that has dozens of lines you're not using.

“People need to be aware of sabotage,” said Makan. “If you get a disgruntled employee, they can wipe out the database, if you don't back it up. Or they copy it. Or they just start corrupting the numbers and changing things in there.”

If you adhere to the principle of least privilege and are on top of booting old users out of the system completely, the risk of sabotage is near zero. If not, you’re putting your data integrity in jeopardy.

VoIP phone services like RingCentral, Nextiva, and Ooma make it easy for administrators to keep track of who has what privileges. You won’t need an infosec credential to keep all the accounts locked down.

Conclusion

My top recommendations are Nextiva, Ringcentral, and Ooma. They are affordable, reliable, and easy to set up.

If you need a full-fledged VoIP platform on the cheap, consider Phone.com.

Grasshopper is great if you're more worried about having enough different extensions instead of unique, dedicated phone lines. 

Need something that's more suited to support your sales teams' efforts. Look at PhoneBurner for a sales engagement platform that includes an auto dialer.

If you're a solo operator or just someone who is sick of having to use your personal number for running your business, OpenPhone gives you an easy and cheap way to get a professional number and VoIP service.

So, to recap all my top picks:

1. Nextiva – Best for offices with work-from-home employees
2. RingCentral – Best for high-volume outbound calling
3. Ooma Office – Best for Adding VoIP to Existing SMB Phone Systems
4. Phone.com – Most affordable professional-grade VoIP
5. Grasshopper – Best if you need more extensions than phone lines
6. PhoneBurner – Best off-the-shelf VoIP for sales teams
7. OpenPhone – Best way to run your business from a mobile phone

Regardless of the route you go, don’t forget to consider your requirements, budget, and the criteria we talked about as you go through the process of choosing the best VoIP phone service for your business. 

Have you used a VoIP service provider in the past? What was your experience like?

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: The Best VoIP Phone Services (In-Depth Review)
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/voip-phone-services/
Published Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

Are you serious about growing your business? Your website needs to be able to grow with you.

Dedicated hosting gives you a ton of power and total control. Every bit of bandwidth, storage, and RAM on that server is yours and yours alone.

Shared hosting is good for getting off the ground, but you can't run a high-traffic site, massive databases, or develop apps.

At a certain point, you exhaust the limits of other forms of hosting and recognize that your own server is going to be worth the price.

So, how do you choose the service that's going to give you the most value for the money?

Let’s talk about some of the best dedicated hosting options in 2021 to make things easier. After in-depth reviews of my top picks, I'll walk you through what you need to know to make a decision.

#1 Bluehost Review — Best for Comprehensive Dedicated Hosting Features

Bluehost is one of the best dedicated hosting services out there, and for good reason. It’s cheaper than other dedicated hosts while still giving you tons of features for your website. Its 99.98% uptime also puts it near the top of the list when it comes to performance.

Bluehost has all of the basic dedicated hosting features, plus several more advanced ones, giving you room to grow. With access control and database management, you have everything you need at your fingertips and 24/7 access to customer support if you have a problem.

You can get three different hosting packages with Bluehost:

• Standard: $79.99 per month
• Enhanced: $99.99 per month
• Premium: $119.99 per month

Standard gives you four cores at 2.3GHz and 500GB of mirrored storage so you can back up your data. With 4GB RAM, you don’t get an impressive amount of storage, but it works well for simpler websites. 5TB bandwidth gives you the speed you need to keep things up and running with three IP addresses.

The Enhanced package bumps you to the next level with the same number of cores at 2.5GHz and 1TB of mirrored storage. It doubles the bandwidth to 10TB and gives you four IP addresses.

Premium, the highest tier, also gives you four cores at 3.3GHz and 1TB of mirrored storage. It once again doubles the RAM to 16GB, adds to the bandwidth for 15TB, and gives you five IP addresses.

With Bluehost, you get a free domain name for the first year, a free SSL certificate, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. The biggest downside to Bluehost is that they only have one server location. It’s in the United States, so if you run your website internationally, you might want a different host.

#2 HostGator Review — Best Customer Support with Dedicated Hosting

HostGator’s 99.99% uptime and unmetered bandwidth make it an attractive option for business websites. HostGator is known for its excellent customer support, which you can access 24/7/365. It also has online resources like videos and knowledge base articles to help you set up your site.

HostGator gives you three options for dedicated hosting:

• Value Server: $89.98 per month
• Power Server: $119.89 per month
• Enterprise Server: $139.99 per month

The Value Server gives you four cores with eight threads and an Intel Xeon-D CPU. Its 8GB RAM and 1TB HDD make for plenty of storage.

The next level, Power Server, comes with eight cores with 16 threads and the same CPU as the Value Server. However, it doubles your RAM to 16GB and gives you a combined 2TB HDD and 512GB SSD to store bigger applications.

The Enterprise Server has the same number of cores and threads as the Power Server and the same CPU. The upgrades come with RAM at 30GB and 1TB of SSD for your most complex applications.

You can choose between managed or semi-managed hosting based on how much you want to customize your server. Plus, each of HostGator’s packages comes with unmetered bandwidth and compatibility with Linux and Windows OS.

HostGator has two servers, but like Bluehost, they’re both in the US. Despite the host’s superior performance, it’s not a great choice for businesses with primarily international customers.

#3 DreamHost Review — Best for Dedicated Hosting Storage

DreamHost doesn’t have the same features or performance as many other dedicated hosting providers on this list, but it does offer a lot of storage. With a fully managed server, 24/7 tech support, and 100% uptime guaranteed, the basics are definitely covered.

You can get two packages: Standard and Enhanced. The Standard plan starts at $169 per month and comes with four cores with eight threads and 4GB RAM. Its 1TB HDD and RAID 1 storage mean DreamHost has more capacity than most other hosting services.

When it comes to the Enhanced package at $279 per month, you upgrade to 12 cores and 24 threads, 16GB RAM, and 2TB HDD with RAID 1 storage. It’s a big price jump, but remember that each feature more than doubles—and, in some cases, quadruples.

You can choose from three Standard levels and six Enhanced ones that go up to 64GB RAM.

With each package, you get root access so that you can control your settings even with a managed server. Plus, it comes with DDoS protection. 

The downside comes with the high price despite its fewer features. The most expensive option sits at a lofty $379. Bear in mind that this is high only in relation to my top recommendations–if you are searching dedicated hosting as a whole, this is still a really good price.

DreamHost has international servers in the US, Asia, and Europe, making them a solid choice for international customers.

#4 InMotion Review — Best Dedicated Hosting for Technical Websites

InMotion accommodates businesses that have a lot of tech needs. This high-performance platform comes with features like:

• 99.99% uptime
• Tier 1 network
• Free SSD
• 24/7 support
• Multi-layer defense
• Fast start times

It might look at first like InMotion only offers basic packages, but their Bare Metal and Managed options have plenty more in store.

Starting at $57.50 per month, Bare Metal is an unmanaged server with full root access. You can choose your OS, get automation with Ansible, and get up to 5 IP addresses. You even have RAM options starting at 16GB.

The Managed option, starting at $77.50 per month, gives you a fully managed server with cPanel and WHM included. You also get automated backup, so you won’t have to worry about losing data. It’s Linux-based, so you only have one OS option, but you still have RAM starting at 16GB and 5 IP addresses.

InMotion offers a 30-day money-back guarantee and customized solutions for your website. Considering its features, it’s an affordable dedicated hosting service.

#5 A2 Hosting Review — Best Dedicated Hosting for Website Performance

A2 Hosting is known for keeping websites running at top speed. With a commitment to 99.9% uptime and 24/7 customer service, it has the tools to keep customers on your site.

A2 Hosting offers three options for management, including unmanaged and two types of managed servers. With the managed version, you have no root access. Core gives you root access to your managed server for more customizability.

They use the SwiftServer platform for faster performance and claim to give you a website up to 20 times faster than other hosts.

A2 Hosting comes with three tiers:

• Sprint: $141.09 per month
• Exceed: $207.49 per month
• Mach: $290.49 per month

The Sprint package comes with 8GB RAM and 2x500GB storage with 10TB transfer. It gives you two cores with Intel 3.1+GHz.

The Exceed package offers a small upgrade with the same amount of RAM and storage. You get a 15TB transfer, plus four cores and Intel Xeon 2.4+GHz for a faster system.

With Mach, you make a wider jump to 16GB RAM, 1x1000GB storage, and 20TB transfer. This package sets you up for speed with over eight cores and the 2x Intel Xeon 2.1+GHz processor.

Unlike other hosting services, A2 Hosting has an anytime money-back guarantee.

#6 Liquid Web Review — Best for Customizable Dedicated Hosting

Liquid Web has fully customizable servers with real-time monitoring and root access. It looks pricey at first, but don’t let that deter you before you’ve explored what this hosting service has to offer.

Liquid Web comes with SeverSecure advanced security, Worldwide Cloudflare CDN, and business-grade storage. It also has a support team to manage its servers, and they offer 24/7/365 customer service.

You can get three packages of dedicated hosting service:

• Intel Xeon 1230: $199 per month
• Intel Xeon 4108: $299 per month
• Intel Xeon Gold 6130: $499 per month

The Intel Xeon 1230 comes with four cores, 32GB RAM, and 5TB bandwidth. It gives you impressive storage with 2x240GB SSD on the primary disk and a 1x1TB SATA backup disk.

When you upgrade to Intel Xeon 4108, you double your cores, RAM, and storage on both the primary and backup disks. With 8TB bandwidth, you guarantee speed and performance.

Despite its significant price jump, the Intel Xeon Gold 6130 doesn’t seem to offer anything new in terms of RAM, storage, or bandwidth. However, you do get 16 cores.

Every package comes with 250 Acronis Cyber Backups. Liquid Web also has value bundles if the basic packages don’t meet your bandwidth or memory needs.

#7 TMDHosting Review — Best Dedicated Hosting for Quick Startup

TMDHosting might not be as big or fancy as other dedicated hosting services, but it does give you a quality site fast. It focuses on power and speed, so you’ll have no problem upgrading if your site struggles with lots of traffic or other changes. With fully managed servers, you don’t need to sweat the tech.

TMDHosting offers four dedicated hosting packages:

• Starter: $159.95 per month
• The Original: $199.95 per month
• Smart: $249.95 per month
• Super Powerful: $299.95 per month

For a basic package, Starter gives you an impressive 1TB storage with RAID-10. You also get four CPU cores with eight threads and 8GB DDR4 RAM, so you have plenty of space for everything on your site.

The Original upgrades you to 2TB storage and six CPU cores with 12 threads. You get the same amount of RAM, so it’s not a huge jump. Then again, neither is the price.

At the Smart level, you get the same amount of storage as the Original. The upgrades come in the form of eight CPU cores with 16 threads and 16GB DDR4 RAM.

At the top, Super Powerful comes with 2x2TB storage with RAID-10. You still get eight CPU cores and 16 threads, but with 32GB DDR4 RAM, you’ve got plenty of room for memory and storage.

Each level comes with unlimited bandwidth, free setup, premium support, and a cPanel and WHM. TMDHosting claims that they can have your website up and ready to go in 20 minutes, blowing the 24+ hours of other hosting services out of the water.

What I Looked at to Find the Best Dedicated Hosting

When you choose a dedicated host, knowing the features you need will save you time.

You want one that helps your website perform at its best at all times. Factoring in these additional elements of a dedicated hosting service will help your website stand out.

Managed or Unmanaged

Whether you choose a managed or unmanaged host depends on your server knowledge and how much control you want over your dedicated hosting.

A managed hosting service means that the host takes care of server problems for you. They manage the operating system (OS), control panel, setup, and anything else that comes with the platform when you buy it.

Unmanaged hosting is cheaper, but that’s because you manage everything yourself. The host still does the bare minimum when it comes to network maintenance, but they won’t help you manage software, servers, security, or errors.

An unmanaged system means you have more control, but that doesn’t mean much if you don’t know what you’re doing. Feeling comfortable with a managed hosting service can make it worth the extra cost.

Scalability

If you want to grow your business, get dedicated hosting that will grow with it. Scalable hosting allows you to configure your hosting to your individual website’s needs. It also prevents downtime associated with server limits.

Security

According to Forbes, data breaches cost companies an average of $3.9 million. A dedicated host with high-quality security helps protect your business. 

It also means your customers feel comfortable shopping with you. That way, you can avoid problems and build trust with your customers.

Availability

A dedicated host helps you keep your website’s uptime as close to 100% as possible. Downtime can cost you website traffic and, by extension, conversions. 

Find a provider that keeps up availability and guarantees maximum uptime. Ideally, you want a host with an uptime of at least 99.98% or higher. 

Administration

Dedicated hosting gives you control over configuration and software installation, so you can work your website as you wish. Administrative access helps you tailor your service to your business. You control which services you use with your dedicated host.

Operating System and Hardware

Some hosts support more than one OS, but others don’t. If you choose the wrong one, you might not be able to use it with your website.

Hardware determines whether the server can meet your business needs. Check things like the CPU model and speed, RAM size, bandwidth, and hard disk capacity before you buy.

Conclusion

A website is only as good as its dedicated hosting service. Choose one that gives you everything you need, whether that’s speed, customization, or support when you need it.

Dedicated hosting is an investment. Use my recommendations and reviews to narrow your search:

1. Bluehost—Best for comprehensive dedicated hosting features
2. HostGator—Best customer support with dedicated hosting
3. DreamHost—Best for managed dedicated hosting
4. InMotion—Best for technical websites
5. A2 Hosting—Best for website performance
6. Liquid Web—Best for customizable dedicated hosting
7. TMDHosting—Best for quick startup

You can find dedicated hosting you trust, so explore your options and determine which one fits your business. Use this guide as a resource for narrowing down your options with our methodology and top choices.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: Best Dedicated Hosting
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/best-dedicated-hosting/
Published Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

Does your business book appointments online? Are you looking for the best WordPress booking plugins to help you streamline your workflow and increase customer satisfaction?

An effective booking plugin can be an essential part of your business puzzle. Once you find the right one, you eliminate the possibility of losing customers to faulty or less than ideal plugins that don’t do the job well.

In this guide, I share some of the best WordPress booking plugins to help you manage all your appointments with ease. Once you’ve read through my top choices, you’ll be able to make the best decision for your unique business needs.

Let’s get started. 

#1 – StartBooking Review — The Best for Service Appointment Scheduling

StartBooking offers a powerful WordPress booking plugin you can easily download and install to manage all your service appointment needs. 

They offer a clean customer-facing interface that allows them to choose from a pre-defined list of services with available times and dates. Once they’re ready to book their appointment, StartBooking effectively captures all their information, so they’re ready to go. This makes StartBooking an exceptional option for WordPress users in the service industry that want to offer their customers a clean and professional online booking experience they can rely on. 

If you want to capture online payments as your customers book their appointments, StartBooking integrates with Stripe for easy payment processing.

Some of their best booking features:

• Offers a fully customizable booking plugin so that you configure it to book appointments exactly how you want
• Easily integrates with Google Calendar
• Manage how customers view their booking options and services from your WordPress dashboard
• Book and manage an unlimited number of appointments
• Get access to crucial booking analytics, so you always know how you’re doing month to month
• Assign different staff members to different appointment offerings
• Define booking times that prevent you from overlapping appointments
• The ability to handle class and group booking

Pricing tiers include:

• Individual — $12 per month for unlimited sites and appointments
• Business — $28 per month for unlimited sites and appointments

Both tiers offer custom fields, blocking dates, and customizable emails. The Business plan is better for a team with multiple calendars and comes with advanced reported and priority support. Try StartBooking free here for 14 days. 

#2 – Bookly Pro Review — The Best for Use with Staff Members

A plugin like Bookly Pro is a top choice if you work with staff members and need plenty of assignable backend booking features. The plugin was downloaded over 34,000 times by businesses that want a strong handle on their booking workflow.

With Bookly Pro, you can enable your staff to stay on top of upcoming appointments with automated notifications and let them know when they’ve scored a purchase. Bookly lets you connect each of your employees and their Google Calendars to any number of services available for booking. 

This enables you to manage your team and multiple bookings without the potential confusion that can come with it. It’s the feature that makes Bookly an immensely effective booking plugin if you’re managing a growing team. 

Though Bookly offers a free plugin version, if you want access to support and advanced booking features, you’re better off making their one-time payment for full access to everything they offer. 

Some of its best features: 

• Gorgeous booking forms and front-facing design
• Fully responsive booking features that work on any screen size
• Integrate with Google Calendars and WooCommerce
• Accept payments through a variety of payment gateways, including Stripe and PayPal
• Built-in analytics with plenty of booking stats
• Offers the ability to connect to a number of third-party systems using Zapier

Bookly Pro costs $89, a one-time payment that includes future updates and six months of support. You can also pay an additional $31.50 to extend support for up to 12 months. Buy Bookly Pro now.

#3 – Booking & Appointment Plugin For WooCommerce Review — The Best for Use with WooCommerce

The Booking & Appointment Plugin For WooCommerce truly does it all when it comes to booking just about anything online once you integrate and use it with WooCommerce (a robust WordPress ecommerce store plugin). 

With it, you can handle hotel bookings, fitness appointments, party rentals, apartment rentals, and a ton more once you get it configured with your WooCommerce shop. 

The Booking & Appointment Plugin For WooCommerce lets you set up single-day or multiple-day bookings for equipment rentals or hotel reservations with just a few clicks. If you already have a WooCommerce shop set up through WordPress, adding the booking and appointment plugin can completely transform your shopping experience with a booking and appointment interface that’s easy to use in both backend and frontend views. 

Some of the Booking & Appointment Plugin’s best features:

• Syncs with Google Calendar for both admin users and customers
• Easily set up and automate SMS reminders
• Enable time slots that configure to customer’s local time zones
• Capable of multilingual displays in more than 60 languages
• See all your penned in appointments in either calendar or list views
• You can setup booking for multiple products on multiple dates

For a license, you’ll pay an annual subscription fee. The tiers are:

• Starter — $119 for one store
• Business — $199 for five stores
• Enterprise — $249 for unlimited stores

All three licenses come with all of the core features, including flexible labels, exclusion dates, custom booking calendar, multi-language capabilities, and timezone conversions. Get started with The Booking & Appointment Plugin For WooCommerce here. 

#4 – Bookingo Review — The Best for Scheduling Training & Classes

Recent times have taken a lot of aspects of business remote. Whether you teach classes or lead training, you're likely doing a combination of in-person and videoconferencing sessions.

That's the situation that Bookingo is perfect for—maintaining and growing your teaching or training business.

This WordPress booking plugin from QuanticaLabs is tailor-made for anyone who offers courses on a recurring basis. It gives you everything you need to post classes and session easily, with customizable fields that allow you to adjust the plugin to your industry needs.

By default, you're able to start and end dates, duration of each course and individual class, participant limits, recurring dates, location (or link to a virtual course), instructor contact details, and any additional information.

And, you get unlimited booking forms, courses, and course groups.

That makes it fantastic for companies whose whole purview is training or education. Segment course sets by instructor or topic and book as many as you'd like.

Better still, if your training service is growing wildly, you can even support payment in any global currency. So, your course on how to get ahead or add a skill can accommodate students from all around the world.

There are boatloads of other features already included in Bookingo and the devs at QuanticaLabs are constantly updating the plugin to add more and address user needs.

You can get Bookingo for $40 from EnvatoMarket, which comes with six months of support. You can easily extend that support by another year for an additional $13.13.

#5 – BirchPress Review — The Best for Easily Capturing Payments

BirchPress is a reliable WordPress booking plugin that works great if you want to capture PayPal and credit card payments hassle-free. This makes it easy to process payments without having to look for a third-party payment gateway that’ll complicate your life. 

If you’d rather not use PayPal as your payment gateway, you can capture payments through other available gateways with WooCommerce integration.

Especially if you operate in the healthcare industry, fitness, automotive, salon and beauty, or the health and wellness space, BirchPress helps make the process of scheduling and keeping up with appointments easy right from your WordPress dashboard. 

Even if you’re constantly taking appointments and collecting payments, you won’t always be available. With BirchPress’s holiday blocking feature, you choose which dates are unavailable for booking throughout the year. 

The straightforward features BirchPress offers, along with their ability to sync with more than one payment option, make them a top booking plugin for online appointment management. 

Some useful BirchPress features include:

• You can embed booking features on any page or post with their shortcodes
• Integrates with Google Calendar, Outlook, iPhone, or Android to import and export appointment dates
• Easily send reminders and emails when someone schedules, changes, or cancels an appointment
• Customize their appointments to your needs by configuring sign up forms accordingly
• Developer friendly plugin with advanced customization features

Once you make the one-time payment in the tier that suits your business budget, you can quickly start handling your booking needs. Here is the pricing tier breakdown:

• Personal — $99 
• Business — $199 
• Business+ — $249

All plans come with one year of support and updates, automated email notifications, and holiday blocking. The Business+ package is the only one to support WooCommerce integration. Start using BirchPress today, or go through a live demo here.

What I Looked At To Find The Best WordPress Booking Plugins

Booking plugins come with lots of different features that can strengthen how you run your business appointments. Any booking plugin worth using will offer a great user experience, integrate well with your WordPress site, and streamline the process of accepting and organizing appointments.

Still, you’ll want to take it a step further and look into some key criteria to enable you to choose the best plugin that will deliver what you need. 

To choose a plugin that works for you, make sure you’re clear on your business goals to know exactly what you need a plugin for.

Are you booking online sales calls with prospective customers? Are you booking local in-person appointments? Will you need to capture payment information upon booking? Are you booking appointments or reservations?

Some plugins come with robust features like drop-down menus for multiple schedules, the ability to revise and re-schedule appointments, a dashboard that allows you to easily view and manage your calendar, or even automated appointment reminders triggered upon booking. 

Here are a few other things I considered when researching and choosing the best WordPress booking plugins. Use these factors when doing your research and selecting the best for you.

Online Payments

Some plugins are designed to accept online payment solutions without having to use a third-party payment gateway. This can be useful to you as a business owner if you require payment upon booking. 

Being able to capture payments within your booking plugin can go a long way in saving you time. This way, you don’t need to integrate additional plugins on your site that could potentially slow it down.

Calendar Views

Would booking appointments on your site be made easier if your plugin offered a calendar view for you and your customers? Using a plugin with calendar views can be a great option if you offer appointments over a span of time or if your business is service-based. 

Mobile-Friendly

Your booking plugin won’t do you much good if you can’t easily capture appointments from a mobile device. A vast amount of online traffic is generated through mobile as opposed to the standard desktop view.

You’re always better off with booking plugins that are up to date and offer mobile compatible views. Using booking plugins that haven’t been recently reviewed or updated to be compatible with the latest WordPress version can work against you if you aren’t careful. 

Conclusion

This might have been a ton of information to digest in one go. I reviewed a list of the top booking plugins for WordPress you can start using right now that go beyond the basics.

To help you choose the best WordPress booking plugin, here’s a quick recap of the plugins I recommend:

1. StartBooking – The best for service appointment bookings
2. Bookly Pro – The best for using with staff members
3. Booking & Appointment Plugin For WooCommerce – The best for use with WooCommerce
4. Bookingo – The best for scheduling training and classes
5. BirchPress – The best for easily capturing payments

Now it’s your turn. Has there been a booking plugin that’s worked better for you than others? Let me know in the comments below. 

If you want to build an app for your business, you face a dilemma. 

Should you opt for a traditional centralized app, or turn to a decentralized platform? More importantly, what is the difference between the two and why does it mean for your business? 

There’s no straightforward answer to this question; it really depends on your goals and what you need the app to do. 

I'll walk you through the differences between both app types so you can decide how to move forward with your marketing and development goals.

What Is a Centralized App?

Centralized apps are operated and owned by a single company, and they run off a single server, or cluster of servers. 

How it works is simple: Someone downloads a copy of the app, and the app works by sending and receiving information from this server. 

In other words, the app won’t work unless it’s in contact with this server. If the centralized server crashes, the app stops working across user devices until the problem is fixed.   

Examples of centralized apps include:

• Facebook
• Twitter 
• Instagram
• WhatsApp
• Netflix

What Is a Decentralized App?

A decentralized app, or “dApp,” runs on a blockchain network. Rather than downloading an app, the user pays the developer a certain amount of cryptocurrency to download a “smart contract,” or source code. 

The code generates a whole new copy of the app on the user’s device, which creates a new “block” in the chain.    

Here are some examples of decentralized apps:

• BitTorrent
• CryptoKitties
• Rarible
• Audius
• MetaMask

Pros and Cons of Centralized Apps

Centralized apps have a few distinct advantages over dApps. As the developer, you retain full control over the app and how it’s used. Centralized apps can generally handle higher traffic volumes. 

What’s more, it’s much easier to update a centralized app since the update is sent automatically to the user’s device.   

All that said, there are some downsides. If there’s a system error, no one can use the app until the problem is resolved, which might inconvenience your customers. Additionally, you might incur higher cybersecurity costs because you need to protect the main server.  

Pros and Cons of Decentralized Apps

Decentralized apps definitely have their advantages, depending on what you need from your app. 

First, as there’s no single server, users won’t lose access to the app if your server goes down. Second, since there’s no centralized storage, user data won’t be compromised if there’s a data breach or hacking attempt. 

From a marketing perspective, this could incentivize people to choose dApps over centralized apps.    

Still, dApps come with a few drawbacks.

Your target audience is smaller, since cryptocurrency and blockchain aren’t “mainstream” technologies yet. What’s more, as dApp transactions are often slower and more expensive than centralized transactions, so you might find it hard to draw people to your dApp in the short term. 

Finally, since there’s no centralized rollout, it’s much harder to fix bugs or update the software across user devices.          

Should You Create a Centralized or Decentralized App?

Only you can answer this question. However, there are two points to consider when weighing your options. 

• How far do you want to expand your app? Decentralized apps are an emerging market with over 70 million users worldwide, but far more users download centralized apps. 
• How much control do you want to retain? You can control how people use a centralized app, not a dApp. Depending on your target audience and business goals (e.g., if you’re all about erasing censorship), this might not be a priority.  

Don’t rush the decision. Spend time thinking through your options and what your company and customers need in the short and long term. If you need some extra help with your decision-making, check out my consulting services.  

Resources for Centralized Apps

There’s a ton of great information out there around how to build a centralized app, but it's hard to know which ones actually work. Here are my five top app building resources to get you started: 

• Builder.ai: Quickly design and create a centralized app without coding knowledge. Simply decide what type of app you want to build, choose your design, and get going.   
• Android Developers: This developer page contains resources to help you learn the basics of Android app development, from creating your first centralized app to launching on Google Play. 
• Appy Pie: If you plan on building an iPad app, Appy Pie can walk you through the process. From restaurant apps to chat bots, Appy Pie has the tools you need to develop your first app. 
• Code With Chris: Want to build a centralized app, but don’t know where to start? Check out this guide. It breaks the entire process down into simple, manageable steps. 
• Lifewire: This guide brings together some of the most helpful iPhone and iPad app development tools to help you get started. If you’re looking for Appy Pie alternatives, check out this guide. 

Resources for Decentralized Apps

Ready to dive into building your first decentralized app? Read these resources before you get started.

• 101 Blockchains: If you’re confused by dApp development, 101 Blockchains has a detailed user guide you'll want to read. It’s designed for beginners, and it makes decentralized app development less daunting.
• Ethereum: For dApp developers building on Ethereum, check out this website. You’ll find a whole range of tutorials and guides to walk you through decentralized app building, and a developer community for even more help. 
• Solidity: If you want to build on Ethereum, you need to learn Solidity, a coding language. The website itself has some helpful resources to learn the code and understand how to apply it effectively in dApp development. 
• Medium: Need help understanding smart contracts? This Medium page brings together some useful courses for learning about smart contracts and dApp creation. 
• Dapp University: If you’re struggling to make sense of blockchain, Ethereum, or any other part of dApp development, check out this tutorial from Dapp University. From generating code to Ethereum deployment, this full-length guide has you covered. 

How to Build a Centralized App

If you’ve settled on a centralized app for your business, here’s a rundown of the basic steps to create your own. 

1. Choose Your Launch Platform

First, decide if you’re building an app for Android or iOS. The process is similar for both, but you need to settle on a platform at the outset. Remember, you can always expand later.

2. Get a Wireframe

A wireframe mockup is just a sketch or skeleton outline of your app. You can use tools like Adobe XD to help with wireframe design. Here’s an example of what it looks like if you’re building a wireframe on Adobe XD:

Once you’ve got a mockup, do some user mapping. All you’re doing is mapping what different actions users will take on the app, such as creating an account, making payment, etc. and what screens they’ll pass through to get there.  

3. Test the Framework

Next, get some user feedback on your wireframe and proposed mapping. Is your mockup clunky and disorganized, or is it user-friendly with a clear flow from one screen to the next? Do the colors and text stand out, or is it boring and unengaging? 

Reflect on feedback and make changes where appropriate.   

4. Design a Prototype

Once you’ve got a wireframe and a user map, you can design a fully-fledged prototype. You can either use your existing wireframe building tool for this, or check out other tools like Justinmind. 

If you use Adobe XD for the wireframe, you can import it straight into Justinmind:

You can also include A/B testing as part of your prototyping, if this works for you.    

5. Choose Your App Builder

Now it’s time to actually build your app. If you don’t know how to code, either hire a freelance app designer, consult an agency, or download your own mobile app building tool. 

6. Run Final Tests

Before you go live, share your app with your marketing team, colleagues, and even friends and family. Does it work as it should, or have you identified a few bugs? By running final tests, you can make tweaks before the app launches in the real world. 

7. Prepare for Launch

Prepare your listing on your chosen app store. You’ll need things like a privacy policy, terms and conditions, and a name for your app. 

8. Release Your App

Create an account on your chosen app store. Complete your app listing using the details you figured out earlier, add some screen captures to show how your app works, and go live. 

How to Build a Decentralized App

Centralized and Decentralized Apps FAQs

Decentralized Versus Centralized Apps: Conclusion

Decentralized or centralized apps: which is better? In reality, neither! It all depends on how much control you want over your app in the long term, the size of your intended audience, and, to some extent, how you wish to market your mobile app. 

Now that you understand the pros and cons of each, you should be ready to make a decision and start building your app. 

Have you opted for a centralized or a decentralized app? How is it working for you so far? Is there anything you wish you'd known before getting started? 

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: Decentralized Versus Centralized Apps: Differences, How to, & Resources
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/decentralized-vs-centralized-apps/
Published Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2021 13:00:00 +0000

When it comes to building a conversion rate and search engine optimized website, speed is crucial.

If you don’t have a fast website, people will bounce faster than you can say “conversions.”

However, speeding up your website is no easy task.

Your problem could be anything from code that’s written poorly to images or large page elements.

You need to fix those issues fast, because Google will ding your website if you don’t.

The faster your site loads, the lower the bounce rate. If your site is fast, you have a better chance of ranking on Google over slow sites that drive high bounce rates.

Thankfully, Google offers the PageSpeed Insights tool to find out what you need to fix.

Unfortunately, they don’t give you the best instructions on getting your score to 100%.

Here’s how to score a perfect 100% on Google’s PageSpeed Insights and why you need to accomplish this feat.

Why Page Speed Matters

Page speed is a critical factor in ranking your website higher on Google’s search engine results.

If your website isn’t on par with the top 10 organic pages, you won’t rank on the first page.

So focusing on page speed is paramount to having a successful company and a website that converts.

Backlinko recently conducted a study where they analyzed over eleven million search engine results pages (SERPs) on Google.

They wanted to figure out which factors were the most common among sites ranked in the top 10 results.

Surprisingly, they found page speed and ranking don't seem to be correlated. However, the average load time of a site on the first page is 1.65 seconds, which is decently fast.

However, Google says page speed does matter. There was even an entire update about it.

That connection is backed up and supported by Google’s new PageSpeed industry benchmarks.

They found that as page load times go up, the chance of someone bouncing from your site increases dramatically:

That means that if your page takes 10 seconds to load, the likelihood of someone leaving your site before it even loads increases by more than 120 percent!

But according to a recent study of more than 5 million sites, the average website takes 10.3 seconds to load fully on desktop and 27.3 seconds to load on mobile.

This means almost all of us are missing the mark when it comes to having a fast-performing website.

In another study, BigCommerce found that conversion rates for e-commerce websites average somewhere in the one to two percent range.

Portent found page speed can increase conversion rates drastically.

Getting your speed to under two seconds can increase traffic and revenue.

So, what causes a page to load slowly?

The most common causes of slow pages are bulky images and poorly-designed coding.

If you look at any website in the modern era, it’s likely filled to the tipping point with images.

If you aren’t optimizing your images, you could have pages that take up multiple megabytes of space.

Page size and weight are often measured by page weight bytes. Simply put, page weight bytes show the total size of a web page measured in bytes.

Google’s benchmark data shows that the best practice for page size or weight is under 500KB:

But again, most of us are missing the mark here. We are vastly exceeding the recommended weight.

One of the concepts that stood out to me the most from the Google report comes from this short yet impactful quote:

“No matter what, faster is better and less is more.”

No matter how well your site is doing, there's a good chance you have serious room for improvement.

How to Use PageSpeed Insights Tool

Most sites run slowly due to large images that take up too much space.

But that’s not always the case for every website.

You need to know exactly what’s causing your slow site speeds before you can make the necessary changes to score 100% on the PageSpeed Insights tool.

To get started, open up the PageSpeed Insights tool and enter your website URL into the bar:

Click “Analyze” to have Google run a quick test on your site.

The finished report will tell you everything you need to know about your site and what might be hindering its performance.

Here’s what my report looks like:

It’s an 87/100.

It’s not great. It’s not terrible either, though.

There's almost always have room for improvement. My goal here is to get you to 100% by the end of this article as we take this journey in page speed together.

First, let’s look at the items that I have optimized and perfected:

Now, notice how there are only a few items on this list compared to my “Possible Optimizations” list:

This information tells me that the items on “Possible Optimizations” are a little less impactful than those I have already optimized.

Obviously, you’ll need to take care of every element to hit 100% on the Page Speed Insights tool.

You’ll want to start with the top priority items (more on this later).

Next, we want to test our mobile site separately.

You can use the mobile site tester on the PageSpeed Insights tool, but Google released an updated, more accurate version of this.

Head over to Test My Site to try it. Input your website URL and hit enter:

Google will take a few minutes to run this report, but it will give you a detailed look at how your mobile site performs compared to industry standards.

It will even tell you how many visitors you could be losing because of a lower page speed.

Here’s what my data looks like:

My load time on mobile is four seconds.

Remember: The recommended load time is three seconds or less.

That means that my speed isn’t up to par with industry standards.

Due to that, I am losing up to 10 percent of my visitors simply from poor speed performance!

Here’s what my mobile test looks like when I compare it to the industry standards:

While still in the top-performing section, I am not where I should be if I want to maximize the effectiveness of my website or drive more traffic and conversions.

Scroll down even further and Google will give you an estimate on what your top fixes could do for your website:

Google says that with a few fixes I could reduce my load times by around three seconds.

That means that I could potentially get my website to load at the one-second mark!

That’s amazing. Trust me, to save 10 percent of your visitors or more, it’s something that you need to do.

Run your website through this mobile site test to get data on what fixes you need for your website.

In this next section, I’ll walk you through fixing the top page speed problems to help you score a 100% on the PageSpeed Insights tool.

4 Ways to Land a Perfect PageSpeed Insights Score

Getting a perfect 100% on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is no easy task.

It’s not going to happen overnight, either. You’ll have to do some legwork and spend some hours at the grindstone.

But if you want to save traffic, drive more conversions, and bring in more revenue, you need to do it.

It may be tedious and tiresome, but you need those conversions. You can’t be lazy and risk leaving traffic and profit on the table.

Here are the top four ways you can speed up your site and score a perfect 100% with Google.

1. Compress Your Images

The biggest cause of slow pages and low scores is large images.

When I fixed this on my own site, I found a huge impact on speed.

One of the top optimization techniques for fixing image size is compression.

You can save an average of 50 percent or more on image size by using simple compression tools.

If you use WordPress, one of the best ways to do this without spending much time is to use a plugin, like WP Smush Image.

WP Smush has tons of awesome features for free.

You can smush images automatically by adding the plugin. It will scan your media library on WordPress and detect images that it can compress:

If you want to smush tons of new images for your site in bulk, you can upload them directly into the plugin.

You can smush up to 50 images at a single time, making it one of the fastest tools on the market:

If you head to the settings for this plugin, you can turn on the setting to automatically smush images on upload.

If you enable this setting, you’ll never have to worry about compression again. And if you compress all of the existing images on your site, then you don’t have to worry about it every time you upload.

WP Smush is an excellent, free tool for the everyday WordPress user.

But, if you don’t use WordPress, what do you do?

If you run a Shopify-based store and site, you can use Crush.pics:

Crush.pics says that you can expect a big jump in PageSpeed Insights scores using their tool:

PageSpeed score before compression: 75/100. PageSpeed score after compression: 87/100

If you aren’t familiar with plugins or don’t like to use them for your site, you can use free tools online like Compress JPEG or Optimizilla.

Both are fast, free tools that allow you to compress up to 20 images in a single upload.

Check out this example image that I compressed to give you an idea of how impactful these programs can be:

I reduced the file size by 68 percent in just two seconds using Optimizilla. It reduced the size from 380KB to 120KB with almost no quality difference!

You can use all of these tools for free and you should definitely implement them if you can’t use a plugin.

2. Use Browser Caching

Browser caching works by “remembering” the previously-loaded resources so that it doesn’t have to reload them upon every single visit.

When a website visitor travels to a new page on your site, all of your data, like logos and footers, won’t need to load again.

That will result in a big increase in speed when people land on your site.

How do you implement it? Thankfully, there’s a plugin for it. You don’t need to be a coding expert to do it.

Try using W3 Total Cache for WordPress sites. It’s got over one million active installs and is the most popular caching plugin on the market:

W3 Total Cache claims that it can give you at least a 10x improvement in overall site performance.

On top of that, they claim (and back up) that this plugin will help you achieve higher results on Google’s PageSpeed tools.

The tool also helps you minify HTML (which we will dive into next), JavaScript, and CSS, giving you up to 80 percent bandwidth savings.

Try using W3 Total Cache today to give your website a fast, easy boost in speed even if you don’t have coding experience.

3. Minify Your HTML

Minimizing the space your HTML coding takes up is another big factor in getting a perfect score from Google.

Minification is the process of removing or fixing unnecessary or duplicated data without impacting how a browser will process the HTML.

It involves fixing code, formatting, removing unused code, and shortening code when possible.

Once again, thanks to the awesome plugin options of WordPress, you don’t need to be a coding genius to fix this.

One of the best tools to do this is HTML Minify.

You can download this plugin for free directly from their site and install it to your WordPress account in seconds.

You can also install it directly from this plugin page.

Once you install the plugin, you only need to take a few steps before you see an instant impact on your site.

Head to the settings tab on your Minify HTML plugin and enable all of the following settings:

You can effectively kill multiple birds with one stone.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights recommends that you minify HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Enable the “Minify HTML” + “Inline JavaScript” settings.

Next, be sure to select yes for “Remove HTML, JavaScript and CSS comments.”

The great thing about this plugin is that it will tell you what the recommended action is under each setting.

Follow these actions if you are unfamiliar with how these settings work.

Minify your coding today and you should see an instant impact on your insights report.

4. Implement AMP

AMP is short for Accelerated Mobile Pages.

It’s a project implemented by Google to help mobile pages load faster.

It works by making an open-source format that strips away tons of unnecessary content, making your mobile pages load nearly instantly.

It gives users a more streamlined experience on mobile without any clunky features that don’t work well on mobile devices.

If you browse the Internet on your mobile phone, you probably have clicked on an AMP-based article.

Here’s what they look like:

They are often relegated to the “Top Stories” section of Google search results and they load up instantly.

They don’t have much formatting, which helps them load quickly and deliver the content that the mobile user wants to see.

When a searcher on Google clicks one of these AMP articles, they see the content like this:

It’s a simplified version of the real website that allows a user to scroll between different stories without leaving the web page and clicking on the next.

This feature streamlines the user experience on mobile.

Gone are the days where you had to wait 10 seconds for a site to load, then click back to the search results page, and wait another 10 seconds for the next site to load.

Here you can access the content of multiple articles without clicking the back button once.

It’s extremely effective at speeding up your site and reducing the likelihood that someone will leave.

Tons of companies are taking advantage of AMP.

The company WIRED started implementing AMP to do a better job of reaching their customers.

They were finding that their mobile user experience was too slow. Conversions were simply not happening because of the speed issues and visitor retention problems.

Deciding to invest time into AMP made a huge impact for WIRED.

They increased their click-through rate from organic search results by 25 percent.

They found a 63 percent increase in CTRs on ads in AMP stories, too.

They also were able to add AMP stories to over 100k articles on their site.

Gizmodo also hopped on the AMP train and saw huge improvements on their mobile site.

They were getting over 100k AMP page visits every single day with load times that were 3x faster than standard mobile pages.

Conversions increased by 50 percent, too.

It’s safe to say that AMP can significantly increase conversions and mobile speed, giving you a massive opportunity to score higher on Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

If you want to start using AMP on your own site, there are a few ways to do it.

If you’re familiar with HTML, you can follow AMP’s detailed tutorial here.

For those who are less technologically savvy or have no experience in HTML, try using a WordPress plugin.

One of the most popular plugins is AMP for WP.

It has over 80,000 active installs and has constant support and updates.

The plugin includes an AMP page builder that you can easily drag and drop page elements on:

It’s one of the easiest ways to create AMP-friendly content.

All you have to do is download and install the plugin on your WordPress dashboard and activate it.

From there, you can use the page builder on each new post that you upload.

These pages will then create an AMP-friendly version that will show up in mobile search results.

AMP is a proven way to speed up your mobile site and reduce your speed to under one second–and tons of companies are finding success with it.

Google PageSpeed Insights FAQs

Why is page speed important?

Google uses page speed as a ranking factor because it affects user experience. It may affect your ability to rank higher in SERPs.

How does bounce rate correlate to page speed?

Studies have shown that sites that load faster have a lower bounce rate. This means the user is likely having a better experience.

What industries have the slowest sites?

On average, technology and travel sites load the slowest, where local and classified sites load the fastest.

How fast should a site load?

The best practice for page speed load time is three seconds.

Google PageSpeed Insights Conclusion

When you’ve spent countless days, weeks, and months building a new website, you want every image, element, and icon to be top-notch.

However, that often results in a site that is slower than Google recommends.

When it comes to driving conversions on your site, speed will always play a big role.

People don’t want to wait 10 seconds for your site to load when they can click back to Google and select the next result.

Scoring well on the PageSpeed Insights test should be one of your main priorities when trying to perfect and optimize your site.

To get started, you first need to diagnose what issues are plaguing your site.

Is it images, page elements, too much text, bad coding, or all of the above?

Use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to see where the problem lies, then work through their suggestions. You'll also want to minify code, compress images, add browser caching, and implement AMP.

These are proven steps that can have a big impact on your PageSpeed Insight score.

Scoring a perfect 100 percent on Google’s PageSpeed Insights can give your website the boost that it needs to succeed.

What are the best ways you have found to increase your site speed?

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: How to Score a Perfect 100% on Google PageSpeed Insights
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/google-pagespeed-insights/
Published Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2021 17:45:00 +0000

Instagram is extremely popular. The image-heavy platform is the fifth most-used social media network in the world, with over 1.2 billion users.

If you don't have a presence on Instagram, you’re missing out on building an audience and increasing your sales.

To get the most out of Instagram, you should create a solid Instagram bio so users can get a clear, concise idea of who you are, what you’re about, and, most importantly, what you can offer them.

Here are ten of the best Instagram bios for small businesses and explain why they’re excellent. We’ll also include tips for crafting a strong bio and what must-haves to include on your company account.

10 of the Best Instagram Bios for Small Businesses

Here are several small-business Instagram bios that hit the mark and why. We’ve also included takeaways you can use for your own company.

1. Ellevest

Ellevest is a digital investing platform. CEO Sallie Lee Krawcheck co-founded the company to empower women to take greater control over their financial future.

Why This Instagram Bio Is Great

The Ellevest Instagram bio works because it clearly states who the business is for (by women, for women), the industry it’s in (financial services), and the type of business model it uses (membership-based). This gives the reader a good idea of the target audience and what they’ll achieve through the service.

The company also includes a Linktree link in its bio, a platform allowing you to showcase additional links to content you want to share with your followers. This link points users to multiple brand blog posts and membership webpages.

You can borrow this for your own small business. After all, a Linktree link isn’t just a content-sharing opportunity: You can walk people directly to your landing pages via Instagram, cutting through the noise so they can more easily buy from you.

2. Pura Vida Bracelets

Pura Vida, which translates to “Pure Life,” is more than just a bracelet retailer. The company has a community of over 800 artisans in countries such as Costa Rica, El Salvador, and India who earn money crafting homemade jewelry.

Why This Instagram Bio Is Great

First off, the Pura Vida Bracelets Instagram bio is structured with various emojis, which saves space and gives off a fun vibe. “Fun” works here because the company features tons of colorful images of smiling people modeling the products—it’s on-brand.

Second, the emojis-as-bullet-points help clearly state the bio's main areas of focus, particularly “FREE SHIPPING.” This is good for small businesses to highlight, especially if your main competitors don’t offer it.

Lastly, the branded hashtag, #PuraVidaBracelets, is a nice touch. Small-business retailers should consider implementing a personalized hashtag as a way to social-listen and reshare UGC across social while getting their brands' names out there.

3. The Freckled Hen Farmhouse

Created by lifestyle blogger Natalie Freeman and her husband Luke, The Freckled Hen Farmhouse is both a brick-and-mortar and online shopping destination. This general store has everything from home goods to local products to garden supplies.

Why This Instagram Bio Is Great

The Freckled Hen Farmhouse Instagram bio doesn’t cater to one audience over the other. Instead, it caters to both in-person and online shoppers.

The bio includes its store hours, local delivery options, and phone number. Additionally, the company plugs its rental cottage in the bio, adding more opportunities for loyal customers to spend money on the brand. Finally, it includes a Linktree link leading to its store website, newsletter sign-up page, and seasonal and year-round category pages.

If you’re a small business with an online and offline space, it’s a smart idea to speak to all your customers in your Instagram bio.

4. Lush Cosmetics

Lush is a values-driven brand. Founded in London, the cosmetics company prides itself on fresh products, no unnecessary ingredients, and cruelty-free testing.

Why This Instagram Bio Is Great

Unlike our other examples, the Lush Cosmetics Instagram bio keeps it short and sweet, saying, “We’re creating a cosmetics revolution to save the planet,” followed by two emojis, its branded hashtag, and a Linktree link.

The message is direct, and words and phrases like “revolution” and “save the planet” feel bold and exciting coming from a makeup brand. Similarly, small brands can, and should, experiment with how they describe their company, as long as it feels relevant—otherwise, it will come off as confusing, or worse, inauthentic.

This bio is a good reminder, too, that just because you have more space doesn’t mean you need to use it. That in itself is a departure from jam-packed bios and even a bit surprising. Our brains like novelty, so don’t be afraid to do things a little differently for your business.

5. Later

Later is a leading Instagram marketing platform. The company boasts millions of users, and social media professionals, brands, and influencers can use the tool to manage content across Instagram, Pinterest, and even TikTok.

Why This Instagram Bio Is Great

There are a lot of things working for the Later Instagram bio. First, the company does a great job expanding the copy beyond its name to better reach users on the platform who may be looking for this type of service (social marketing platform).

By improving its Instagram SEO with relevant keywords, the brand increases its chances of being found. Plus, “Later” is a common word, so it’s good to add more context for searchers.

Next, the company states it’s the “#1 Marketing Platform for Instagram.” Piggy-backing off SEO, this is good to market to potential users.

Small businesses can optimize their bios with applicable keywords and feature brag-worthy accomplishments to get readers’ attention.

6. ALOHA

ALOHA produces USDA organic, vegan, and gluten-free protein powders, drinks, and foods. The brand shares plenty of recipes and UGC on its site and social media platforms.

Why This Instagram Bio Is Great

Taking a page out of Later’s book, the ALOHA Instagram bio asserts the company as its industry's leader. While the brand keeps the copy to a minimum, it focuses on the keywords its customers care about, like “organic” and “plant-based.”

ALOHA also changed its profile picture to showcase it was named a Certified B Corporation. These companies must meet strict social and environmental standards, among others. If your small business has a prestigious distinction or won a big award, it’s worth highlighting it in this space.

7. Lokal

A husband-and-wife duo created the Lokal Hotel after dreaming up ways they could improve the Airbnbs where they’d stayed and the hospitality experience in general. This home-away-from-home brand offers hyper-local lodging in the Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey regions.

Why This Instagram Bio Is Great

The Lokal Hotel Instagram bio covers a lot of ground. It includes a specific category, “boutique hotels | cabins” instead of just “hotel,” so those seeking this particular experience can find it, and expands on this with “apartment suites & homes.”

On top of the location and branded hashtag, the bio points out the Linktree where guests can book their stay, sign up for its newsletter, and more.

Other small businesses, especially those in this space, can take a few cues from this bio. By keeping all this information centralized, you could keep potential guests engaged and on your page longer.

8. GOODEE

GOODEE is a top online marketplace. Designers and entrepreneurs Byron and Dexter Peart founded the company to curate brands that not only looked good but sparked good too. As such, they only work with artisans who prioritize positive environmental or social impact.

Why This Instagram Bio Is Great

The GOODEE Instagram bio lays out what the business is (a curated marketplace) and its focus (good design meets good purpose). Like ALOHA, pointing to the company's B Corp designation and 1% for the Planet certification aligns with its mission and signals to consumers what’s important to the business.

This is both sincere and savvy: 72 percent of U.S. consumers believe it’s important “to buy from companies that reflect their values,” according to Retail TouchPoints.

So, if your small business is values-driven, don’t shy away from including that in your marketing and messaging. After all, the customers you seek are also seeking you.

9. Rumpl

Rumpl operates in the outdoor-industry space and helps keep campers and adventurers warm. After a successful Kickstarter launch, the company continues to grow and expand its inventory.

Why This Instagram Bio Is Great

There’s beauty in the simplicity of the Rumpl Instagram bio. It mentions its best-known item—blankets— and gives a brief, relatable description of the materials in them. The company also mentions its “Shark Tank” appearance and includes a branded hashtag and link to a current giveaway.

Instagram contests are popular and can help accelerate your brand growth. This is especially true if you partner with another company and can leverage each other’s audiences. It’s something your small business should consider (and then promote in your Instagram bio, of course!).

10. Letterfolk

This home-decor biz produces letter boards, tile sets, paper goods, and more. A married couple founded Letterfolk, and the company has developed a big following thanks to its thoughtfully designed products and national press hits.

Why This Instagram Bio Is Great

Instead of using the company's Instagram bio to direct followers to use certain hashtags, Letterfolk invites its followers to check them out, saying, “See LF products in the wild,” followed by relevant hashtags. Using this hashtag, consumers can view how other people use and display their products. By making this tweak, it feels more community-oriented right away.

Another notable distinction: It’s stated in the bio that Joanna and Johnny are not only a husband-and-wife team but also a small business.

Since some shoppers specifically look to buy from smaller companies, this is an excellent way to get in front of potential shoppers. If you don’t call-out your small-biz standing in your bio, consider adding it and see if there’s an increase in engagement.

5 Tips for Creating the Best Instagram Bio for Your Small Business

Now that you’ve seen examples of some of the best Instagram bios for businesses, let’s recap the top ways to make yours stand out.

1. Use Creative Elements

Some brands add emojis to the mix in their Instagram bios. Aside from highlighting your brand's personality, these icons can help influence readability. This could help your messaging stand out. So, you might want to try cutting back on copy and increasing white space by including emojis.

Brands can also change up font styles in their Instagram bios. This adds variety. However, be careful to make sure the script is readable, and don’t overuse it.

2. Show Your Brand’s Personality

You want to capture your brand’s personality in your Instagram bio. Experiment with copy, emojis, and other creative ways to show it off.

Don’t be afraid to play around a bit and have fun with your followers, either. Drizly’s Instagram bio comes to mind:

Be careful not to mistake “social media” as an excuse to depart from your familiar brand voice, though. For example, a hospital using laughing emojis in its bio wouldn’t be a fit—and might even make patients nervous! Alternatively, seeing emojis on the BarkBox Instagram bio feels completely in-line with the company's fun reputation.

Bottom line: Know your brand and know your audience.

3. Share User-Generated Content

You don’t need to develop a campaign to create a hashtag—though it doesn’t hurt. Creating a hashtag unique to your small business is a good way to create brand awareness and help build your community.

Craft a hashtag that includes your company name or captures your ethos. For instance, if you think #JustDoIt, chances are, your brain goes to Nike.

From there, you can encourage your customers to include your hashtag in their social posts and reshare that user-generated content (UGC) on your channels.

You can also repurpose UGC for stories and other content. Incentivize users to share posts with your hashtag for discounts, contests, or just the opportunity of possibly featuring them on your platforms.

4. Clearly State Your Brand’s Purpose

You only have so many characters to work with in your Instagram bio. Use this space to clearly state what your small company does and be direct in your ask. For example:

• Do you want to build a community? Include your branded hashtag and ask followers to use it.
• Are you looking for newsletter subscribers? Include a link in your bio.
• Are you looking to increase sales? Add a Linktree pointing to multiple product pages so users can find what they’re looking for.

Whatever your goal, be clear about it.

5. Include Links, Hashtags, and More

You have a hard stop when it comes to characters within the bio itself. However, there are options to expand on more details about your business and even cross-promote your other companies or personal pages. Consider including the following:

• intentional calls to action (CTAs)
• Instagram handles for your other related brands
• your location and hours of operation if you own a physical store
• your contact information
• your branded hashtag
• links to current promotions or contests
• a Linktree (or similar) link leading readers to other content

Conclusion

The best Instagram bios authentically match your brand and serves your users.

Checking out the bios of the pages we've listed can help you get a feel for what's working across the board. Also, see what your competitors are doing, and don’t be afraid to experiment with different formats.

Social media is an important aspect of digital marketing. Our agency can help if you are having trouble developing a social media strategy. We also offer assistance with content marketing and SEO.

Once you’ve polished your page, Instagram can be a powerful marketing tool for your business. So don’t skimp on putting the work into it.

What do you like about your favorite brands’ Instagram bios?

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: 10 Small Business Examples of the Best Instagram Bios
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/instagram-bios/
Published Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

Website monitoring helps you identify your site’s performance problems in real-time. Most of these services capture webpage availability, average web page load time, and web page functionality, among other performance indicators. 

If you're site is slow, people are not going to stay and wait. They'll leave quickly, which lowers your page rank. The process feeds on itself until your site is forgotten entirely.

In this day and age, speed is a killer. Website monitoring is all but mandatory if you wish to remain competitive. 

I picked out the seven best website monitoring services to keep your site up and running. Keep reading for reviews of my top picks and a brief buyer's guide to help you find the best option for you.

#1 – UptimeRobot Review – The Best Free Website Monitoring Service 

UptimeRobot offers a free plan if you aren’t yet ready to spend money on a monitoring service. This option is excellent for a blog or if you are just starting in e-commerce. The service has more than 800,000 clients, including GoDaddy, Expedia, and IBM. 

You get all the necessary monitoring features with the free plan, including HTTP(S) monitoring, ping monitoring, port monitoring, and response time monitoring. You also get 50 monitors with five-minute checks. 

Additionally, the free plan offers two months of log retention and one status page. 

You can upgrade to the Pro plan for $15 per month to get more advanced features in addition to the ones you get with the free plan. Some of the additional functions include: 

• Voice calls and SMS alerts
• 24-month log retention
• One-minute checks 
• Cron job monitoring
• Keyword monitoring
• Maintenance windows 
• SSL certificate expiry monitoring
• Advanced notification settings
• Unlimited status pages

There is also an Enterprise plan for custom check intervals and several monitors. 

UptimeRobot offers reliable website monitoring tools and will easily scale with your business as it grows. The service has monitoring locations in the USA, UK, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Canada, and Japan. 

Register for a free UptimeRobot account. Use it as long as you like.

 #2 – Pingdom Review – The Best for Small And Medium Businesses  

Pingdom by SolarWinds is a powerful website monitoring service for small to medium-sized businesses. The service is also suitable for startups, digital marketers, and even DevOps. 

The service gives you a choice of synthetic or real user monitoring to provide you with a comprehensive view of what's going on with your website. You can also combine the capabilities of both monitoring options with their Enterprise plan. 

Pingdom’s synthetic monitoring checks for uptime from over 100 locations, provides page speed analysis, and monitors important transactions, including shopping cart, checkout, user login, new user registration, and search, among others. 

RUM monitoring with Pingdom gives you detailed insights into how real users experience your website across different browsers, devices, and geographic locations. 

The service also monitors your mobile site every 60 seconds (same for desktop) and performs the same checks on your mobile sites to help you deliver a standard experience across devices. 

Pingdom also has a powerful HTTP-based, RESTful API for people who like to customize and automate synthetic monitoring interactions. Developers can also write their own applications or scripts depending on their specific needs. 

Pingdom integrates with plenty of third-party services, including Webhooks, Slack, and VictorOps, to further optimize reporting, incident management, alerts, and dashboard. 

Additional features include:

• Sharable reports
• Color-coded chart bars
• Web analytics tool
• Bounce rate checker 
• SSL certificate monitoring and alerting
• Cloud performance monitoring 
• Joomla monitoring
• Server uptime monitoring 
• Website uptime history

You can try out Pingdom's 14-day free trial for access to all the features. Paid plans start at $10 per month, which is very affordable for smaller businesses. 

#3 – AppDynamics Review – The Best Software Monitoring Service for Web Apps 

Web applications have complex and diverse interactive elements that are not always easy to monitor. While some website monitoring services watch apps, you really need a service that caters primarily to this market. 

AppDynamics is an application performance management solution. It supports everyday application environments, including Java, Node.js, C/C++ (Beta), and PHP. Additionally, AppDynamics covers more complex platforms and solutions, including WebMethods, TIBCO, JMS, and queuing technologies. 

The service does real-time transaction monitoring across crucial metrics, including response time, slow rate, error rate, load, and stalls. It also eliminates blind spots in your applications by automatically mapping the relationships between the various tiers and services. 

AppDynamics automatically detects anomalies and provides rapid root-cause diagnostics. The tool also captures important debug data to speed up the software debugging process. They also offer an in-depth diagnosis, allowing you to identify the problem down to the offending line of code. 

Additional features include:

• End-user monitoring
• Application performance monitoring 
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Network monitoring
• Business performance monitoring

AppDynamics has three pricing plans, and you have to contact the provider to get the actual price. The Pro plan also supports complex multi-cloud topologies mapping and visualizing, creating alerting policies and health rules, and key performance metrics.

The Advanced and Peak plans offer additional capabilities depending on what you need. This service is ideal for industries like retail, media and entertainment, healthcare, and insurance.

You can check out the free trial or schedule a demo before you decide if App Dynamics is right for you. 

#4 – Site24x7 Review – The Best for Multiple Websites And Apps

Monitoring a single website is hard enough, but Site24x7 makes it easy to keep an eye on up to 500 websites at once. This service is all-inclusive and will monitor the website, cloud, server, application, and network. 

Site24x7 has a single log that collects, consolidates, analyzes, and stores data where you can easily view and troubleshoot problems. They use synthetic and real user monitoring in each package, so you always get the best of both worlds. 

The Starter plan costs $9 per month and monitors up to 10 websites and servers from more than 110 monitoring locations globally. All plans support HTTP(S), DNS, SSL/TSL, FTP, REST APIs, URLs, SMTP server, SOAP web service, and more.  

You can also manually select the monitoring location from multiple addresses across North America, South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. 

Site24x7 supports Ruby, Java, PHP, .NET, Node.js, and mobile platforms for apps. The tool also monitors Windows, Linux, Docker, VMware, FreeBSD, GCP, and Azure for servers.

Additional features include:

• Mobile access
• Root cause analysis
• Hosted status pages
• SLA management
• Alerts and reports
• Support for managed service providers

Site 24×7 plans and pricing is as follows:

• Starter: $9 per month
• Pro: $35 per month
• Classic: $89 per month
• Enterprise: $225 per month 

If you’re looking for an adaptable and flexible service for multiple websites and applications, Site24x7 is a great option.

#5 – Monitis Review – The for Custom Monitoring Plans 

If you believe that you should only pay for what you use, Monitis is the website monitoring service for you. Some of Monitis’s clients include SIEMENS and the University of Cambridge. 

With Monitis, you choose only the features you want, and then the service will create a customized price and plan to suit your needs. This is the perfect arrangement for users who know exactly what they want from a website monitoring service, down to the specific features. 

The service checks your website every 60 seconds from more than 30 server locations in North and South America, Europe, Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa. 

This is also an all-inclusive monitoring tool. You can monitor websites, servers, networks, and applications. For website monitoring, Monitis checks uptime, full page load, and transactions. The service supports Windows and Linux for server monitoring and will check CPU, network, memory, and bandwidth, among other aspects.

Monitis also has a powerful API to customize your experience further. You also get SDKs for all popular languages, including Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, and C #. 

Additional features include:

• Real user monitoring 
• Graph view 
• Device monitoring
• Asset tracking
• Backup
• Patching
• Comprehensive reporting 
• Webpage content check
• Instant alerts
• Screen capturing 
• Diagnostic 
• Funnel visualization

Montis has a good selection of alerts integrations, including Slack, VictorOps, OpsGenie, Jira, and PagerDuty, among others. 

You can try out the 15-day trial before making a final decision. 

#6 – LogicMonitor Review – The Best for Service Providers 

If you are a service provider, your website monitoring requirements will naturally be different from those of your clients. LogicMonitor has products that explicitly cater to this market, so you won't have to rely on the same cookie-cutter tools as the shops you serve. 

This is another all-inclusive monitoring tool that monitors your websites, networks, servers, cloud, and IT infrastructure.

LogicMonitor allows you to view your entire hybrid infrastructure from one place. You can observe several infrastructure metrics, including cloud and container resources, networks and networking gear, websites, SaaS services, IoT devices, and more. 

LogicMonitor also has all the website monitoring features you would need, including ping checks, web checks, rapid deployment, and customizable alert thresholds.  

Additional features include:

• 2000+ integrations 
• Intelligent alerting 
• Topology mapping
• Forecasting
• Encrypted data
• Visualizations
• AIOps early warning system
• SaaS deployment
• Log analysis
• Remote monitoring 

LogicMonitor also offers remote and on-site training for seamless implementation. They do not post their prices online, but you can tour the platform and call for a customized quote from their website.

#7 – Uptrends Review – The Best for Internal Server Monitoring 

Sometimes the problem is on your side of the firewall. For site owners who don’t want to take any chances, Uptrends has robust internal monitoring systems. 

The service checks your internal servers and network devices to make sure that everything is up to par. Setting up is as easy as executing an installation file on the servers. The agent works seamlessly with your firewall, and there is no need to create special rules. 

The tool supports popular protocols and devices, including Windows, HTTP, Ping, SNMP, and Connect.

Uptrends also allows you to customize your dashboard for internal server monitoring to give you control over how data is presented. Once you create your custom dashboard, you can save it as your homepage. 

Web monitoring with Uptrends is equally robust. The service has more than 220 monitoring locations worldwide that check uptime, performance, and multi-step transactions. Uptrends uses synthetic monitoring and offers interactive charts, public status pages, bandwidth throttling, and error snapshots. 

This service is all-encompassing and includes additional essential capabilities like:

• Web application monitoring
• API monitoring
• Multi-browser monitoring 
• External server monitoring 

If you are not yet ready to purchase, Uptrends has a free plan. Here, you get access to plenty of free tools, including free website monitoring, global uptime, website speed test, DSN report, traceroute, uptime and SLA calculator, and ping test. However, you can only choose one feature at a time to try out rather than a single free package with all the tools. 

Paid plans include:

• Starter: starting at $15.47 per month
• Business: $21.59 per month
• Enterprise: $51.58 per month 

You can also try a free trial for the business plan for 30 days here.

What I Looked at to Find the Best Website Monitoring Service

Even a seasoned webmaster would have a problem picking out the best website monitoring services without help. There are currently more than 150 services available, so choosing the best one takes a keen eye for detail. 

The secret to making the all-important decisions lies in the services' features. Features will instantly tell you whether the service is good, mediocre, or terrible. Here are the most important things to consider when comparing website monitoring services. 

Uptime Monitoring 

The most basic function of a website monitoring service is to tell you whether your website is working properly. If your website is down, you can't make sales, and you could quickly lose customers to the competition. The service should check the website at regular intervals and report back the status. 

The most common checks include HTTP(S), DNS, SSL, and domain expiry checks, ensuring that essential infrastructure is performing as it should.  Additional protocols to consider may include SIP, TCP, FTP, PING, and UDP. 

Some services run these checks from different servers worldwide to ensure that your global audience can access your site. Additionally, monitoring schedules may vary from once every four hours to once every minute or less. 

Ideally, you want uptime of 99.9%, so this monitoring is crucial for keeping your hosting service accountable. 

Average Web Page Load Time 

Once you know that your webpage is working and available, you need to find out how it performs. Full-page load monitoring primarily checks how long your web pages take to load.  Some services also report back the cause of any problem found.  

A good website monitoring service should keep records of the average loading time of each page. Some let you set a maximum load time and alert you when pages take too long to load according to your criteria. 

You may also want a monitoring tool that specifically targets content. This feature ensures that page outputs, words, or phrases critical to your conversion funnel are loading correctly. 

Load Testing 

Your website may be performing optimally until it is overloaded. Special events like Black Friday sales or the holiday season come to mind.

Load testing or web stress testing puts a load on the website to see how it works under pressure. For example, the tool may apply a load of 3000 users for 20 minutes to see if your site remains stable.

A surge in traffic is good, but only if you know your site can handle it.

Reports & Analytics 

Regular reports and analytics help you to keep a record of your website's performance over time. It helps if the information makes sense, so your DevOps, executives, or other people who have access to the data know what to do with it. 

Consider also public reporting. Website visitors can get simple reports displayed on the web page or a dedicated status page. This option can drastically reduce unnecessary calls to customer support.

Summary 

If the only advantage you get from a website monitoring service is enhanced customer retention, then your efforts will have been worth it.

These services offer an array of additional benefits, including optimized website performance, strengthened security, data retention, and much more.

Here's a complete recap of my top picks:

1. UptimeRobot — Best free website monitoring service
2. Pingdom — Best for small and medium businesses
3. AppDynamics — Best for web apps
4. Site24x7 — Best for multiple websites and apps
5. Monitis — Best for custom monitoring plans
6. LogicMonitor — Best for service providers
7. Uptrends — Best for internal server monitoring

Follow the links and compare the services' features to narrow down the best options. Also, try to go for industry-specific services such as the ones I have outlined in this review. You can never go too wrong with these strategies. 

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: Best Website Monitoring Services
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/best-website-monitoring-services/
Published Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2021 13:00:00 +0000