I am very interested in offering telephone support to my clients. However the issue is in how to pull it off. I have support staff located across thestates that all have different assigned shifts.

What kind of options does this leave me?

I have heard of companies using remote offices but I dont really know how that works. It would be ideal for me to have a service that allows people to call into an 800 number and to be greeted by the on duty technician. Is there a service that I could setup that would route calls based upon the time of the call. Where then the tech could pick the call up via a VOIP line that the company will pay for.

I know that was a little unorganized and rambled but just trying to get the idea across. Please throw some ideas out there about how to run this successfully.

Their is a company out their that offers a telephone service to where, you can make extensions on your link or link up phones to do certain departments even if they are across the world.

I.e:

You - KY, US
Carl - China
Sujit - India
Roxy - Russia

Lets say I'm a po. customer. I call your phone and get the nice proffesional voice, asking me to pick a department. Since I am a po. client, I choose 1 (sales). Now lets say you made Roxy and Carl to answer the sales call. It would page both of them (make their phone ring, they pick up and an automated voice tells them its a sales call, what number, etc) they can accept or deny or trasnfer the call to whoever. You can also assign each staff memeber their own extension. They can be anywhere in the world and this works, you can hire 10 people in China to do sales and everything would get trasnfered their, costing your cleint $0.00 for the call.

Something like this, I'll try and look this up for you though. If that of coruse what you are looking for.

I highly recommend ringcentral.com (http://www.ringcentral.com).Very inexpensive and I think they offer everything you need.

( I am in no way affiliated with ringcentral, just a happy customer)

What Frimon86 is suggesting is a PBX/hosted pbx. You could go many different ways with this from Virtual PBX where the numbers (cell phones for example) get blasted/hunted to a true PBX where you have dedicated phones.

I personally like the hosted pbx with VoIP solutions out there as you get a dedicated phone -- so you know 100% that it's business related, and you can call others within the company for free and with just an extension number.

If you are going to have a lot of calls, also think about the possibility to install your own asterisk system.

Okay I think I'm beginning to understand. Does the PBX/Hosted PBX make where I can set it up as follows:

Tech 1 - Chicago ::Calls Routed here between 12pm and 6pm::
Tech 2 - London, England ::Calls Routed here between 6pm and 1am::
Tech 3 - Tokyo, Japan ::Calls Routed here between 1am and 7am::

Then provide a VOIP line for the three techs, as an integrated service with the Virtual PBX? Thank you very much for your guys inputs and responses.

After googling some fo the PBX providers. I felt ringcentral was a really good looking provider and company. However I am still open to looking at other providers if there is something better that can be found out there. I still need to know if I need a seperate VOIP provider to provide for my employees.

I have to say that RingCentral is a service that you should definitely look into (as you are). As far as I know, they have a VOIP beta right now so you can have extensions ring directly to the VOIP extensions -- which would be an "all-in-one" solution.

This may be something you would want to look into.

I use ringcentral.com with regular U. S. land line and cell phone numbers.

Your staff can use their regular lines. They would simply hear a message from the PBX clearly indicating that it was business call. A password can also be setup for each extension in order to accept an incoming call. This is great if they are using their home line and are afraid that someone else in the house may answer a business call. Outgoing calls can also be routed thru the system so that the company gets the bill.

They have a Windows app called RingCentral Call Controller which allows the user to setup shortcuts to dial any number. It also integrates well with Outlook and can be used to send faxes right from the desktop.

If you still want to use VOIP I suggest getting everyone a Skype In number and have RingCentral route calls to it. I've never tried it, but it should work.

I hope this helps.

Kall8 supports time-based routing: http://www.kall8.com/

Personally I think 24/7 email and live chat support is better than email,chat and phone support on specific hours.That is especially true if you have a small staff.