my friend and I are starting a travel website. We will be creating a mini-call center in his house. There will be 2 reps (his wife and step-son) doing all our customer service. I want to get a VOIP service in case we grow and need to move to a bigger place. I want something online and not set up my own.

We need a toll free and local number for the website then each rep will have their own phone to answer calls that come into those numbers. Each rep can have their own # or extension though this is not necessary but were in case customers wanted to talk to a specific rep.

When a user calls it would ring on all phones and whichever rep is available will answer. If one rep is on the phone, calls could still come in and be answered by the other reps. If all reps are on the phone then it would go to a general voicemai bpx. Eventually we will add more reps to answer calls and have different departments. We want to set up schedules for work and non-work hours, etc. We also want music/message on hold.

I also need to get an internet fax line.

I have been looking at RingCentral and Nextiva. They both offer 4 local lines, toll free and fax within unlimited incoming & outgoing for $99.95 plus taxes. They both say we need a phone line for each rep that will answer the phone on top of the toll free and local numbers for the website. With Ringcentral I didn't like the quality of calls when I spoke to the reps. With Nextiva the toll free minutes are not included. Both do have fair limit usages with Ringcentral being less.

Any recommendations?

Hi,

dont know if this will help, But came across this http://cosmopbx.sourceforge.net/

Looks good, a free pbx with linux distro

I was just going to mention RingCentral :) Which should be great if you don't want to bother messing with managing a PBX.

However FreePBX is a free asterisk setup. And these guys http://www.easyvoxbox.org/ have a pre-setup distro for you to play with.

as i said i dont want to deal with my managing my own system, set-up or server.

Then RingCentral it is :) There are others, but RingCentral makes it very simple.

what others are there? As I said I was not impressed with the call quality from ringcentral.

what others are there? As I said I was not impressed with the call quality from ringcentral.

http://www.pbxcompare.com/

RingCentral I look at them and I can only read good things about them.

So I will also suggest you use them for your travel biz.

All the best with your hunting for better communication with clients.

try virtualpbx.com, they're good as well.

I second the RingCentral vote!

You can buy a multiline voip adapter that does the local extension thing, and just have the incoming as a hunt group(old pbx terminolgy).

There is a nice one that does 8 lines for about $250. It's just a small box, like a consumer router. No pc to maintain at all.

Hello,

We have been using Ring Central for a few years now. I have not noticed any issues with the quality of the calls. Our Management Team all have their own lines and phones and our entire CSR Team uses a single extension. We set up each of our CSR's with the softphone that is already configured with the login information. When the CSR comes online, their softphone boots up and logs in. When a call comes in it rings all of the soft phones at one time.

We like RC due to the ease of management and configuration.

Were you just basing judgment of RingCentral's call quality on your call to them, or was there somewhere you read reviews of it?