Traveling internationally can be a major problem for small business owners when they find that using a cell phone can incur enormous roaming charges. In fact, even if you do not answer your phone, you may pay $1-$2 per minute for every call that rings when you are roaming overseas!

Phone.com has a way to help business people save substantial money on phone costs when traveling.

The idea is simple. Before you board the plane, you forward your cell phone calls to your Phone.com business telephone number (follow instructions from your cell phone provider for that. For example – click here to see how to do it on an AT&T cell phone). When you reach the destination country, you purchase a low cost “pay as you go” SIM card and place that in your (unlocked) cell phone or rent a cheap phone with the SIM card.

At your convenience from your hotel room, you set up your Phone.com extension using the web-based Phone.com Control Panel to forward calls to your new local number that comes with the SIM card.

Boom! There is no roaming charge and, in many countries, no cost for incoming calls either.

As for outbound calling, you can dial out of your phone and pay whatever the local SIM card d deal offers but the better way is to obtain a Global Number from Phone.com (we have numbers for over 40 countries) this will allow you to place calls using your own Phone.com Caller ID by dialing only your Global Number (a local call) and setting up menus to dial all your contacts.

You can also use our Phone.com Mobile VoIP App on your Smart Phone (if you have one) and dial out using your Hotel Wi-Fi with no International or roaming charges.

As you land back in the US, replace the SIM card and undo the cell phone call forwarding and you are done!

You can also set up schedules to make sure calls do not come in at undesirable hours in case you travel far off from your normal time zone.

Economically-minded users can make all that happen before they fly, and then cancel when they return. There are no long terms contracts at Phone.com.

So what can be simpler or more economical than that? Nothing! Remember: Phone.com customer service agents are always happy to help you with any questions.

Step 1: In your Phone.com control panel navigate to “Call Info” and then to “Manage Spam Callers List”

Step 2: Click the “Add A Number To Block” button.

Step 3: You will need to check the “Starts With” check box. You can then enter “+1325” which will block all calls from numbers beginning with 325. The note field is for your reference. Once you have completed that, click the “Add” button.

I told you it was easy. If you have any questions whatsoever regarding this new feature, our awesome customer service representatives are here to help 24 hours a day and 7 day a week!

Jeremy Watkin is the Director of Customer Service at Phone.com and co-founder ofCommunicateBetterBlog.com (and on Twitter: @commbetterblog ); a blog dedicated to learning about good and bad customer service with the intent of providing awesome customer service for Phone.com.

Recently Phone.com added Caller Analytics as a feature for our customers. This is an entirely new way of looking at data with insight into your customers age, gender, education and income level. This data can be broken down by time or date range and you can view the traffic in terms of technology used, landline or cell phone.

This means that you can have an insight into your clients/callers that you’ve never been able to before. Knowing you’re talking to a 75 year old millionaire with a college degree who likes to call in between 8 and 9 am for a chat with your company is quite different than at 21 year old who’s still in college and is in debt up to their ears. They both deserve a top notch customer experience but by knowing a little background information you have a much better chance of having a successful call.

With Caller Analytics you can even track the success of social media marketing, whether it’s a campaign or just daily interactions we can analyze calls by social channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even email.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in you should take advantage of our 60 day free trial. There’s no obligation, just log in to your administration control panel and add Caller Analytics. If you’re a new customer start off signing up from our homepage at www.phone.com. Remember the first rule of business is knowing your customers. Getting to know them will make you and your company more prepared to interact with them and isn’t that usually what we want?

Scheduling calls allows the administrator to set the times calls are forwarded to a certain extension or in this case cell phones.  You can have calls ring through to the employees desk phone and Communicator app on their computer (PC or Mac) 24 hours a day and to their cell phone from just 8am to 5pm Monday through Friday.  That’s up to you.

Scheduling is just one of those features that once you start to use it you won’t ever be able to live without it.  Plus your employees will probably be happy being able to cut down the hours in the day they get work calls on their cell phones, I guarantee their spouses will be.  It’s also good for them to know there’s a separation between work and home life.

Do you use call Scheduling in your company to keep from getting phone calls at all hours of the day and night?  Tell us about it on Facebook or Twitter.

Livingston, NJ (PRWEB) November 17, 2011, Phone.com, a provider of cloud-based phone services, today announced the addition of two new features to its already robust suite of functionality – call recording and group text messaging.

Phone.com has excelled at providing Voice over Internet (VoIP) services to businesses with requirements for one to twenty phone lines for more than four years. The company has achieved an outstanding record of customer retention and service quality. One of the driving factors behind this success is the rapid deployment of innovative features and functions needed by entrepreneurs and other business people.

Call Recording allows Phone.com customers to record the call audio and keep the recordings for future reference. The recordings will be stored for 13 months from the recording date and can be played from the Phone.com web-based call logs page. Further details can be found here. Any business that has a need to record calls for training purposes, regulatory compliance, or other reasons will enjoy the ease and flexibility of this service’s activation or deactivation. The service is offered in two added feature packages – 300 minutes of recorded call or 1000 minutes of recorded calls.

The Phone.com Group SMS is a free service that lets any customer create an SMS (text) conference with a group of friends or colleagues. Each participant can elect to accept messages from all and can then respond to all. A smartphone is not needed. Group SMS is compatible with any SMS capable device. Imagine the ability to send a text message to an entire work group or even softball team once rather than needing to send the same update repeatedly! Phone.com makes it easy and effective!

For more information on Phone.com, please visit us at http://www.phone.com or call 800-997-9179.

About Phone.com

Phone.com® is a cloud-based phone company offering a variety of innovative and economical business and home phone services for entrepreneurs, home offices, small businesses and individuals.

Powered by advanced VoIP technologies, the company offers Phone.com Virtual Office, Phone.com Home Office and Phone.com Enterprise for small businesses, Phone.com Virtual Number for individuals on the go, Phone.com Home Phone Plus for consumers and Phone.com Mobile Office and Mobile VoIP. Affordable monthly plans start as low as $4.88/month. Phone.com’s mission is to offer unparalleled communication services, exceptional customer support and the lowest possible pricing to small businesses and individuals. For further details, call 800-997-9179.

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Most recently, with the first big snowstorm of the season falling outside my window, my broadband service went down and thus, of course, so did my VoIP phone service. Perhaps, I thought, it was the weather. At first broadband tech support said no, it was some sort of “programming error.” But it affected my neighbors’ service too, and after 47 minutes my broadband tech support finally said it really was a remote hardware problem, indeed possibly due to the weather.

The point, though, is that since I have Phone.com VoIP phone service I wasn’t struck speechless – okay, incoming phone call challenged – by the situation. That’s because of the ability to quickly and easily program features such as call forwarding using Phone.com’s web site. Actually I use what I would call conditional call forwarding. The way I have it set up, if somebody calls my home phone and I don’t answer, the call is automatically forwarded to my cell phone, and my home phone also rings again, simultaneously. Only after that does the call go to my voicemail service.

Moreover, if for any reason my VoIP adapter is off line – be it a snow-induced broadband outage, power outage, or perhaps I have the adapter in my luggage when travelling — the call automatically goes to my cell phone right away. And since I use Phone.com’s Virtual Office, I’m considering giving callers an option to forward the call to either my cell or my wife’s.

My advice to anyone using VoIP for either business phone service or for their home phone (or both, as I do) is simple – program your system now, before you lose service (in a pinch, you could of course use your smartphone afterwards to program Phone.com’s forwarding feature, but I don’t suggest that because you might not even be aware that you’ve lost broadband). As for those who might still be using traditional phone service all I can say is sorry, you probably can’t do it or, if you can, it costs extra.

By the way, my broadband finally came back on line after more than six hours. Amusingly, I got an automated call from the service provider saying it was working about twelve hours after that. Not so amusing was the fact that those of my neighbors who still use standard landline phone service lost that too, and for those hours they simply couldn’t get their calls unless they had an expensive extra cost forwarding plan.

Stuart Zipper is currently a contributing editor to Communications Technology, a high tech business journalism consultant and freelancer, and the past Senior Editor of TelecomWeb news break.

For example if you run Acme Construction Company and Acme Equipment Rental you have 2 different companies that do 2 different things and it may be out of the same office. You may want to save money by having just 1 Virtual Office account but it’s important to get the caller ID showing the right company name when calling out. It’s more professional. So to save money you can add a second number onto your Phone.com Virtual Office account for $4.88/month.

Something to remember is that like many small business these days, if you’re on a cell phone running our Mobile Office App you can change the outgoing caller ID on the fly on a per call basis. No need to carry 2 phones to have 2 different numbers. To change the setting go into your Mobile Office app and click Menu, then Settings. Your second option is Caller ID, click on that and select which number you want to use to make your outgoing call which in turn will show the right company name on the outgoing caller ID.

–
Jeb Brilliant
Phone.com
Community Manager

Now there’s a company that solves this exact problem, it’s called Fonolo and it does the work for you. When you go to a contact page on a website to call them you look for Fonolo (If they’re smart they use it) and follow the instructions. It’s can be as simple as clicking on the department you want to talk to and filling in your phone number. Fonolo let’s the folks in the call center know to call you back. It’s nearly the same for their mobile app, you pick the company you want to call and drill down their menu and click call. Once someone is ready to talk to you and they pick up the phone Fonolo calls you back and you’re connected.

Now if you run a business or work for one that has phone menu’s I suggest you contact Fonolo right away. You will have happier callers because they didn’t just wait on hold for you, you will save money by having fewer operators speak with each caller and you’ll have an increased conversion rate of web site visitors to callers.

Keep in mind there’s no change to your companies phone system and Fonolo will help you have happier customers, they’ll be in a better mood when they talk to your operators because they didn’t have to wait on hold and in turn are more likely to have an overall positive experience. Phone.com has been using Fonolo for a while now and I can’t speak officially for the company about it but it seems like everyone is happy using it, I know I personally have been.

–
Jeb Brilliant
Phone.com
Community Manager

But until now it was just a theoretical possibility, nothing I expected to make use of. After all, why would someone send a text to my landline VoIP phone, and not my cell phone?

By now the reader can probably guess with ease what comes next:

It happened.

I got an SMS sent to my home phone number.

The gist of the message was that a friend of ours who lives in New Jersey, and has only wireless service, was having trouble with the signal from her wireless carrier. She could send a text message, but voice calls were dropping like flies. As it turns out this young lady does have Internet service, but she doesn’t have VoIP phone service, and the gist of her text message was to please contact her over the Internet via an Internet Messaging service.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. The text message was sent to my Phone.com number, and Phone.com then forwarded it to me as an eMail. In other words, it didn’t count toward the monthly message allowance I buy from my carrier.

It also got me thinking about how I might use this in business, for instance if I want to receive text messages while I’m overseas without paying the premium that wireless carriers charge. What I’m thinking of is setting up a virtual number, telling folks to use that for text messages, and then have the texts sent to a free eMail account I set up just for that purpose. Then I can have that account show up as a separate live tile on my Windows Phone 7 handset (yes, I’m already running Mango), and I will get the message anyplace in the world, at no extra cost if I can connect to WiFi.

To learn more about Phone.com SMS service click here.

Stuart Zipper is the past Senior Editor of TelecomWeb news break and a contributing editor to Communications Technology.

Now, if you’re specific about what you mean by the term “menu,” I could tell you about what’s on the menu that’s attached to my Phone.com Virtual Office account. More relevant, I’d tell you about how surprised I was at the ease with which I could set up a menu, one that sounds the same as you might find when calling a billion dollar company.

Now my company right now has just one employee – me – working as a consultant. But as I’ve written before, I’m using the Virtual Office business phone service as a family service as well. That creates a situation where it’s as if I have a headquarters, branches in two U.S. cities, and two overseas branches.

What I wanted, and got, was a system where a caller gets a menu that allows them to choose between calling one of my kids homes, calling another on her cell phone (she’s pure wireless, and doesn’t have a landline), or calling my home office phone. Oh, and for fun there’s an option that rings multiple phones, and the caller takes pot luck on who answers (not something I’m recommending for businesses, of course).

My menu also includes the obligatory choice to replay the menu, and the ability to dial the extension during the menu message. And its proven so easy to add the various features, that I’m planning to add things such as rules to control calls that might ring in the middle of the night.

It does remain true that for someone who wants no more than home phone service, Phone.com’s Home Phone Plus is one of the most cost effective ways to go. But with features such as the menu capability included at no extra charge, it’s almost a no-brainer that both for advanced home use and for small business phone service, including a home office business, you need something both powerful and cost effective like Virtual Office.

(Oh, and for my growing ‘business,’ I may soon add another “office,” – a virtual extension – at no more than the cost of another VoIP adapter.)