December 2010
Our Year in Review
At Phone.com we pride ourselves on having the highest level of customer service, and we are constantly working on improving it even further. I’d like to start off with a thank you to our customers, without whom Phone.com wouldn’t exist, let alone be a market leader in the virtual office service arena. Thank you for your continued loyalty and your help with our growth. We are constantly adding services, updating features and applications and, just as important if not more, upgrading our network infrastructure and our customer service department.
We are extremely pleased with the recent introduction of our new mobile apps. As most of you know with the variety of smart phones available in the market today and the constant changes it is impossible to have just one app available for all phones. We support applications for Android phones, iPhones, and Blackberry while also working on other platforms as well.
Our apps were well received with the ability to place calls out from one’s cell phone while showing your Phone.com office or home caller ID being the feature liked the most.
Remember, downloading Phone.com Mobile apps is free . Just search Phone.com in the iTunes app store or in the Android Market or download from our website.
We now also support automated voicemail transcription. For those who did not want human assisted transcriptions we offered (either due to cost or perhaps privacy concerns), you can now choose
unlimited, fully automated voicemail transcriptions. It is available for $1.50 per extension per month with all Phone.com plans and the first month is free.
SMS is a growing force with all cell phone users not only with kids and teenagers. All Phone.com numbers (excluding toll free numbers) now support SMS capability. This means you can have friends, customers, or clients send a text message to your Phone.com number, pick it up and reply on your mobile phone without the need to reveal your private mobile phone number. You can even send an SMS or reply from your computer using your Phone.com control panel!
For all feature updates please visit our website, read our blog, follow us on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.
We wish you all the best for a great holiday season and a Happy & Healthy New Year!
Sincerely,
Ari Rabban, CEO & the entire Phone.com team
Note: downloading mobile apps is free but check plans for usage.
One time fee of $3.88 for the iPhone voip app will also be applied. (after usage)
Featured Service – Global Numbers
Global Numbers are phone numbers that can be added to a Virtual Office account for a wide variety of purposes. For example, if your company is opening an office overseas and you want it to have a local number that still rings on your Phone.com system. Or if you’re traveling abroad, you can give out a local number to clients, friends, or even restaurants (for reservations of course) in your destination country so they can reach you without paying international fees.
Global Numbers have so many uses, but the question is, “How will you use it?”
Phone.com Wins NJ Communications Company of The Year Award!
The news we’re proudest of this year was just announced recently. Phone.com was awarded a prestigious award and named Communications Company Of The Year by the New Jersey Technology Council (NJTC).
Maxine Ballen, CEO and president of the NJTC said “We are so proud and excited to name Phone.com the Communications Company of the year for 2010. Year after year Phone.com has demonstrated their ability to be an innovator and leader in affordable small business telephony solutions. We are excited to watch Phone.com continue to grow and innovate in the years ahead.”
We are humbled and honored to be the recipients of the NJTC Communications Company of the Year Award for 2010. –Ari Rabban, CEO and Co-Founder of Phone.com
 Award Reception |
 From left: Ari Rabban, CEO, Brian Scott, COO, Alon Cohen, EVP & CTO |
 From left: Simon Nynens , NJTC Chairman, Ari Rabban, Phone.com CEO, Maxine Ballen, NJTC CEO |
Phone.com Features and Services Top 10+ Tips and Tricks
Some of these are tricks, some are features and some are tips.
- SMS on ANY phone – If you’re replying to your friend, who sent the message to your Phone.com number, just reply to their number and your friend will get it. To start a new conversation; you send a message to your own number, with the first text being @1234567 (your number)
- Make calls showing your Phone.com number on ANY phone – Call your voicemail, and hit *, , # to access its admin menu. Then press 4 to make an outbound call.
- Reverse call block – All calls to voice mail besides X, Y, and Z
- Disposable numbers – This is useful if you’re selling something or don’t want to give your regular number out to someone, it can also be used for places where you think they will sell your # and you will get spam calls.
- Block incoming calls on a per number basis – Call Block is an option on your menu, go in and select the number from the list that you want to block and just click block. Easy as that and will block SMS from those people as well.
- SMS blocking – Works the same as call blocking (blocked numbers shows up in your block list)
- Set your caller ID – So your outgoing calls will show with any text up to 15 characters (may take up to a week to propagate in the worldwide telephone system).
- Virtual Office menu – A phone greeting tree for example “Press 1 for sales 2 for customer service 0 for operator”. It’s easy to set up as well.
- International call forwarding – Gives you the ability to never miss a call by having your calls forwarded to a cell phone or land line when traveling abroad. Set up by just adding an additional number in the Call Handling Rules. *Additional charges may apply.
- Greet each caller with a unique message based on caller ID – You can predefine what a caller will here by recording messages in advance and assigning them to different callers based on their caller ID. For example maybe you want your most important client to hear a personal message. Plus with call handling rules you could forward just them to your cell phone so they always get your best service.
- Use voicemail transcription to dictate notes – Leave yourself a voicemail with notes or reminders if you can’t write them down at the moment.
Do you have any tips or tricks you think we left out? If so, please send them to Jeb@Phone.com.
Employee Profile
Name: Jeremy Watkin
Title: Customer Service Manager
Responsibility: Managing Phone.com’s customer service staff and customer relations.
Accomplishments (professional): Worked with Phone.com since its launch & in customer service for 10 years.
Accomplishments (personal):
- Bachelor’s degree in Management and Organizational Communication from Point Loma Nazarene University
- Masters Degree in Leadership and Organizational Studies at Azusa Pacific University
- I have been married 9 years with one son
- I have completed several half marathons and recently completed my first full marathon
Short Q & A with Jeremy
Jeb: When is the next marathon you’re running?
Jeremy: It’s in January in Carlsbad
Jeb: Where is the strangest place you’ve gotten a call?
Jeremy: Well not so strange, but I got a call while playing guitar with my band (while on stage) from my wife, calling to tell me it’s time to go to the hospital because she’s going into labor.
Jeb: What is your favorite Phone.com feature?
Jeremy: I love having my voicemail transcribed and emailed to me. I’m on the phone for work a lot so I can’t always answer my personal phone, so having it sent to me via email so I can read it later is the best.
Jeb: What in your opinion is the most under utilized Phone.com feature?
Jeremy: I don’t think enough people know about *8. It works on all phones from desktops to cell phones. It puts the caller on hold and I don’t think people realize they can do it on any phone.
Jeb: What is your favorite hold music?
Jeremy: If we’re talking other than Phone.com I would have to say the hold music for Miva Merchant from 2000-2005 still haunts me. The “Groovy” soundtrack for Phone.com is a lot of fun.
Jeb: What is your favorite movie of all time?
Jeremy: Wayne’s World, because I quote it the most of any movie.
Customer Testimonials
“Phone.com is exceptional with having such friendly, helpful, intelligent customer service and I am happy to recommend it to others.”
Katrina S. Nashville, TN
“Just wanted to let you know what a great employee you have working for you. Craig was really awesome and saved me from going through a more expensive phone company. He worked with my boss and I and got us exactly what we wanted. We are so glad we went with Phone.com.”
Cassandra D. Pheonix, AZ
“Phone.com has not only exceeded all our expectations but also in fact blown them out of the water. Their feature list is like no other company around and they are constantly adding more and more useful features.
Setting up a complex menu system, with greetings, hold and a queue system is as easy as 1, 2, 3 and whenever you do have questions their support is always there to help out.
What has really amazed us the most with Phone.com is how easy it has become to allow our international staff members to work as if they were sitting in our head office. Calls can be routed easily to cell phones, and in the case that no one is there to answer, Phone.com has an outstanding voice-mail service. Throw in their Mobile Office solution and you basically have the ability to receive and make calls via your business line wherever you are.As you can tell we are very happy customers, and will continue to use Phone.com for a very long time.”
Ceri May Manchester, UK
“Your web portal has proved to be simplistic, yet surprisingly capable, with complex controls for both inbound and outbound calls and fax. I have also been using your Phone.com mobile phone app and it gives me the much needed ability to log into any extension and not only see the Call Log as well as Inbox, but return calls from either as well as SMS the caller if needed, all with the same reliability.
Lastly, your customer service and technical team have been very responsive and knowledgeable when I have emailed them with questions. Additionally, I was shocked when I posted some questions on your Phone.com web site forum and your CEO actually responded. How great is that!
I can honestly say that I could not be more satisfied with Phone.com, keep up the great service…Cheers!”Terry C. Birmingham, AL
“Having had our Phone.com service for almost a year now, we can really look back and see how much it has helped our business. We chose Phone.com last year as we were operating out of a home office and needed a more professional process for clients to contact us rather than several cell phones. After conducting a weeklong review of many Virtual PBX providers, we chose Phone.com for its flexible features and affordability. At the beginning of the year we moved out of our home office and into a new location, and our Phone.com service grew with us as we discovered yet another benefit to the system – not having to change phone systems and numbers. Our favorite features are the scheduling and “call queues” – scheduling allows to eliminate after-hours calls and we recently started using the “call queue” function as our client base has grown. In summary, we have been very pleased with our Phone.com service. We feel it has more than paid itself off and has been invaluable to our business. We highly recommend Phone.com to businesses of all types and sizes.”
Jonathan Jones Watkinsville, GA
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