Hosted PBX Guide

Quality and reliability. The technology is their baby.  They don't want it to be any less than its capable of being.  Their entire system is built with multiple levels of redundancy so when something breaks, the system stays up.  And you can get the quality of phone call that you want- use the PSTN and copper wires for high quality or VoIP and cell phones for cost or convenience.  They say that even though many of their competitors are rolling out a VoIP package that includes phone service, they haven't gone that route because they feel VoIP quality to the user can be spotty.  This loses them some customers, but they just accept that.  They'll still put calls to VoIP phones, of course, if you acquire them elsewhere.

ACD Queues. The company's original name was actually Advanced Queuing Sytems, AQS, and this is one place where they stand distinctly ahead of the pack.  They use smarter, more feature-rich queue systems than anyone else.  Since ACD queuing is so important to large businesses and makes even small businesses more flexible and appear more professional, this is fairly important.

Customer Service. I've put in phone calls to each of these companies, asking about obscure details.  With most groups, I can usually find something that the representative on the phone simply knows nothing about, or, worse yet, no one answers and no one returns my call.  Virtual PBX never answered with a standardized corporate greeting, and never ended the call with "I don't know".  When the person on the phone didn't know something, he asked his manager.  When I called again and the agent wasn't authorized to discuss certain information about upcoming products, they said they knew who had more information, put me on hold for a moment to ask her, and I came away with what I wanted to know.

No outbound faxes. They tell me they're working on this technology, and that it's one of their major development projects - which is to be expected, no matter what we were talking about.  Personally, I don't use faxes anyways.  A scanner/printer hooked up to a computer with email does just a good a job, as far as I'm concerned.  But for anyone who does need this for their business, you'll need to pick someone else or wait for their nebulous timetable.

Their ‘parachute' plan. One of their more unique services, but which probably doesn't see much play.  It's essentially a system backup option for hardware PBX services, so that if a premise based PBX suffers some sort of system failure, the hosted PBX is activated and they can still get their calls routed to the right employees.  It's not designed to cater to the usual hosted PBX crowd, and feels almost like a gateway for a hardware to hosted transition.