Hosted PBX Guide

Setting up with Ringcentral was almost easy – provided you can get past all the advertisements for their extra features and year-long plans. While it’s nice to know what they can do, all that information can be found elsewhere and those services can be added at any time. Of course, that kind of approach is exactly the reason I had a bad feeling about Ringcentral from the start – the kind of glitzy marketing approach they used made me worry that they were a somewhat hollow service. Having used them for a month, I’m glad to be able to report otherwise. They’re actually still a very complete service, despite the advertising approach.

They do have a few things I’d rather worked otherwise, though, so, let’s take a run through the process, starting with creating an account.

First you pick a fancily named version of small, medium, large, or huge. That determines the number of extensions you can have, the pool of free minutes you start with, and the cost of new minutes if you go over that pool. You can also get a ‘trial’ account, which means you can tinker with their system with a maximum of sixty minutes of phone use before you start paying. Then it makes sure you understand what the basic services are, encourages you to get a year-long contract, encourages you to buy extra rollover minutes, and advertises its VoIP service.

The advertising comes back two pages later.

Yeah. It’s kind of like paid advertising in a free product, except you’re already buying something. Of course, should you show interest in their outbound VoIP plan, you’re then encouraged to upgrade to one of the more expensive options. They also not-so-subtly remind you of cost-saving on the yearly contracts when you put in the billing information.

Once you have all that out of the way, you move on to setting up your account. Fortunately, they have helpful video tours of the service and how to use it. This is good, because their system is a bit thick with menus – more information on this once I’ve used the system more, but the learning curve seems a touch steep.

Once you’ve selected your extensions, the type of extension, the times of the extension, the numbers, the night rules, the holiday rules, and any other special rules, you’re ready to start using your account.

There’s a line of thought that says a PBX is a simple thing. Calls come in to the main board, they get sent out to specific phones. But while it may appear to be a basic automated switchboard, when you start taking into account things like call quality, connectivity, support, voicemail, faxes, reporting, call queuing, and account management, things get a little more hairy. Ringcentral touts itself as having all the features and doing them all well. Do they live up to the hype of their own marketing campaigns?

Short answer: Not really. Ringcentral has lots of good features, but fails at the most basic requirements of a hosted PBX.

The long answer actually starts with an inquiry made by someone in the forums. A current customer said that they’ve noticed a steady decrease in the sound quality of calls made across Ringcentral. The reason, as mentioned there, is that Ringcentral decided to go with a newer technology: Voice over Internet Protocol – VoIP. This technology is cheap, has lots of potential, and may someday replace standard telephone lines. However, it’s not universal yet, and the quality of calls fluctuates depending on the internet service in your area. So that’s the first problem. Uncertain call quality.

The second problem is loss of calls. Now, Ringcentral PR tells me they have 99% system uptime. Mind, I only discovered that on my second call, because my first call I placed to their center disconnected halfway through. This gave me two pieces of concern. First, whether they consider calls dropped after thirty seconds to still have connected (thus making their uptime number larger than reality), and second, 99% of the time is still more than three full days of the year that you would have no service. So I did some asking around.

The first thing I discovered upon further inquiry is that Ringcentral customer service is absolutely terrible. Don’t take my word for it. Run a search. Talk to their customers. More than anything else about Ringcentral, this is the single most complained-about subject. I found, from speaking with an ex-employee of the company, that two of their four call centers are based in Pakistan and the Philippines, that they use generic ‘agent names’ for their employees so that they don’t have to provide their real names, and I managed to collect a few amusing anecdotes.

Second and third complaints are about dropped calls and poor call quality. After a month of testing, I’ve confirmed all of these complaints for myself. Interestingly enough, I receive calls through Ringcentral much better on my VoIP phone, presumably because when an incoming call hits their switchboard and they convert it into a computer sound file, they don’t have to turn it back into telephone sound when they toss it to my cell or landline.

After all their basic service issues, though, they do great. Ringcentral has an incredibly sophisticated system for making sure calls get to the right people at the right times, they’ve got the most advanced hunt groups I’ve ever seen (again, hunt groups, not ACD queues), and it’s easy to change your settings through the website with the help of their video tours or on-page instructions. So as long as you don’t actually have anyone calling you on the phone, their phone system is very elegant and easy to use.

Each hosted PBX provider offers their own set of features, but most of the time these features are very similar to everyone else’s. So for this section, I’m going to start with the features that are just different, move to things they do well, then tell you what to watch out for. First and foremost on that list, then, is their call controller/softphone, a downloadable piece of software that connects with the Ringcentral network in order to provide greater access to incoming calls. You can view caller ID, click to answer or send to voicemail, choose to record the incoming call, transfer the call away before picking up…lots of fun little options, and it’s fairly convenient when you’re wearing a headset while working at the computer (my preferred method). It essentially lets you use your computer instead of punching buttons on the phone that would do the same thing. It’s a fun little gadget, but doesn’t really change how you handle calls.

Another interesting feature for windows users is the Microsoft integration. Outlook, explorer, word, all can get a Ringcentral toolbar so that you can click a phone number and Ringcentral will dial that number and dial you, essentially letting you ring the number by clicking on it. It’s another way to command your phone from your computer, which is nice. But if you don’t use Microsoft products, it’s a non-feature.

As for their queues, well, they’re simply the best hunt groups I’ve ever seen. They’re almost ACD queues, but they don’t have actual presence awareness and management, which is the real break point. There’s no at-a-glance way to see which agents are on phone calls, reporting has yet to be implemented, and there’s usually a delay for a caller to be connected depending on how many agents you have, how many of them are busy, and the like. This is probably a result of their internal process for locating an available extension. Also, they have two extra problems that are fairly devastating. First, while a given agent can either be in or out of the queues at any time, they cannot be conditional – you can’t have a sales agent who ‘sometimes’ also takes billing calls. He’s either in all the queues or no queues. Also, to add or remove an extension from a queue, you need to delete the whole queue and rebuild it from scratch, adding every extension individually. This is a bit of a nail in the coffin for large companies.

A lot of their other features are fairly standard for the market, such as being able to accept inbound faxes on the same phone number you accept calls on, converting voicemail to .wav files and emailing it to you, included dial-by-name directory, that kind of thing (although the directory costs extra if you’re a smaller customer, with five or less extensions). There is a place where they really shine though, and it’s not in their downloadable gizmo, or even their better-than-average queues. It’s in their calling rules.

Essentially, you can program your system with a complex set of rules telling it which number to connect callers to at different times of the day, weekends, specific days, whether to use different greetings, send callers directly to voicemail, play a special message on repeat, or anything of the sort. It’s a very powerful tool for scheduling your phone system.

But there’s also a few features that don’t compare as well to the standard competitor. I noticed two almost immediately. The first was when I tried dialing in to change settings by phone, figuring not all customers will have ready internet access every time they want to configure their account. Yeah, that…didn’t work out very well. Their phone menu tree is a bit clumsy to use, and I found myself having to refer to their website to determine the best method for not having to use their website.

The second ‘feature’ that I was concerned with was a fairly major one. Security. All extensions have a password with a maximum of ten digits. Only numbers can be used, and they cannot be repeated or sequential (no 1 and then 1 or 1 and then 2). The account also has a password to enter the administrative extension, which is always the same, and uses the same rules. I’m not a hacker myself, but I know enough about computers to know that the number of combinations their password system provides can get knocked over pretty readily.