Hosted PBX Guide

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. I’ll get into more detail of their specific features’ ups and downs with my next post, then close it all off in a nice overview, pull the posts into a single branching article, and toss it into the archives. See you next week.

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