Right now our location is using a simple 4 line AT&T phone system that we bought at Fry’s. I am starting to look into a more robust/fancy system that will enhance the call in experience. I think it would be very valuable to have a system that could tell a caller the specials, directions, hours, ect. Right now our answering machine sounds like we are out of the 80’s.
Does anyone use a VOIP system? Do you recommend them? What questions should I ask? Any recommendations of companies to look at or stay away from?
If you do not recommend VOIP, what do you use & why?
The only real problem with VOIP is the recurring outages that ISPs seem to have, as opposed to phone service. I’m not really sure why this is, aside from the complexity of the Internet with multiple services that don’t necessarily play well with each other. Just because a caller connects to you, through your own ISP, doesn’t mean that a problem elsewhere won’t cause a problem…your VOIP server to your web server to you.
That said, I think VOIP will be the only landline service available in the next 6-8 years, unless something else radically alters the landline market. Traditional phone service is on its last legs, I’m afraid.
I’m at the NAPICS food show and I came across this company: www.pizzaphonesystems.com. With an internet connection, they can offer you unlimited lines over a single number with VOIP. $500 setup. $199.00/month for the system with 4 physical phones. No busy signals as the overflow is directed into a message on hold while they are in the queue.
I may look into this at our new store that’s not tied up in Centrex contracts.
Brad, I have talked to two different operators that use this system. They both seem to be happy with it overall. When you call the store I was impressed with the customer experience. It is actually what prompted me to look for other options to compare them with.
What phone system did they put in? I am concerned about the ability of network phones to stand up to a pizza place. Are you limited to a certain number of lines? I want to make sure I avoid the problem of a busy signal.
All I know is that a store in our franchise(the one I recently purchased) went to VOIP and had major problems. I’ll bet they lost well over 50 hours of phone calls last year do to the system not working. Was a lot of that operator error? I would imagine it was. All I know is that last year I had my phones down at my original store once for less than an hour due to an accident a few streets up. Compared to the number of times and the length of the outages at this other store, I’m more than happy to pay $350 per month to ATT and knowing that my phones are going to work. My phone outages in the last 10 years don’t begin to approach the outages this store experienced last year. Until landline service is no longer available, I’m not likely to move away from it.
In my opinion, non land-line phones do not belong in a delivery/carryout environment, there is just too much risk for loss of income because your internet is down… Also take into account the amount of other internet traffic you’ll have because of credit cards and online ordering. yes you can set your routers to give the phones priority, but everything else could suffer. My house phone through the cable company probably goes down once a month at least. Landline just keeps on tickin.
If you really want a VOIP system, look for one where the system is internal to your store and uses traditional landlines into it. its probably not going to be cheap though.
Otherwise, you can probably find a regular PBX phone system that has the “auto-attendent” feature. However, you’ll want to consult with a telephone system installer to find the system that best suits what you’re looking for.
One last thing… Do you have a security system in your store? If you do, you might still need a landline for it anyway… Some security systems don’t work well on some VOIP systems.
We don’t have a very high call volume, but I use a combination of cell phones and google voice.
Our main number is on a cell phone that forwards to a google voice number. That google voice number rings a couple VOIP lines. I really like a couple things about doing it that way. The first is that it’s fairly inexpensive while giving me the freedom to quickly make adjustments if there is a problem with our internet (which never has been a problem, but it’s still nice to know we can get calls if there is a internet/power outage).
The second, and biggest thing is the ability to block numbers. Before we started this, we would get10 or 15 spam/robo calls a day. Now, if we get one, I just log into google voice and block the number and never have to deal with it again.
Another nice thing, I get an email every time we miss a call or it goes to voicemail (which tells our customer all our lines are busy and asks them to call again in a few minutes). If I’m not at the store and start seeing a bunch of calls missed, I know to head down there pretty quick because they are needing an extra pair of hands or another driver and can usually be there before they decide they need me.
I also looked into Vonage a few months ago and they had a setup that seemed like it would work pretty well for small to mid sized stores.