Best VoIP Service Providers

VoIP pricing structures

VoIP service providers offer varying pricing structures. These can vary in duration. Some prices require a year-long commitment, but others are month-to-month or by unlimited vs. metered minutes of use.

• Metered based pricing: You'd prefer a metered, usage-based pricing scheme where many phones are lightly used; say, where conference room phones are common, or where most business communication tends to be email or inter-office. You might also prefer metered pricing when your phone usage has seasonal spikes and valleys.
• Per-seat pricing: If your service lets you add extensions for your three heavy months and drop them after that, per-seat pricing is the way to go.
• Unlimited per-seat plan: You'd prefer an unlimited, per-seat plan where phones are used heavily for contacting customers and others not on your hosted phone system. In all instances, calls between extensions, even if that extension is used by a remote worker, stay on-net, and therefore should not add anything to your costs.

VoIP calling plans

Know your calling habits and profile.  If a lot of your traffic is off-net and overseas to specific countries, look for VoIP service providers who include these countries within their unlimited calling plan, or find a provider with low rates to those countries. Pay attention, too, to per-minute charges that accrue whether you make or receive the call.

• Overseas calling: Calls to overseas locations of your business make a great case for getting those remote workers on your system, even if they only use softphones (VoIP applications) on desktop or mobile for interoffice calling. Remember, on-net is free.
• Domestic calling: Unlimited calls to 48 states and Canada is now the norm for traditional consumer land and mobile plans, and that's the case with VoIP.  Still, per-usage pricing can be the better choice for seldom-used phones, like house and conference-room phones.

Business VoIP packages

Businesses need their phones to do a lot more than just ring and take messages. They may need to help callers find the right extensions, play hold music, attach voice messages to email inboxes and conference 100 people into one call. They could need CRM integration, such as to have the ability to pop up a screen of salesforce.com information or Google contact on the desktop of the person getting the call in the style of call center agents. They might even perform simple interactive voice response (IVR) tasks. These features typically come bundled; check the plans' side-by-side feature grids on their websites.

• Speech-recognizing auto attendant: Even very small businesses can project very large impressions by making use of a speech-enabled auto attendant, which dials by spoken name as well as the first three letters of the last/first name.
• Conferencing: Often an à la carte feature, conferencing for a maximum number of participants is often an option in a business VoIP package. The same goes for conference recording, video or desktop, and file sharing collaboration features.
• CRM integration: CRM integration can work in two directions: outbound, by enabling users to dial out to a contact by clicking on his CRM record, and inbound, by presenting a salesforce.com, SugarCRM or other CRM package's customer record simultaneously with the voice or video call. This brings the caller's info front and center as the agent takes the call for personal, efficient customer service. More advanced and extra-cost call/contact center features include automatic call distribution, finding the "next available agent" in an assigned pool to take calls or automatically routing calls by caller's language or intent. VoIP's location-independence allows these agents to be scattered around the country and Canada, forming today's "virtual" call center.
• Mobile extensions/apps: Business phone services typically have Android and iOS "softphone" versions of their extensions, giving employees' smartphones all the functionality of the smartphone extensions on their PCs or the hardware phones on their desks. You might even save the cost of desk phones. These mobile VoIP apps, where Wi-Fi is available, also save on cellular plans or roaming policies that charge by the minute.
• Web site integration: Some VoIP services include a click-to-call button that business subscribers can put on their websites, initiating calls between a browsing customer and a customer service agent.

VoIP calling features

In addition to the basic calling features that consumers and businesses have come to expect, there are a range of additional call treatments that can help minimize distractions, make best use of your employees' time and prevent unauthorized and potentially costly calls. Call blocking, find-me-follow-me, do-not-disturb and conference calling are just a few optional services.

• Call blocking: This service is particularly helpful to consumers who are inundated with sales calls, allowing unidentified numbers to be automatically blocked. But with the ease of use of a browser-based interface, VoIP business phone services allow you get more specific; blocking by area code or specific incoming phone number, and similarly, preventing insiders from making outbound calls to particular countries, regions, area codes or numbers. Just like you can enter rules in an email application to send certain senders' emails to trash, you can tell VoIP phone systems to send certain callers straight to voicemail, or not answer altogether.
• Call parking, transfer: Once transferring calls required learning a button sequence on the physical phone, and had perhaps a 50 percent chance of success. With a browser-based control panel, it's drag-and-drop. Similarly, you can "park" a call, with its caller ID or photo, under a visible screen button, to be picked up by you or others with a click.
• Business-hours rules: You can instruct sophisticated business phone services to route to west-coast offices after east-coast working hours, and vice versa, and similarly switch outgoing greetings by time of day.
• Do not disturb: Enabling the do-not-disturb function forwards incoming calls to voice mail without tying up the line for outgoing calls.

VoIP equipment setup and maintenance

VoIP phone service can require very minimal or substantial investment, depending on the phones currently on desks.  It also requires an appropriately sized and equipped internet connection. The Internet Service Provider (ISP) is typically chosen independently of VoIP provider in consumer and small business settings, although in larger companies, it may go with choice of data carrier.

At a minimum, even legacy TDM business phones can work with VoIP if they are fitted with analog terminal adapters.  You'll just sacrifice something on features. For the best feature set, get IP phones that run the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) signaling standard that runs most in-house IP PBXes and out-of-house hosted services. These can run anywhere from $100 on up.

• Paying for setup: Many VoIP services can be trialed for free, for small accounts, and paid for by credit card on the spot. It's a simple matter of receiving new phones (if you even want the hardware; softphones that run on desktops or smartphones are simply downloaded) and registering IP endpoints and numbers, a DIY process you can follow from web instructions or instructional YouTube videos.
• Self-install: Those rare customers still buying an in-house IP PBX assign installation to their own IT people, or have their local resellers do this, as part of their contract. Such contracts should spell out whether you, the customer or the reseller assume maintenance responsibilities. Bear in mind that one of the central benefits of the IP PBX is its DIY economy. The kinds of moves, adds and changes for which you once had to pay a field service tech are now drag-and-drop simple. The same goes for hosted VoIP: adding users and mailboxes and activating most features should be a simple DIY function on the admin portal.

VoIP technical support

Small businesses and consumers rarely have the technical know-how on staff to fix problems as they occur.  Check to see whether your plan includes live phone support or only links and searches in online knowledge bases.

Check review sites and articles that rate VoIP services for uptime and customer service.  Important metrics are wait times for phone support, frequency of failure and mean times to restore service.

• Identify specific outage protocol: Businesses of sufficient size should insist on SLAs (service-level agreements) that spell out the provider's responsibilities and points of contact in the event of an outage.
• Monitoring: Resellers of voice and data services also take on responsibility for sizing and equipping your network to accommodate voice and/or video traffic. Many also perform ongoing network monitoring. With the proper switches installed, they can switch your sites to wireless backup should wired data links fail.
• Remote support: Technical support today usually involves remote diagnosis and repair, but you may want to make sure that help is located in-country.

Hosted VoIP

This is the most common solution for small businesses and residential customers. The voice switch and servers for all calling features and messaging are located in the provider's data center and accessed through the Internet or a managed link. For businesses, extensions can be dispersed across the country, and calling to the U.S. and Canada is typically unlimited. The only equipment on site is the phones, or softphones running on desktops, smartphones and tablets.

On-premise VoIP

Increasingly rare, businesses house and maintain their own IP PBX, which controls on-premise as well as off-premise extensions. This switch is installed as software on a dedicated or virtual server. Those going with IP PBX must also acquire the access device and SIP trunking service to obtain the cost-savings and functionality of VoIP beyond the enterprise and out to the world at large.

Hybrid VoIP

This is Hybrid Cloud, telecom division. Here you may outsource calling features like audio and video conferencing, collaboration and even voicemail to a service provider while keeping your own legacy PBX. Another hybrid scenario calls for an IP gateway to be installed between your PBX and your SIP trunks, converting TDM (legacy, time-division multiplexed) voice streams into IP packets for carriage over data lines.