What Is the Best Phone Service for a Small Business?

Running a small business is nothing short of a gamble. It comes with high risks, high stakes, and higher expenses. A single wrong move and you can lose all the leads you’ve accumulated over time. One of the most important facets of managing a small business is to stay in constant touch with customers. Today’s customers are impatient buyers with loads of options and alternatives. If you are not active enough in responding to customer queries, you won’t be able to stop them from abandoning your cart and shifting to the next best brand in the market. How can you keep your customer engagement, interaction, and communication rate high? With a telephone line, of course.

There are two types of telephone services in the market. Those that connect your calls in the best way possible, like Spectrum voice for home, and those that uphold business-to-customer communication standards, like Nextiva or others. This latter kind of telephone service is designed for commercial usage. Why does your small business even need a dedicated business phone line, you ask? Suppose you add a personal phone number to your business website. You’ll be overwhelmed by the number of incoming calls, for starters, leading to increased customer wait time, higher dissatisfaction, and lower ROI. Besides, a personal contact number doesn’t give off a trustworthy impression. Customers tend to rely on businesses that look and sound professional, and a business phone line can surely contribute to a small venture’s credible reputation in the market.

Why should a small business invest in a dedicated business phone line and what are the topmost recommended services? Let’s find out below.

Why Do You Need a Business Phone Service for Your Small Business?

A business phone enables small business owners to offer better customer support. It’s true that shopping doesn’t come easy to everyone. People need help along the way. This is where customer service comes in. A small business that has an active customer support phone line and provides 24/7 assistance to potential buyers is relatively more successful. A business phone system, particularly one that is based on VoIP technology, eliminates the expenditure and hassle of maintaining a call center, which works out best for small businesses with a limited budget. Customer service representatives can share a single business phone number, track calls, answer customer requests on the go, and streamline the whole calling experience with state-of-the-art business phone features like inbound call routing, etc.

What Is the Best Phone Service for Your Small Business?

Now that you know how a business phone directly boosts business growth, it’s time for you to purchase a service for your small venture. Here are a few remarkable business phone services for you to consider at the start of this fiscal year:

Nextiva – Best Overall

Nextiva is an industry leader when it comes to business phone systems, and for all the right reasons. It offers dedicated lines for your desk, phone systems for your conference rooms, a business phone-calling app for your smartphone, an auto-attendant tool for always greeting your callers, a voicemail-to-email feature, and a central application to manage texts, emails, and calls through your PC, etc. Plus, there’s seamless integration with Hubspot, Salesforce, and other CRMs. Nextiva has three standard phone plans, i.e. Basic, Pro, and Enterprise, with the monthly price starting at $19.95. You can choose a package based on the number of users and the length of the contract.

Ooma – Best for Physical Offices

Ooma is the second best business phone service for small businesses, delivering ideal VoIP plans to power your office phone systems with unlimited calling, affordable international dialing, toll-free number, and virtual receptionist. It has a single flat-rate monthly plan costing $19.95, but this price doesn’t include hardware costs. You’ll have to purchase separate hardware from Ooma, such as analog or digital IP phones, front desk starter kits, and wireless extensions, etc. However, once you do, the cheap monthly service cost will feel like a breeze and you won’t have to worry about any rental hassle. Ooma has no contracts, so you cancel anytime. It has exceptional customer service and is best for offices.

RingCentral – Best for Textual Communication

Texting is a solid signifier of millennial behavior. So, if you have a lot of talented young adults on your team, RingCentral can help you find the perfect way to communicate internally, as well as externally. It has four main plans to offer, i.e. Essentials, Standard, Premium, and Ultimate. Their costs range from $19.99 per month per user to $49.99 per month per user. A team of 20 people can easily use the Essentials plan to send out unlimited SMS and MMS, enjoy 100 toll-free minutes each month, utilize on-demand call recording feature, and carry out unlimited calling within the United States and across Canada, etc. RingCentral has diverse packages and gives you 30% off on sign up for an annual plan.

Wrapping Up

Thus, having a business phone helps a small firm to cope with the daily challenges of the market and gain a strong foothold in the ever-turbulent market.