The Best Business VoIP Solutions of 2016

One of the most important aspects of building a successful business is customer engagement. Today’s businesses reach out and connect with customers across multiple channels (including social media and email). However even with seemingly constant advancements in online communications and collaborationtechnology, nothing has yet to fully supplant the telephone. Maintaining the capability to talk directly to customers in real time while gathering valuable marketing and business intelligence (BI) is still best done via voice. So, having a functional and feature-filled telephone system fully integrated into your sales and marketing strategies is hugely important for any size business.

But even with this realization, you have a multitude of choices. Larger businesses need to select between on-premises Private Branch Exchange (PBX) hardware and hosted solutions, weighing their potential benefits (i.e., advanced functionality and total customizability) against associated costs. Small to midsize businesses (SMBs) need to make that same choice, but also weigh their current needs and budget against what they expect those needs to become in the future as telephony technology continues to evolve and integrate with other types of software, especially cloud services. For many, the cost of a traditional PBX system may not only be beyond the reach of their current operating budget but may also not make much long-term sense.

Furthermore, when you’re starting or running a small business, you need to be devoting the majority of your time and efforts into your core business in order to succeed. Wasting time on purchasing, implementing, and managing infrastructure can be extremely costly, both in capital outlay and time removed from building the business.

Traditionally, small businesses would rely on a local telco for basic business phone needs, using something like a CENTREX system. But today, those systems have become antiquated and do not mesh well with the needs of a modern business—especially for emerging trends such as integrating mobile phones, enterprise social networking, texting, leveraging call center and call queuing software, or dozens of other features that can streamline processes, promote collaboration, and accelerate growth.

Fortunately, there are many more options available today in hosted PBX solutions that bring the features and reliability of an enterprise-level PBX to SMBs. In order to provide a guide to these solutions, we’ve pulled together four of the leading hosted PBX solutions representing a range of features and types: Citrix Grasshopper, Fonality Hosted PBX, Microsoft Skype for Business Online, and RingCentral Office.

We also attempted to include VoIP solution provider Nextiva in this roundup, but oddly, the company didn’t respond to any of several attempts at contact, which was more than a little puzzling for a company that ostensibly specializes in business communications.

Modern Features of Business Phone SystemsThe four VoIP solutions we did test cover a wide range of features and options. Some, such as Fonality Hosted PBX and RingCentral Office, are geared towards larger businesses, and offer high-end enterprise features, but they offer rates that fit into SMB budgets. Others, such as Citrix Grasshopper, are very much geared towards the smaller end of the SMB market and provide the basics of a modern phone system—without the need for any on-premises equipment or even fixed phone lines and, though limited in features, are extremely cost-effective.

On the higher end of this space, hosted PBX providers such as RingCentral Office and Fonality Hosted PBX will generally require some on-premises hardware such as specific desk and cordless VoIP phones preconfigured to work with the hosted PBX service. These phones connect to the provider over the Internet and function exactly as you would imagine a business phone should, but the phone system running those phones is located in the cloud rather than the telco closet in the basement. Self-service management and configuration of these systems generally occurs through a Web-based portal, and features such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, call queuing, hold music or audio, extension assignments, and similar business capabilities are all managed there.

In some cases, providers will offer on-premises Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) connectivity through hardware that is connected to analog or digital phone lines from the local telco and connected to the business network. This allows a business to continue to use local phone lines with their hosted PBX solution and may be of significant benefit to businesses that have a requirement to maintain local wired lines.

Furthermore, most (if not all) providers also offer smartphone integration with custom apps that extend the phone system beyond the office. This integration allows users to transfer calls to and from their mobile phone, place and receive calls from their personal phone (that appear to be coming from the business), and interact with colleagues and customers via voice and text.

The Right Internet ConnectionMost of these VoIP solutions will require stable and consistent Internet connectivity at every location where the wired phones are to be used. In many cases, standard business-class Internet service with suitable bandwidth will suffice, though the use of Quality of Service (QoS) configuration on a business-class Internet router may be necessary to prioritize voice traffic over other Internet traffic in order to maintain good call quality. Some hosted PBX providers offer assistance with this type of configuration on existing customer hardware,