Why RingCentral?

Many of us need to be reachable to our clients even if we are not in the office. Also as our firm and employees change we need to quickly adapt our phone system to those changes.

There are a few flavors of VoIP systems but after doing some research 2b1 Inc. found that RingCentral has the flexibility and easy of use that even non-technical people can more easily make changes.

Some of the advantages of RingCentral is that you receptionist can transfer incoming call to your extension. That will make your phone ring at the office but if you are not there it can call you cell phone and / or additional numbers. When you transfer the call the recipient can be in the same office or at a satellite office even in a different country. Here at 2b1 Inc. we have collaborators in Atlanta and Canada. Once we receive a call in our main office in San Francisco just by dialling extension 103 the Atlanta office phone will ring and ext. 105 the Toronto office phone will ring. All the setting can be changed in a few moments on the RingCentral web site without a need of a programmer.

Another feature that I like about RingCentral is that I can check my voice messages on my office phone, on my cell phone with the RingCentral app or I can log into my RingCentral portal and see the call history, listen to voice messages and even undelete voice messages that have been deleted. In the smart phone app and web portal I can see all the faxes I sent and received and even view the sent faxes. From my smart phone I can take a picture of a document and fax it directly to a client, from the phone!

For those of us who track time even if we are not at the office RingCentral app will log all the calls made or received through the app. Then by looking that the Recent page we can see all the calls and see how much long was the call. Back at the office we can enter the time in the practice management or the billing program.

I often use the RingCentral text/SMS capability to text clients without revealing my direct cell phone number. RingCentral line can send and receive faxs and messages showing the business number.

If you go on vacation and don’t want to receive work related call you can set your RingCentral status to “Do Not Disturb” and not calls will be forwarded to you mobile phone. This feature is very hand if you travel internationally and don’t have to pay extra international long distance charges.

Depending you your RingCentral plan you have from 4 to 200 participants video meeting (including sharing screen) and conference call as part of the plan.

Also RingCentral now comes with a collaboration tool that allow to have teams to collaborate/exchange messages and documents. I will cover RingCentral collaboration in another article.