| Company | Website | Full Review | Coupons |
 |
 |
 |
Limited offer: $75 off coupon.Click here to redeem! |
 |
 |
|
| Company | Website | Coupons |
|
|
Limited offer: $75 off coupon.Click here to redeem! |
|
|
When it comes to choosing a business telephone service, there are myriad of options in the virtual and hosted PBX telephony sector of the industry. Indeed the market sector has become so overcrowded and competitive it can be difficult to keep up with all the new companies entering the market space. Furthermore, most of the new entrants don’t appear to be bringing anything new to the table, they seem content to follow the same old – me too model – and compete mainly on lower fees and free minutes. Consequently, it is becoming more difficult to find meaningful services differentiators that make a company’s product stick out from the crowd. Thankfully, that isn’t the case with two of the pioneers of the virtual and hosted telephone service, Grasshopper, the entrepreneur’s favorite, and RingCentral a true heavy weight in hosted PBX and virtual telephone services.
Target Markets
Both Grasshopper and RingCentral are leading, established and very accomplished vendors when it comes to providing virtual telephone services to the SMB (small medium business) market. However, they have different approaches in the way they provide their customers with telephone services and this defines their products and their relative positions within the market. Grasshopper for example targets small home businesses, entrepreneurs and startups and their product it tuned to meet the unique customer requirements within these niche markets. Grasshopper fulfills that service by providing a professional incoming call management service as part of its virtual telephone service.
On the other hand, RingCentral targets the entire SMB market from startups, to medium and large organizations that require business or enterprise class PBX features and functions. Subsequently, RingCentral’s product portfolio is feature rich, boasts extensive business, unified communication and contact center functionality, which was once only the preserve of the enterprise. However, RingCentral also strives to ensure that even small business is catered for with a range of services that can match the requirements of organizations of all sizes. Consequently, RingCentral operates two distinct telephony services, 1) a hosted feature rich PBX service, and 2) a virtual telephone service.
Competitive Areas
Grasshopper and RingCentral may have different business focus but their interests do overlap when it comes to providing a virtual telephone service. Consequently, this is the area of mutual interest, which we can focus when comparing each service provider, as it is an apple-to-apple comparison. Therefore in this review we will compare Grasshopper against RingCentral’s ‘Professional’ service (virtual telephone service), as opposed to its flagship hosted PBX product, ‘Office’.
In order to understand and appreciate the services provided by Grasshopper and RingCentral it necessitates that we have a basic understanding of what a virtual telephone system is, and what small businesses can reasonably expected from the service. The reason for this is that a virtual telephone service is not entirely, what you might expect it to be, in fact, some of the features; or rather, the lack of them might surprise you.
So what is a virtual telephone service and what is its value to the SMB?
A virtual telephone service is designed to provide a professional incoming call management service. Both Grasshopper and Ring Central provide their clients with a business number, a real number, which may be toll free, vanity, local or regional, which the client can in turn pass to their own customers and advertise on their business cards and other marketing collateral. The key service then is that Grasshopper and RingCentral will provide the service of auto-answering any inbound call using an auto-attendant/receptionist. The advantage here is that no call to the client’s business number will ever go unanswered, indeed the system will answer the incoming call promptly and the caller will be greeted by a customized greeting, typically followed by a menu of options. The client will customize the menu, which is offered to the caller by the IVR (auto-attendant), but a typical example could be, ‘Press 1 for Sales, 2 for Billing, 3 for Support’ etc. The IVR menu though, can be hierarchal in nature and support many tiers and options, for the caller to consider.
The real trick that virtual telephone services deploy is seamlessly and transparently – to the caller – diverting the incoming call to a preconfigured real telephone number assigned to the menu option that the caller selected. This real phone, can be a mobile telephone, a home landline or a desk phone in the home or office, in short it can be any phone that can be dialed externally, even a VoIP phone. What this means in practice is that the employees of the client SMB can work remotely from their mobile phones yet be contacted by customers on the main business number. This is a huge benefit for small businesses, especially those without office premises, as they do not have to give out their personal mobile phone numbers. Moreover, the employee can recognize and differentiate between incoming business and personal calls, answering the calls appropriately.
The problem is though, is that virtual phone systems are incoming call centric, and rarely is there a mechanism or method for handling outgoing calls through the business number. Fortunately, both RingCentral and Grasshopper have their own proprietary work-around to this service deficiency that will be discuss later.
Now, that we understand the concept of a virtual telephone service and how the service relates to the clients business we can begin to look at the individual service offering provided by Grasshopper and RingCentral.
Grasshopper Model
Grasshopper is an innovative concept as virtual telephony goes, as it isn’t actually VoIP at all, indeed it is built upon the PSTN underlying network. Grasshopper, utilizes the basic functionality of the POTS (plain old telephone system) to redirect calls over the PSTN. Subsequently, incoming calls can be answered and then redirected transparently using the standard call redirect method to a mobile phone, or any real or virtual telephone of your choosing, so long as the telephone can be physically dialed/reached over the real PSTN network. This PSTN overlay design is hugely important, as it is not placing or routing calls over the Internet as is the case with VoIP. Subsequently, Grasshopper has none of the unreliability, lack of availability or poor voice quality issues that are associated with VoIP voice calls. Instead, Grasshopper has all the five nine reliability, availability and landline voice quality you would expect from a call traversing the PSTN voice network. This is an inherent design feature of Grasshopper that cannot be stressed enough as the main obstacle for businesses to adopt hosted or virtual telephone services is their fear of VoIP internet reliability and voice call quality issues. Customers adopting the Grasshopper system have nothing to fear, their calls are crossing the PSTN and Mobile networks and will only pass over the internet should you call a VoIP telephone or Skype number for example. Therefore, the virtual telephone service’s reliability and quality of voice is practically guaranteed.
RingCentral Model
RingCentral on the other hand is VoIP and furthermore is a hosted cloud based service, so much is going to rely on the state of the internet. This certainly is not the problem it was only a few years ago with the shortage of bandwidth and unpredictable reliability of internet services and links. Nowadays, businesses run critical applications on the cloud and make use of software as a service (SaaS) from cloud providers for their CRM applications such as Saleforce. Therefore, there is not the same resistance in the market to VoIP, or the inherent fear of internet reliability or quality issues. However, data can handle poor link quality, voice cannot, so the unpredictability of the internet will always be a risk for VoIP and Video, and consequently hosted virtual telephone services.
Features & Functions (the bells and whistles)
Putting aside the underlying technology of the system architecture lets now consider the features and the functions that both service providers offer. So let’s start with Grasshopper, as it has to rely on existing POTS features for its basic service.
The way Grasshopper works is very simple, and that is a good thing as it’s is very easy to use:
- Pick a number for the business
- Record a custom greeting
- Add departments and employee extensions
- Get calls, voicemails and faxes anywhere
When choosing the phone number for the business, the client can select toll free numbers, premium 800 numbers, a new 844 prefix, have a vanity number or keep their existing business number. Furthermore, you can get a local or national number for business presence and have as many employee extensions as you wish and Grasshopper supports a name directory. The value of a name directory is that you can use it as an option in the auto-attendant IVR menu if you have several departments and many employees. For example, ‘Press 1 for Sales, 2 for Billing, 3 for Support … 8 for Name Directory’, and this allows outside callers to route to an individual’s phone, rather than to an apartment. Additionally, should there be no answer on an extension; Grasshopper will automatically divert the caller to voicemail. Each extension has its own voicemail. Furthermore, Grasshopper automatically delivers voicemail as MP3, or Faxes as PDF, via your email. Alternatively, voicemail if required can be transcribed by a human, so that you can read your voicemail, which is handy for meetings.
Grasshopper has several other features that overcome some of the inherent limitations of virtual telephone systems; these are based on its Smartphone application. The Grasshopper app for both iPhone and Android can provide call screening so that you may decide to accept or send the call to voicemail. What is more though is the application allows you to send outgoing calls using the business number. This is a great feature as it is one of the major failings of virtual telephone systems in that they only deal with incoming calls. The problem is though that it is not very intuitive or easy to manage. Saying that it works and is fine for occasional use, but you wouldn’t want to be using this all the time to make calls. Another problem is it only works on the mobile app; there is no facility to make outgoing calls using the business number as the caller ID on a landline or a mobile that doesn’t support the app.
RingCentral Professional
RingCentral Professional claims to be an incoming call management system for mobile professionals and that is about right. It has all the features that Grasshopper supports and being PBX based – using only the incoming feature set – it has several more up its sleeve. Internet FAX is one of these features where all incoming faxes are handled online so there is never a busy signal and no fax goes unanswered. Furthermore, RingCentral is able to send faxes from various devices, such as your mobile or Softphone, and send from outlook or MS Office applications as well as attach documents from Box, Dropbox or Google Drive. Additionally, you can even connect your existing fax machine to RingCentral using an analogue adapter.
RingCentral Professional also has easy-to-use call control functions, which permits you to make cold/warm call transfers, park and retrieve calls in the cloud. There is also the facility to record calls. Another feature that many businesses will find useful is call conferencing, which can support up to four people to an existing call.
Another useful feature of VoIP is the Ring-me feature in RingCentral that allows a hyperlink to be placed in an email signature or on a website that customers can click to call from anywhere in the world.
Price Plans
Grasshopper comes with a choice of four price plans:
Pay As You Grow – $12/month (no minutes)
Ramp – $24/month (500 minutes)
Grow – $49/month (2,000 minutes)
Max – $199/month (10,000 minutes)
RingCentral Professional:
Pro – $9.99 (300 local, long distance or toll-free minutes)
ProPlus – $19.99 (1000 local, long distance or toll-free minutes)
ProPower – $24.99 (2000 local, long distance and 1000 toll-free minutes)
Summary
When comparing RingCentral with Grasshopper with regards their virtual telephone services it is important to remember that Grasshopper is not based on VoIP architecture, instead it is a PSTN overlay of the traditional phone system. This means Grasshopper has all the inherent reliability, security and quality of the traditional phone network. RingCentral on the other hand is built upon VoIP and that means it is susceptible to the unpredictability of the internet. However it also means that RingCentral has many more features and functions, which enable it to beat Grasshopper on functionality, integration with business apps and growth potential.
Grasshopper is perfect for the small business that requires an incoming call management system with few frills but rock solid performance, quality and reliability. However if it is features and functions you are after such as application integration, call management, routing and recording then RingCentral is going to be the better bet.
| Company | Website | Full Review | Coupons |
|
|
|
Limited offer: $75 off coupon.Click here to redeem! |
|
|
|
| Company | Website | Coupons |
|
|
Limited offer: $75 off coupon.Click here to redeem! |
|
|
