The VirtualPBX Makes It Possible for a Business to Have Nothing but Cell Phones for Their Business Phone System

Basic Concept

Certain kinds of businesses have employees who are constantly moving about so that a standard business phone system or PBX which rings to an extension on an employee's desk is ill adapted to their needs. Or, a business has large changes in the number of employees working, especially companies using temporary employees on a project by project basis. Or, a business is located in multiple geographic areas, and cannot easily integrate all of their employees in a single phone system.

Such businesses are often better served by issuing a cell phone to each employee to carry while they are on the job. When this approach is combined with the VirtualPBX, one has the ideal business phone system for this type of organization. Cell-phone rates have become inexpensive and are continually dropping, and this solution can actually be cheaper in the long run than installing a standard PBX in-house. Furthermore, it guarantees instant access to all employees helping to eliminate phone tag.

Examples of businesses which can benefit from this are:

• Consulting businesses where a group of diverse specialists wishes to give the impression of a single company and be locatable no matter where they are working at the time. Often such companies have members or associates which are scattered throughout the U.S. and Canada and sometimes, the entire world.
• Businesses with distributed employees such as manufacturer's representatives whose employees are also often widely scattered.
• Any inbound call center that needs ACD (automatic call distribution) to route callers to sales, support, or customer service agents, especially when the agents are not all working from a single geographic location.
• Engineering development and research firms where an employee is just as often in the lab as at his desk.
• Real-Estate Brokerages where an agent can be almost anywhere at a given time. An additional advantage of the cell-phone/VirtualPBX combination is that the number of phone numbers on an agents card can be reduced from a half dozen to one, and cell and home phone numbers can remain secret. Nevertheless customers have instant access to the agent. If an agent desires privacy or a little time off, the extension can be marked as "unavailable". In this case all calls go to voice mail, but the agent is not isolated from his customers since each call to voice or fax mail results in a page to the agents pager or digital cell phone.
• Businesses with employees who work in the field and are often underway and away from their desks such as service, delivery, repair, plumbing, city employees, etc.
• Start-up companies which require an immediate business phone system before the have their offices or their new business location, i.e. while their employees are still working from home.
• Companies with multiple offices, branches, or locations which want to have a single number reaching any employee at any office, and want to be able to transfer calls from any employee to any other employee no matter which office they are working at.
• Businesses with telecommuting employees.
• Any company with employees which work from vehicles instead of an office and want to integrate them into a single business phone system.

The concept of a business phone system with only cell phones is truly an approach for the year 2004 and beyond. The VirtualPBX system provides the perfect marriage with the rapidly growing cell-phone technology. In the VirtualPBX system, all PBX and business phone services are delivered by the public telephone network. The customer has no equipment to purchase, install, or maintain. As a result the customer's PBX system never becomes outdated or obsolete.

Description of the VirtualPBX

A new VirtualPBX customer is provided with a toll-free phone number or they may port or remote-call-forward an existing phone number to their new VirtualPBX system. When a customer calls, they are greeted by an auto-attendant and may dial the extension of an employee, look up the extension in an alphabetical company directory, dial 0 for a live operator, dial sales or support queues, etc.

When an employee's extension is dialed or if the employee is logged into a sales or support queue, the system rings the employee's cell phone and if the employee is not found there, the VirtualPBX can dial up to three more phone numbers stored by the employee in the extension, until the employee is found. If the employee's phone is busy or if the employee is at none of these numbers, the caller is transferred to voice mail. If a caller desires they may transfer directly to voice mail without waiting to be connected to the employee.

In addition a customer may send a fax to an extension. This fax-mail feature allows the extension owner to download the fax confidentially at whatever fax machine may be handy.

Because of the way that the VirtualPBX system is designed, it is not necessary for a company to get rid of their old phone system to begin implementing this new concept. The VirtualPBX can be overlaid on an existing business phone system provided that it has either DID (Direct Inward Dial), dialing through an auto-attendant, Centrex, or a Key System to directly ring the phone on an employee's desk. In this way the company can begin issuing cell phones to employees without disturbing the phone system that is already in place.

The are many many other features in the VirtualPBX system. It has all of the features of high-end PBXs and many more such as connecting multiple offices under one number, transferring to extensions outside the company, etc.which standard PBXs can only do with difficulty.