14 Oct The leading cloud switchboards in the USA and their innovative features
That the switchboard market is changing is clear to everyone.
Thanks to the internet, cloud switchboard offers are evolving, especially those offered in the U.S. market, and as we know, things that are done in the USA often act as “forerunners”. In this article we want to analyse which companies in the USA have a cloud PBX offer and what features and functions we find in switchboard management systems.
In America, the concept of traditional physical switchboard present in the company is now obsolete.Businesses choose the cloud and that’s why we already have American market leaders.These are the top 4:
www.grasshopper.com/
www.virtualpbx.com/
www.phone.com/
www.onebox.com
…
And there are many others!
These sites all offer the same thing: a highly professional cloud switchboard solution. We registered and entered into the management systems of these switchboards to evaluate their functions and it appears that in America it has already been understood that the switchboard audio message customisation service is very important for the customer.
Let’s start with Grasshopper.com.
It is interesting to note that the company wants to give ample visibility to the function useful for ordering customised audio messages in every part of the management system. This is a function which they focus on heavily. Look at this image for example.
The visibility for that service comes above all at the point in which, most logically, it could be necessary to use it: the “load audio messages” section. At that point, in fact, by clicking on “organise messages” a window appears offering more solutions: record the audio message using the phone, upload a file, record the message with the computer microphone. But as you can see, the first solution suggested is:”order professional messages”.
But OneBox.com surprised us most of all!
The OneBox.com cloud switchboard offers various “features”, including the ability to record phone calls! For customised audio messages, OneBox uses a price calculation system very similar to ours: a price proportionate to the amount of words that make up the message, complete with a word counter.
And another very nice feature is: 48 hours after completing the quick customised message request form we received an e-mail telling us that the message had been recorded and was already loaded in the switchboard!As the customer, we only had to verify that the message was to our liking and, if necessary, request a remake.In short, a very hands-on service.This is the e-mail we received:
And they also produced a good video explaining how the customisation service works!
All these sites proved to be somewhat limited in choosing the musical backing track for messages; for example, OneBox asks the user to call to be able to choose the musical backing track.It is very strange that they did not think of online players (as done for speakers) useful to the customer for choosing the music in the same context.With the TelephoneVox.com API this would all be synchronised with our databases.
And … Phone.com?
The San Diego company comes out tops in terms of “features”. Among others, a function allows you to receive a detailed e-mail with the information of the caller for each call received; in this way, losing a phone call will not be a serious problem.Phone.com has chosen to join an affiliate programme for customised messaging. Like that which TELEPHONEVOX proposes through this page: https://www.telephonevox.com/en/become-affiliated
It is certainly simpler than implementation of API, but in this case the invoice to the customer is made by TELEPHONEVOX which then pays the excellent commission to the affiliated partner.
All the features offered by this company are presented here: http://www.phone.com/feature/
If you want more information about audio messages for your cloud switchboard, contact us at [email protected]
