Not Only Luck.
An essay by John Melonakos

Phone Call System with Ringcentral

Another service we use is Ringcentral. For startups, Ringcentral enables flexibility by spreading phone answering responsibilities across the company.

You simply load the appropriate cell phones into Ringcentral, and the system automatically routes calls to the right people. You can choose either to blast a lot of cell phones at once with a “first-to-answer wins” mentality. Or you can choose to call one cell phone at a time down a list of numbers until someone picks up (this is the option we use). Meanwhile the customer will hear elevator music.

You can setup several layers of extensions with different recordings for each extension. Here is how we setup our Ringcentral:

  1. Customer calls in and hear’s an intro message that ultimately says: “Press 1 for sales; Press 2 for technical support.”
  2. If “1” is pressed, Ringcentral plays elevator music as it successively dials the cell phones of our various salespeople. If someone is busy, they just ignore the call and the service finds the next available person. If no one answers on a first pass, it cycles back through one more time. If after hours, it simply takes a message.
  3. If “2” is pressed, Ringcentral behaves the same way, except the list of cell phones it calls is different and includes customer support people rather than salespeople. If no one answers on a first pass, it cycles back through one more time.  If after hours, it simply takes a message.
  4. A “0” (for operator) behaves the same as a “1.”
  5. The caller ID you see on the cell phone appends the extension number onto the end of the caller’s number so that you can tell information about the call before answering:
    1. Since the number of digits in the number is longer than normal, you know the call is coming from Ringcentral.
    2. The extension number at the end immediately tells you if it’s a sales call, a support call, or an operator call.

We prepay 12 months of service for Ringcentral and it ends up being $25/mo.

What strategy do you use for answering the phone in your startup?

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