Voicemail Service/Pager Service/Cellular Service

[Maverick]

What would be the recommended method to carry a business line. I initally wanted an additional cel number but trying to keep costs down to a minimum. Does anyone here subscribe to a voice messaging system? or maybe even a pager/voicemail system?

[FlatCreek]

I recently went with CallWave and think it's going to work out great. They give you a main business line (local number or toll free) and a fax line. You can set it to ring to any phone you like, such as your cell phone, for as many rings as you want. For instance, I have it set to ring once on my cell phone, then go to voicemail. If someone does leave you a voicemail or fax, CallWave e-mails it to you as an audio attachment or PDF. Since I have a T-Mobile Pocket PC, this is great b/c I get my voicemail in an e-mail attachment as soon as someone leaves it. Even if someone doesn't leave a message, it sends you an e-mail with the caller ID to let you know you had a missed call.

This system works great for one-man businesses, but if you have several employees, you may want to consider a virtual PBX system (such as GotVMail - http://gotvmail.com/)that lets callers reach several employees through a phone tree. The key for me was finding a reliable service that will give you a local number - toll free only makes us look distant and that just won't work with the small business clients we're serving.

Hope this helps - good luck!

[The Old Sarge]

We use PBNext with all our web sites. As Flat Creek says, it includes all the bells a whistles.

We add "Toll Free" behind the number on everything that carries our phone number ... just to let people know.

[Maverick]

LOL, looks like we're all thinking alike. I went with http://www.voice-plus.com with the Virtual PBX. Everything like you guys mentioned. They are charging me $14.95/mo and I think another $1 extra for email delivery via mpeg/wav file.