As I prepare to leave for a short trip to Denver I was thinking, I have more calls this week than usual and I’m really going to miss my desktop IP phone. The convenience of the great speaker phone and clarity with the HD voice is hard to beat. The thing is I have a robust work phone in my pocket and I take with me everywhere I go.

I’m talking about my cell phones. Remember back in the day when cell phone companies advertised that digital calls and networks had great sound quality? I do and they were and still are right. I make calls on both my Android and iPhone all the time utilizing our mobile apps, both over WiFi and 4G and the sound quality is great plus I can make my calls seamlessly. I’ve been known to use hotel wifi but it’s a rare occasion, 4G calls have always been fine and in all honesty 3G calls are usually reasonable if you get a solid signal.

What I’m saying is don’t fret if you have to make or take calls out of reach of your IP phone and office. We’ve got you covered and we’d like to think we do it in style. Check out our Phone.com mobile app offering and tell me (Jeb) how you use Phone.com out of the office on Twitter or Facebook.

Traveling internationally can be a major problem for small business owners when they find that using a cell phone can incur enormous roaming charges. In fact, even if you do not answer your phone, you may pay $1-$2 per minute for every call that rings when you are roaming overseas!

Phone.com has a way to help business people save substantial money on phone costs when traveling.

The idea is simple. Before you board the plane, you forward your cell phone calls to your Phone.com business telephone number (follow instructions from your cell phone provider for that. For example – click here to see how to do it on an AT&T cell phone). When you reach the destination country, you purchase a low cost “pay as you go” SIM card and place that in your (unlocked) cell phone or rent a cheap phone with the SIM card.

At your convenience from your hotel room, you set up your Phone.com extension using the web-based Phone.com Control Panel to forward calls to your new local number that comes with the SIM card.

Boom! There is no roaming charge and, in many countries, no cost for incoming calls either.

As for outbound calling, you can dial out of your phone and pay whatever the local SIM card d deal offers but the better way is to obtain a Global Number from Phone.com (we have numbers for over 40 countries) this will allow you to place calls using your own Phone.com Caller ID by dialing only your Global Number (a local call) and setting up menus to dial all your contacts.

You can also use our Phone.com Mobile VoIP App on your Smart Phone (if you have one) and dial out using your Hotel Wi-Fi with no International or roaming charges.

As you land back in the US, replace the SIM card and undo the cell phone call forwarding and you are done!

You can also set up schedules to make sure calls do not come in at undesirable hours in case you travel far off from your normal time zone.

Economically-minded users can make all that happen before they fly, and then cancel when they return. There are no long terms contracts at Phone.com.

So what can be simpler or more economical than that? Nothing! Remember: Phone.com customer service agents are always happy to help you with any questions.

When I call a company I have some expectations.   I was shocked when I called an established businesses conference call bridge and heard something along the lines of “this is a free conference call service”.  My initial thought was doesn’t their phone service include conference calling like Phone.com?  Besides this is a horrible image to portray to me, that your company can’t afford a conference call bridge.

Don’t get me wrong, every penny counts when running a small business and I don’t suggest anyone should spend those pennies without a need but there’s no reason to use a service that announces that it’s free, making your company look cheap.  Every Phone.com extension gets it’s own conference call number or bridge as it’s commonly referred to.  I’m always ecstatic to host calls because I get to use my Phone.com bridge, it’s a bit of a pride thing now, knowing I’m not using some free service.  The really sad thing was these companies can definitely afford a proper bridge.

If you use Phone.com service then make sure to check out our HD Conferencing.  You can access it from the box on the left of your extensions control panel right under the Settings option. If you have any questions message us on Facebook or Twitter.

This definitely isn’t necessary if you have our Mobile Office app but it’s nice to have options, plus I like push the limits of these phones along with fiddle. Enjoy the video and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask on Facebook or Twitter.

I got a call last week but I had to leave my office to pick up my daughter.  Problem is, I couldn’t hang up and I don’t like being late to pick her up from school.  I remembered that one of our In-Call Features during an incoming call is to transfer an ongoing call from one extension to another and that’s exactly what I did.  I was on my desktop IP phone the Polycom IP 450 which by the way has amazing sound quality.  All I did was press “Confrnc” and the extension that forwards to my cell phone.  Next thing I knew I was on the call on my mobile phone and walked out my front door.

I know some of you already use this feature, all kinds of businesses do but it was my first time being in this situation and being able to use it.  I’m a one person operation in my small office, so I’ve never wanted to transfer a call before.

By the way, I decided to test this out a little more and when you’re on your cell phone and want to transfer a call to any other extension dial *2 and that extension.  It places your call on hold and rings the extension.  Once the new line is picked up you can hang up your cell phone.  I’m going to be using this a lot more I think.  I inevitably get calls on my cell phone when I’m on my way to my office and when walk into my office now I’ll transfer them my desk phone.  I’m happy to report in my non scientific testing I was able to transfer incoming calls between my Phone.com Bria iPhone app, our Mobile Office app for Android (I didn’t test it on BlackBerry yet), a desktop IP phone, the desktop Communicator and a call to my personal cell phone number that Phone.com forwards to.  

Are you using incoming in-call transfers?  Let us know on Facebook or Twitter.  

I had the opportunity to speak with one of our awesome customers, John Savidge of Montron LLC. His company specializes in advertising campaigns via electronic media (radio and television) in the education and the medical, legal and automotive industries. They use Phone.com phone numbers in their advertisements and gauge the success of a campaign by the number of calls they receive.

Prior to the release of call notifications, John and his team would send a weekly report to their clients listing the calls that were received in response to a particular ad campaign. Clients would then call anyone back that they may have missed. The problem with this model is that any missed calls are missed leads and when addressed on a weekly basis, are likely very cold.

With call notifications, John’s clients now receive an instant notification of a call and have the ability to call that lead back while it’s still hot. John’s clients are happy, John is happy and Phone.com is happy. I call that a win-win-win!

Please check out our new call notification feature in your telephone number and extension settings. I saved the best part for last. It’s totally FREE! ALL of our customers can take advantage of it today.

Jeremy Watkin is the Director of Customer Service at Phone.com and co-founder ofCommunicateBetterBlog.com (and on Twitter: @commbetterblog ); a blog dedicated to learning about good and bad customer service with the intent of providing awesome customer service for Phone.com.

According to leaks out of the FCC (hardly a surprise), there is some serious back-room discussion of allowing VoIP providers to directly tap into the national telephone numbers pool. The way things stand today, the numbers are still controlled by legacy “telephone companies” … i.e. local exchange carriers including AT&T, Verizon, Century Link, and well over a hundred smaller players. VoIP carriers have to get the numbers from those companies.

The leaks, first reported by web site Politico, hint that the FCC is considering a rule-making action that will change all that.

The obvious question is what does that have to do with the average VoIP user, what difference does it make to me? Well, for those whose phone service is provided by Phone.com or any other VoIP carrier, the difference may be great.

That’s because in this day and age we have something called a “virtual phone number.” In other words, in VoIP technology, the number is not physically tied to switchboard and locality. You can live in California and have a New York phone number, or one from London, or most other places. But the truth is, the number is really tied to a physical location – one still owned by the legacy phone companies. That’s what area codes are (or at least used to be) all about.

But if those legacy phone companies – middlemen, if you will – are cut out of the picture, then a layer of complexity in the network is removed. It doesn’t take a Geek to figure out that the less complex, the better the VoIP phone service can become.

“Allowing VoIP providers to obtain telephone numbers directly, and not through intermediate providers, as is generally the case today, has the potential to fuel innovation and promote competition, at the same time we ensure calls are routed reliably and efficiently, protect public safety, and guard against exhaust of limited numbers,” Politico said that it source, an FCC official, wrote in an email.

One small detail, of course, is that area codes become even less meaningful than they are today. An obvious result is that long distance charges simply don’t have any reality any more. Of course Phone.com users on any plan don’t pay for long distance anywhere in the U.S., but legacy carriers by and large still do try to exact a toll, if only an add-on fee for “unlimited long distance.”

At this point there’s no indication of exactly when the FCC might act, and of course it should be remembered that there’s some pretty heavy lobbying by the powerful local exchange carriers against changing the rules.

I’ve been in Europe all week for a mobile phone trade show plus some meetings and as life continues at home I was getting calls that I had to take. In particular I’m helping plan a wedding reception for my cousin so the family and friends can meet his new wife. Lucky for me, I’m doing all the planning including working with the catering company as well as the facility. Some staff needed to talk to me but because of the time difference they kept missing me and left me voice messages.

I’m happy to report that by having my voicemail transcribed by Phone.com and emailed to me I was able to read them and then respond as needed when they called my Phone.com number. No more paying for roaming to listen to voicemail when I’m outside the US. I was able to read my message, I could text that person back or call them directly from my email. This saved me a lot of time and money but more importantly, it made my life just that little bit easier.

Voicemail Transcription from Phone.com costs 25¢/message for human transcription and for our less expensive automated system it’s just $1.50/month. This is one of those services that can really ease some stress and if it’s out of your range every month you should

Let me explain, Jeff advertises for his clients on the radio, “We use Phone.com to get unique vanity lines for many of our radio campaigns. It allows us to uniquely source our direct response radio campaigns so that we can show our clients verifiable results on a station-by-station basis.”

So instead of utilizing only one phone number for a radio campaign, he implements multiple lines, so that each station which his ads are running can be sourced on a station-by-station basis. For example the radio add for the client runs on 2 different radio stations this month, so each station gets a similar ad just with different phone numbers in it.

When I spoke to Jeff on the phone he explained that his customers like results quickly, he pointed out “Phone.com’s control panel allows for RadioActive Media to quickly look up available toll free vanity numbers relating to the advertisers business. Lines are quickly set up and forwarded to the advertisers’ call centers.” He explained to me that one of his favorite things is paying for the entire year up front saving his company some serious cash. He also likes that we have 24/7 US based customer service reps.

Jeff has been doing this for over 3 years with us and I got the feeling he thinks of it as his secret weapon. Thus allowing him to more accurately target and return stronger results for each customer.

Jeff mentioned more then once, and I thought this was very appropriate for many of our customers that “Phone.com grows with your business”. In Jeff’s case this is literally true. With his growing business we’ve been able to expand the number of phone numbers he has.

I was talking this past week (okay, eMailing) to a former colleague of mine, who worked in the same company as I did for almost a decade. My job there was writing news and features about broadband and telephony. Hers was writing research papers into the business phone switch (i.e. PBX) market. We both left that company within a year of each other, for only slightly different reasons, and are both now still at it, but on a contract basis.

The tale she had to tell is very telling about what’s happening in the market. I’m writing about VoIP (indeed, this blog is one example) and ever faster broadband. She’s earning her living helping traditional phone switch manufacturers cope with the emerging new world of VoIP, doing custom competitive analysis research.

“The traditional phone system market is declining, and the manufacturers are struggling since sales are way down. The growing market is for Hosted PBX,” she said to me. Hosted PBX, or what some might call “virtual PBX.” The bottom line is that what she’s seeing is yet another reflection of the growing trend of businesses of all sizes to move to the type of business phone service offered by carriers such as Phone.com.

Now here I also do make a careful distinction between competitive VoIP carriers. There are several quite well known companies in the market – we all know who they are – that target primarily residential users. But those companies, by their very nature, offer what’s basically an advanced (and less expensive) version of the same type of phone service that home users have long received.

Then there’s another tier of VoIP carriers – which is where Phone.com fits in – that offers an advanced (and less expensive) version of the type of phone service that small to medium size businesses, including the small office-home office (SOHO) users, are accustomed too. Those are the companies that in the past might have purchased a key system or small PBX. But these days a virtual PBX is the answer, providing even a small business with phone service that has features that once were the province of only very large businesses.