HELLO & WELCOME

[greencarrot]

Hi

I'm a (very) small business owner and I'm looking at setting up a telephone answering service for other small businesses.

I want to be able to answer calls in clients company names so the number presentation bit looks good. There will probably be 4 or 5 clients to start with and I'll need 2 phones, both of which need to do everything and be able to see who is being called. I'm planning to grow this to 20-25 over the next year...

I'm assuming I need a number for each client but what else, if anything? How much will the total cost (excluding the physical phones) be?

Hope you can help...
I'm off to see a telecoms person tomorrow and I REALLY don't want to get talked into a BT solution because I don't know what else there is...

[GoofyCyborg]

You just need an account with someone like Voipfone (free) and a telephone number for each client (normally the best is an ordinary geographic one for which costs around £2 per month.)

You then take an extension off their PBX for each number - £1 per month - so you get the Line Presentation feature and can see the number called instead of the number calling on your phone and can answer properly.

That's all you need apart from a telephone which can cost nothing (if you use the free softphone - this works ok but it's not a real business solution.) or around £150 for a top of the range model.

I make that £3 per month, per client.

You get full call records per extension ie per client, which you can view on line in real time or dump as a csv file into an Excel spreadsheet for on-billing.

[greencarrot]

That's brilliant, thanks for the information, I'll be signing up shortly...