Rural small businesses may become big fans of GotVMail. It acts as your phone system or switchboard, handling calls as they come in and routing them to your cell, home, or office.
When a customer calls your business, GotVMail answers the call with a recorded message, giving options like extensions. The customer can choose “Sales” or “Jon” or “Billing” depending on how you set it up. GotVMail puts the caller on hold (you pick the music), and transfers the call to your cell, your partner’s home, or the accountant’s office that does your billing. Do you see how a small town small biz could consider this an awesome tool?
The system is hosted on GotVMail’s equipment. You just sign up. Plans start at $9.95 per month, and are based on minutes. On the upside, you get a US toll free number as part of your plan.
While I haven’t tried the system personally, a few things make me feel positive about it.
- They offer a 30 money back guarantee.
- Excellent testimonials are posted all over their site.
- Erik Arvidson offered to let me try it out.
All of those show confidence in the product.
The standard features are included in all price packages, with a few special features offered a la carte. You don’t have to buy the big package just to get an important feature.
This sounds like a terrifically useful tool for entrepreneurs. Thanks to Erik for letting me know about it.
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
I recommend GotVMail. I use the system for my radio show. I also have partnered with GVM on some things — nice people.
Wonderful! Anita, thank you for sharing your experience. I appreciate it greatly.
Excellent write up. GotVMail is easy to use and generally a good tool. Two key issues I found with them:
1) They charge a high per minute rate for inbound phone calls. In most cases 7.4 cents per minute. This more than offsets their low $9.99 monthly fee, making it an expensive solution for most small businesses.
2) It is not a true PBX. It is a fancy auto-attendant. So you still need another service to receive the actual call or to place calls.
I started using CallButler http://www.callbutler.com which is a very well designed PBX (iPBX) that does all the things GotVMail does and more. You can use your own VoIP service, reducing your per minute use to 2 cents per minute or less. I use an unlimited plan from VoiceMeUp. I estimate that my cost savings with CallButler over GotVMail are over $3500 per year. The set-up is very easy and they provide outstanding customer support.
Brutus: I agree with your high per rate minute charges and will not fully agree to 2. GotVmail is only an incoming call service. I have seen other systems (RC, 800PBX) using which you can use your toll-free number to make outbound calls. Still, I prefer calling them directly rather than calling through my toll-free number to save 1c. Its just so much hassle. Sometimes, I do prefer calling through my toll-free number as the outbound call gets recorded with 800PBX.
CallBulter is a self hosted system. I just cannot base my business on a local system running on my laptop or computer. Too risky.
Brutus hits the nail on head.
Lots of add on options and usage make the bill add up quick.
While I haven’t seen call butler I have used Inteliphone http://www.inteliphone.com packages are more simple to understand. They are able to customize in most instances and have awesome customer service.