If you work from home or run a small business, get a dedicated phone line. It will save your sanity and help you scale. Here are five cheap phone services for small businesses.
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Choosing a phone service for your small business is a decision you often make when you have nothing more than one lone single client, a desk chair, and a mobile phone. Still, make that choice wisely. Once the world — including all your advertising, SEO, and client base — knows that phone number, it’s more of a hassle to change your mind.
It might seem easy to use the cell phone you are already using. But that’s problematic and messy. It’s hard to set hours and ignore calls if you also want to take calls from your mother and partner on that line. And that cell phone number will lack features — like a desk phone — that you might eventually want for your business.
Here are five cheap phone services for small businesses that will grow with you, let you create work/life separation, and can handle calls and texts, a desk phone add-on, and help you direct calls to the right place and handle call volume. Some will even let you add lines to your plan if you grow your staff.
Google Voice
There is a good reason that many businesses choose to start with a Google Voice number. It’s free.
There is a phone app that allows you to take calls, seamlessly, from the cell phone you already have. You can send and receive texts. The web portal lets you text from your computer, see a record of your calls, use a headset to make and receive calls, connect your contacts to Google Contacts, and more.
When you are looking for cheap phone services for small businesses, it’s hard to argue with free, especially when the service is this robust. It might serve your business without a hitch for years.
And when that moment comes, in your business, where you want to add an employee, long for a desk phone, want to provision desk phones for your entire office, or need to set up fancy features like rule-based call forwarding, you can upgrade to a Google Workplace phone for just $10 a month, per phone.
I needed a VoIP phone for my business because my office is a cell service dead zone, AT&T won’t allow Wi-Fi dialing from my phone, and I wanted a desk phone that made me feel like I was working in an office.
The desk phone options that work with this service are a bit limited, at least at the moment. But I bought a Plantronics Poly Edge E220 IP Desk Phone, plugged it in to my router, provisioned it online, and was up and running in a few minutes. (There is a lot of bad information on the Internet about which phones work with Google Voice, which caused me to make a couple of missteps and returns. I am cutting to the chase, here, to save you time.)
This is, for me, the perfect home-office phone service. It gives me a desk phone, cell phone, Web portal for calls and texts, Wi-Fi dialing, and a dedicated phone number that I can ignore when I’m not working and prioritize when I am. And it’s cheap.
Ooma Home Phone
Choosing the Ooma Home service as a business line is quite affordable. And if you do an online search for Google Voice, you will be pelted with ads for Ooma. So I’m dealing with the two services offered under this name next.
Once you purchase the Ooma Telo base station ($99) and, if you like, a desk phone, the basic Ooma home service costs nothing but the service fees. (About $6 a month.) The company offers some very cute home phones, and the sound quality on the cordless HD phone is quite good.
You choose what service level you want. You can make and receive calls from a desk phone and from your cell phone — with the Ooma app — and get a dedicated work number — or port one — for that one-time purchase.
Upgrade to the Premiere service, and you can connect your Google Voice number to this desk phone, use your Amazon Alexa as a phone, and much more.
This is just $10 a month. This is a reasonable option if you grow out of the free Google Voice service and want a few more options.
I tried this scheme, though, and found Ooma’s home service a bit limited. There is no Web portal for home service and no texting. I got around this by using the Google Voice web portal. But ultimately, I felt I was paying a lot just to have a desk phone. When that phone died — rather quickly for a unit that cost nearly $100 — I switched to the Google Voice Workplace service.
Ooma Business
The Ooma Small Business service is a completely different operation from the Ooma residential service. You might think, as I did, that you could start out small with the residential version and upgrade if your business needed more services. That’s not the case. You have to cancel one to get the other. The equipment does not upgrade with the service.
This service is targeted at businesses that are larger than mine. But if you have several employees, want an 800 number for some inbound calls, and like the idea of a virtual receptionist, fax machine, hold music, transfer music, and the ability to transfer calls to extensions of your main number, this is an affordable way to get all of that.
The essential service is $20 a month. If you want texting, though, from this business line, you will need the Pro level service, which is $25 a month.
All still quite affordable, and you won’t have to ditch equipment, port phone numbers, or change services to upgrade your plan.
Zoom Phone Service
If you rely on Zoom for meetings, as many small businesses do, adding a phone line to that service is easy peasy.
It’s affordable, too.
Plans start at just over $10 a month, integrate with your Zoom apps, bring all sorts of VOIP services to your phone service, and let you take your office phone with you in an app on your cell phone.
You can get some basic phone services for free if you already subscribe to a Zoom plan. Even if you are using the free Zoom plan, you can use the phone service.
For dedicated Zoom users, or anyone already paying for an account, this is an easy choice. Go to your online account, add the service, and start making calls.
To buy the service without the Zoom video calling service, you will pay $15 a month and get lots of services, as well as access to other Zoom technologies.
You will be able to fax from your new Xoom phone line, as well as send and receive domestic SMS and MMS messages.
This service will even let you record calls, which is essential in my business and a clever hack for any business that wants to wow customers with detailed notes on services rendered and past conversations.
Grasshopper
Grasshopper is a virtual phone service, rather than a VOIP phone service, and it is perfect for any business that operates in the field, out of a truck, or in any combination of office and field.
You choose a business number and tell that number where and when to ring. Set up an outgoing message specific to your business — or to a role at that business — and use that line from your desk phone, cell phone, or any phone. Set up business hours so late-night calls get picked up, but not by you. Manage your contacts. Get transcripts of voicemails sent to your email.
All your messages are searchable and readable. You can send and receive faxes. And some plans let you record calls, which will also be transcribed and searchable.
Plans start at $14 a month, and upgrading to get extra extensions or services is click-and-buy easy.
This is a very modern solution that lets you use whatever equipment you want and adds features to your phone service that many services can’t.
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