Grasshopper Virtual Phone System Review
Grasshopper Phone will have your business sounding professional in no time with features like: Keep your existing number – Maintain your brand Get a toll free or local number – national or local presence Multiple extensions – for everyone on your team Call forwarding to mobile phones – work from anywhere Voicemails transcribed – delivered to your email No new hardware – use your existing phones Send business text messages – from your toll free or local number
Price: $12.00 Paid plans start at $12/month.
In the increasingly digital marketplace, more and more businesses are being created without having a set physical office or store front. With so many people shopping online, it just makes sense. Unfortunately this means that some things we took for granted from brick-and-mortar shops fall by the wayside - like being able to call a company on the phone. Luckily a number of services are popping up to help fill this need, like Grasshopper. Grasshopper allows you to conduct all the phone-related businesses you need from your personal mobile phone without actually giving out your personal number to all your customers and business partners.
With Grasshopper, you get to set up a new, separate phone number for your business. You don’t need a landline or anything, just your own mobile phone. You can choose to set up a local number if you’re mostly going to be working locally, or if you have a wider range in mind for your business you can set up a toll free number. You can also set up an unlimited number of extensions (regardless of what payment plan you’re on) so that businesses with multiple departments or people can be reached easily. And when you call one of your customers? Your privacy is still safe - the caller ID will show your business number, not your personal number.
That covers all the basic features you’d expect from a business’ phone, but Grasshopper has some additional features that are pretty cool and definitely handy depending on how much business you do over the phone. Not only can you receive voicemail to your business number, you can even receive faxes! Faxes are… outdated, to say the least, but I do know a few businesses and people that still use them for whatever reason. It’s good to have that functionality as a “just in case” option. You can also use Grasshopper to send and receive texts for your business. My favorite feature Grasshopper includes are the greetings you can set. You can record personalized greetings for customers based on the extension and even setup hold music! It’s a little thing, but customizability is always great.
When it comes to pricing, Grasshopper isn’t too bad. I wouldn’t say it’s cheap, but depending on how much phone business you conduct it’s probably less expensive than setting up a land line with a phone company. The cheapest option is $12 per month, which gets you one business number and calls cost $.06 per minute. If you bump it up to $24 per month you get 500 minutes a month free with your plan. That’s pretty reasonable and should cover most businesses, especially keeping in mind that all the plans have unlimited extensions that can be applied to the base number. The most expensive plan is $199 per month which nets you 3 numbers, ten thousand minutes per month, and unlimited voice studio time for you to record and edit greetings and messages.