If you are a small business or a SOHO user, you probably know the importance of establishing local presence. Although a website is a great medium to connect with people across the globe, you need some local presence to meaningfully establish yourself in international markets. A contact form on your website is not enough to satisfy consumers desire to be able to speak with a company representative (especially for a big ticket purchase) to alleviate pre- and post-purchase anxiety. However, opening international offices or establishing local call centers may require significant resources.
Today, we look at VirtualPhoneLine (VPL) that allows you to “be anywhere” without breaking the bank. VPL helps individuals and organizations to keep in touch with people they care (e.g., customer, friend, family member) and help them reach their goals in money, power, luck and love.
What is VirtualPhoneLine?
As the name suggests, VirtualPhoneLine (VPL) provides virtual numbers (DID) in various countries. Everyone can call the same phone number that is local and it will reach VPL customer. At the time of writing this post, VPL had local numbers in over 50 countries.
Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, USA, Venezuela, Vietnam
The rates vary across countries, but you can buy a local number for as low as $0.3 per month. Thus you can have a local presence for almost no cost.
How VirtualPhoneLine works?
The fundamental premise behind VPL is very simple – you buy a virtual number in any of the supported countries and have the number forwarded to anywhere (regular phone number, SIP, or instant messaging account) that you want. When someone calls the local number, the call will be forwarded to the destination that you have chosen.
If you decide to forward to a regular phone number (POTS), you will be charged based on the destination number due to the termination involved. The call forwarding charges to different cities’ phone numbers can be found here. Each account comes with 5000 free incoming minutes that can be used to forward calls to Skype, SIP, or any other instant messaging client (Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, or MSN Messenger) for FREE. You can also use the incoming minutes to receive faxes for free. Finally, you can even use VPL to set up a PBX. See http://www.virtualphoneline.com/asterisk/ for more details.
Other than basic calling, VPL offers some advanced features such as voicemail, call recording, Facebook integration, personal profile webpage, web dialer, voice blog, and SMS. You can record a total of 30 min of calls for FREE. If you exceed this limit, the recording feature is automatically turned off for the rest of the month.
You can even use VPL to send and receive text messages (SMS) from/to your virtual number. Your text messages will be stored in your inbox for your reference. You can check the SMS rates here.
VPL even offers a public profile page that you can communicate to people who you want to get in touch with you. The profile page is something like http://www.virtualphoneline.com/profile/XXXYYYZZZ. Any person can visit your profile page and call you from there for FREE (obviously the charges will be borne by you). The call will be forwarded to the the destination where you have set it to ring at the moment.
VPL works as designed. During my trial, there was no downtime and I am extremely happy with VPL’s quality of service. The voice quality on forwarded calls is very good and even the other party could not tell the difference. Finally, it is heartening to see VPL take customer service extremely seriously. I was very happy with the level of their service throughout my trial. If you are using VPL for your organization, you will definitely appreciate their reliability and quality.
Final Thoughts
Overall, VIrtualPhoneLine is a very useful service. If you are a SOHO user, you will surely benefit by establishing a local presence at such low rates. Even as a personal user, I would suggest that you consider VPL as you can forward the calls to SIP or instant messaging clients for free. That ways your friends and family can reach you by just dialing a local number. Just want to emphasize that this option usually works out a lot cheaper than you having to call each of your contacts.
What’s even more exciting is that you can try VPL for FREE for a full 60 days. Use this offer to explore their services and evaluate if it fits your requirement.
Using any other DID provider? Please share your experience…