Ep. 233: Phone Services You Can Use With Your OFS

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online. Filipino specialists. This is episode 233, phone services you can use with your OFS. So we don't have someone in the Philippines that makes phone calls to the US or that answers phone calls from the US My business partner and I have chosen we don't want phone calls. I don't take phone calls. I don't answer the phone unless it's my wife or my kids. We don't provide a phone number to call. We don't want to do phone calls for us. We're very protective of our time and phone calls just don't fit in. But I get asked all the time, how do I have my ofs make phone calls? And it's totally doable. They can make calls, they can receive calls, they can inbound sales, outbound sales, whatever appointment settings, they can definitely do all those things. So when, what phone service can or should you be using? Well, that depends on what your goals are. So to determine the best service to use, you need to know exactly what you want. Do you want them to make phone calls out? Do you want them to receive phone calls? Do you want them? Do you want your phone number showing up as a caller ID or a local phone number showing up as a caller ID or do you want it to be private caller? All of these things will make a difference in the service you use. Also, is this just for one person or is this for like a team? For like, customer support or outbound Outbound phone sales? That'll make a difference. So let me give you a couple different options. Number one, Skype provides a really good service. So for US$299 per month, you can make unlimited phone calls to the US it's pretty cheap and it works really, really well. For a little bit more, you can get a Skype number and that will allow them allow your OFS to have a phone number where they can receive calls and you can publish that phone number. That number will also show up as the caller ID number from your ofs so that so when they're calling someone, it's not a private caller, which if they signed up in the Philippines, a private caller number could get blocked because it's an international number calling. There's all kinds of issues with private caller. At least I don't trust private callers. The Skype number has a separate fee for from the normal Skype to US phone plan for 2.99amonth. So Another option if you just want to make phone calls out, no inbound, inbound calls is Viber. Viber provides a service called Viber Out. It's super cheap. They can make phone calls to the US it works really well. One downside to Viber is you can't get a separate phone number, so the recipient of the call is going to see private caller every time. Still a good option if you don't care about what the caller ID says. It's really, really cheap and it works really well. Now, these are just for basic phone calling. Like, if you want someone to be calling clients and talking on the phone with them, Skype out is a good option. If you're having, like, customer support and you want voicemail or multiple users or custom greetings or call forwarding or call transfers or a way to manage call hours, all of that's going to require more. So in the description of this podcast, I'm going to put a list of services that we looked up. And actually what we did was we looked up a bunch of services and then we pulled our Facebook group workers and asked, what services, what phone services have you used? And we got a big list of them. Some of the most popular ones were RingCentral, Vonage, Openphone, Google Voice, Grasshopper. Those are, those are some of the more popular ones. I'll put links to those in the description below. And then, just so you know, these are all business phones. Like, they're all going to have fees. People are often asking me for, like, hey, how do we make phone calls with no cost? Well, I'm sure there are free phone services that you can use, but I don't think you want to use that. Free in this case usually means strings attached or unreliable. Or it's just like, phone services are so affordable that I don't think you want to go with a free one, because at some point it's probably going to reflect on your business. So like I said in the beginning, I don't have someone in the Philippines making phone calls for me. We don't. We don't have that in our business. But if you do, I would love to hear from you how you handle this. What service do you use? How do you guys handle inbound calls? How do you handle hours? I would love to hear more about your experience with OFS making and receiving phone calls.