Hey guys, how's it going?
It's Seth Williams here from retipster.com
In this video, I'm going to give you the grand tour of a cloud-based phone system
that I've been using for the past 10 plus years now.
It's called the RingCentral.
And RingCentral, the reason I use this is because anytime I send out direct mail
or give up my business phone number to anybody,
I don't want to give out my personal phone number.
Like I don't want to just have this actual phone number, on my personal phone
out there for all the world to use for people to send me text messages
and call me at all hours of the day.
That's where something like a cloud-based phone system comes into play.
And the reason I use this is because it basically just allows you
to set up as many business phone numbers as you want.
They can be local numbers.
They can be toll-free numbers to use your personal phone
and make calls from your phone, but to the recipient of your call,
they're not going to see your personal phone number.
They're going to see your business number, whatever you set that up to be.
And if you use a service like this, it also allows you to send and receive faxes
from your business phone number, and also send and receive text messages
instead of call forwarding, answering rules, all kinds of stuff.
And that's really what I'm going to show you throughout this video.
It's actually going to be a lot of different things I will show you.
So if you want to skip around the things that you care about most
say, if you're interested in signing up, or even if you already are a RingCentral user,
I'm going to put timestamps beneath this.
I'm also going to show up a quick table of contents on the screen
in case you want to jump around to the different parts of this video
and just see what you care about the most.
And also, before we get into this,
I just want to acknowledge RingCentral is not the cheapest option out there.
There are a couple of other similar cloud-based phone services
that I've played around with that don't cost as much as RingCentral,
but I've also found them to be a little clunky in different aspects of it.
So you kind of get what you pay for.
There are also free options like Google Voice if you want to pay nothing
and just set up a simple number, that's not your personal phone number.
You can do that too. That has a lot of limitations to it.
But again, if you're super budget-conscious,
if you don't want to spend any money on this yet, that can also work.
So just keep that in mind.
We also do have an affiliate relationship with RingCentral.
RingCentral is not for everybody, but if you decide this is what you want to give a try,
go ahead and sign up through our affiliate link and that will help support REtipster
and the content that we're trying to put out there.
And if you'd rather use something else, that's totally cool too.
I hope you find some value in this regardless.
So without further ado, let's jump into RingCentral and I'll show you how it works.
All right. So if you click on the REtipster affiliate link beneath this video,
you'll be brought to a page that looks something like this.
All I'm doing is scrolling down here and these are the pricing plans.
So the one that I am currently using is this one right here,
the standard one for $24.99 a month, if you pay annually.
And really the main reason why I'm picking this one,
mostly boils down to this right here, unlimited internet facts.
I actually find this a little annoying because if it weren't for that one line item,
this one over here would be fine.
But in my particular business, faxing is actually something that I rely on.
Believe it or not, a lot of people when they accept purchase agreements,
they will fax those back to me.
And if I don't give them an easy fax option, then I can't get it.
So if you've got some other way to get faxes from people, or if you just don't want to
give people that option, you could just as well go with the essential plan
and save a little bit of money, but just so you know for me, I go with the standard plan.
If you want to get started with this, all you'd have to do,
you can either try it for free for a little bit,
or you can just buy it right now.
And the first step is to create an account and that starts
by putting in your contact information.
So I'm just going to put that right here
and then we'll click get your number, and then it brings it over here.
So for me, I started out by choosing a local number just where I am.
You're obviously welcome to do that.
Or if you want, you can pick a toll-free number.
I don't know if this matters as much these days,
since everybody uses cell phones
and long-distance charges aren't really that big of a deal anymore.
It would also conceal a local area code.
Say, if you don't want people to perceive you as being from across the country
or something like that,
a toll-free number would also kind of hide that in some sense.
But it's also going to cost you a little bit more as well.
So anyway, I'm going to go ahead and use a local number
and I'll just start by typing in the area code where I'm at.
I'll go ahead and click this and it's going to give me some available numbers,
not a ton of options, but enough solid choices to work with.
I'll go ahead and pick this one. That looks pretty easy to remember.
And then I'll click next.
And then in terms of users. So for me, I'm just going to put one user in here,
but obviously, if you have an existing team, you can add more if you want.
Click next and then choose phones.
So this is if you want like an actual physical telephone on your desk that you can pick up.
I personally don't do this. I can actually see how this might be helpful.
Sometimes I actually do wish I had this just because
I'm used to it from years ago in my day job,
it was just easier to pick up the phone and dial rather than getting on my computer,
picking up my mobile phone.
So anyway, if you want to go ahead, I'm not going to pick one of these at all.
So, I'm just going to click next and then check out
and go ahead and pay for this and keep going onto the next step.
Now, at this point, I'm going to actually flip around to my live account
because I am an existing RingCentral user.
I'm just showing you what that signup process looks like.
So to get to my live account, I'm going to go over here to the main ringcentral.com.
Click on login. And there are a couple of different things here.
And the admin portal is where I want to go,
because that's where I can control pretty much
all the inner workings of how my phone system works. Click on that.
And to log in, I'm just going to use my main RingCentral phone number as my username,
which is right there already. Click next.
My passwords are in there, go ahead and sign in.
And then this is what I'm going to see right off the bat.
Now, RingCentral has actually changed up the layout of this several times
over the past decade that I've been using them.
So depending on when you're watching this video, hopefully, it looks at least somewhat
similar and you can follow along with where I'm going,
but there's a lot of different things you can do here.
So the first thing I'm going to do is just show you how you can make a call
from your RingCentral phone number.
If you go up here and click on this phone icon
it's going to open this thing up.
And the first thing that I'm seeing here is my actual personal cell phone number.
So this is like the number that I have on the phone in my pocket.
And what I can do here is I can also click this drop-down thing
and put in a custom phone number.
And I can literally put any phone number in here
and say if I'm like at a different location or at a friend's house or at work.
And I want to use their phone.
I can put that phone number in here.
And then right down here in this two field,
this is where I put the phone number that I'm trying to call.
So say, if I'm trying to call a customer or call somebody back, that number goes in here
and what it's going to do once I have all these numbers in here, is this is not going to
call from my computer. It's not like a Skype call or something like that.
It's going to start ringing on whatever phone number I put in here.
So say for example, if I just put my personal cell phone on here,
what it's going to do is it's going to start ringing on my phone
and when I pick it up and then it will start calling whichever number I put in here.
And then when they pick up the phone, they're not going to see
my personal phone number on their caller ID.
They're going to see my RingCentral business number.
So it's kind of a weird workaround.
It was actually a little confusing for me the first time I tried to use this.
So I thought I'd just explain how that works.
Also keep in mind, RingCentral does have a fairly decent mobile app.
That's actually what I use more often than not when I'm trying to make a call
as I just pull up the app on my iPhone and call out that way.
And then it pretty much works the same way you would expect it to on your mobile device.
The person you're calling will see your RingCentral number on their caller ID,
not your personal number.
So anyway, I find that to be a little bit easier of a way to do it,
but you can handle that however you want.
And when it comes to faxing, so right up here,
you'll see this little icon that looks like a piece of paper coming out.
If you go ahead and click on that, this is fairly intuitive. It's not that hard to understand.
You just put in whatever phone number you want to send a fax to.
If you want to include a cover page, you can check this box
and you can select from a number of different templates
you can use as your cover page.
I usually don't even use a cover page,
but anyway, if you want to, you can do that.
So I'm just going to uncheck this and then whatever document
you want to send as a fax you can upload those from your computer.
You can use your Box account Dropbox or Google Drive.
So it's pretty easy to use, and you can also schedule It to go out at a future time.
Say, if you don't want to send it right this moment,
you can schedule when you want it to go out.
So it's pretty easy and straightforward to use.
And then in terms of when you get faxes,
so anytime I get a fax or a voicemail for that matter, it actually sends me an email
and I can listen to the voicemail from that email, or I can pull up a PDF of the facts
from that email or you can also go back here to the RingCentral homepage
remember this RingCentral app.
So if we go there instead, we can log in the same way that we did
choose your phone number and password.
And once you logged into this app,
this is where you can send and receive text messages if you want.
So if we go down here to this phone icon and click on this,
this shows us all of the call activity.
This shows us all of our voicemails.
It shows us all of the texting activity,
either that we've received or that we've sent out and then faxes.
So any faxes that have come in, you can see what number it came from,
and you can also download it right here, if you want.
Or you can just click this little eye icon and view it.
So you can see this as like a recent purchase agreement that came in accepted.
So that's where you can check and all that stuff.
People do use faxing a lot, surprisingly even today
when they're accepting purchase agreement
So it is important that I give people that easy option, but depending on your business,
this may not be necessary for you.
So that's up to you, however you want to handle that.
And then recording's over here.
Pretty much all the recordings I'm going to care about are over here
in the voicemail section,
where I can click on these and listen let's listen to one of these here.
Hi, this is Nikki calling in regards to the Manchester Hills.
I'm working on a project for my homeowners.
So anyway, you kind of get the idea on that. That is the RingCentral app.
And pretty much the only time I use this is if I want to get in and see historical
faxes or voicemails, because again, all these are sent to my email address by default.
So usually that's the first place I'll see it and that's where I'll reference those.
That's why you see a lot of stuff is like unread here.
It's cause I don't usually log into this
unless I'm trying to see something that happened a long time ago.
Now when it comes to sending and receiving texts.
So if you want to do that, first of all, it does give you the option
to enable notifications on your desktop.
So you don't have to be logged in just to see what your text activity is.
I actually don't send and receive a whole lot of texts from my particular account,
but sometimes as you probably know, people will just assume that
you're okay receiving texts
and they'll just take the liberty of sending you a text.
And if you don't have a way to receive those,
you're never going to know what they're trying to send you.
So luckily RingCentral can handle that.
So if I want it to send out a new text from my RingCentral number,
all I'd have to do is go up here and click on this plus button and click on new texts.
And Ican enter in that phone number.
I'll just go ahead and enter in my own phone number,
do a quick test right here, just like that.
Click continue. And just say test message. Send that through.
There we go. We just saw that pop up.
So that's how you send texts. And then if a person replies to that text,
it would just come right back through here.
So that pretty much covers the RingCentral app side of things.
If we go back here. So, I just want to show you some basic stuff
you can set up from the admin portal.
So if you want it to set up a caller ID names,
this would be whatever name shows up on a person's caller ID
when you call them from your RingCentral account
you can do that here, under company.
You could just put whatever you want to in there.
So there's a lot of ways you can set up your RingCentral numbers
in terms of how they should behave when a person calls them.
So, first of all, you can set up company hours and I've just got mine set up to be
open 24 hours, seven days a week.
So nothing really different happens depending on when a person calls me.
But I know back in the days when I was working my day job,
I didn't want my phone to be ringing through my RingCentral account when I was at work.
But I was okay with it ringing when I was at home or on weekends.
So you can set up custom hours here if you want.
You can basically just select which days you want to have those custom hours on
and setup whatever custom hours
that you do or don't want to be available and handle it that way
So that's pretty cool. Again, for me these days, it's pretty simple because
I don't ever pick up the phone. It either goes to an automated
voicemail greeting or I'll have it set up to go to my virtual receptionist
I actually have a separate video explaining all that.
If you're interested in that, I'll have a link beneath this video
where you can check it out,
but regardless, however, I have it set up,
I'm pretty much never answering the phone myself these days,
but it's up to you however you want to handle that.
If we go down here to IVR settings.
So this is like the company greeting that people here,
right when they call you, if it doesn't ring directly
to your number and you pick it up yourself,
you can set up an automated greeting for your main number.
What I did here was actually I hired a professional voiceover artists
through Fiverr to record something for me.
So it sounds pretty professional. You can listen to it right here.
Hello. And thank you for calling.
If you know your party's extension, you may dial it at any time.
If you would like to find out more information about selling your property, please press 1.
If you are calling to find out more information
about one of our properties for sale, please press 2.
So you kind of get the idea.
If you want to change this in any way, you can just click on edit
and you can either like record it through your phone. You can record it through
the computer or you can get an audio file and upload it.
However you want to handle that.
And then if we keep going down here, so custom answering rules.
So if we wanted to, we could have this set up so that
if a certain person calls from a certain number,
or if anybody calls at a certain date and time,
say, if we know we're going to be out of town and unavailable from
this date to this date, we can set up our phone number to do a specific thing.
Whether that's just playing a voicemail greeting
or forwarding the number to somebody else,
you can control all of that stuff here.
That's always available if you want to do that
and then go down here, let's see anything else that's worth noting.
So say if you did have a virtual assistant answering your phone for you,
you can do a call recording.
And if you do a call recording, it's going to play this announcement.
And this is there by default, before the call starts.
This call is being recorded.
If you do not wish to be recorded, please disconnect at this time.
So that option is available if you want to use that.
Say if you want to monitor how your receptionist is doing,
you could record it that way. It's kind of a cool feature.
You can also set your time zone.
You can block robocalls or toll-free numbers, but just so you know
that's there say if your phone number is just getting hammered with spam calls,
for some reason, it's kind of a nice little feature to have
If we continue down here to groups.
So again, if I had like a huge team or staff working with me,
this stuff would probably be a lot more useful,
but in my case, it's just me. So I don't use any of this group functionality
if we go down here to phones and devices.
So this is also not really necessary
because I just use my computer or my mobile device.
So nothing too complex going on there.
Now, if we head over here to users up here,
so I'm going to explain what's going on here
with all these different numbers and extensions.
So this first extension up here, there's no separate phone number associated with it.
This is probably the most pointless extension I have, people almost never really use it.
But anyway, back when I set this up
apparently I thought that was important.
Loan servicing. So this is like a separate voicemail box
and I actually don't use this a whole lot anymore.
But back in the day, I used to sell a lot of properties with seller financing
and all of those existing borrowers could call
and say, if they had questions about their loan balance
or about payments or anything like that,
that was set up for them.
Postcard leads. So this is a separate, dedicated toll free number
that goes on every piece of direct mail that I send out.
So if somebody gets my direct mail on just a cold mail campaign and they want to call
me back, that's the number that they see,
This next one down here, the sales department.
So this is the toll free number that goes on all of my property listings that go out there.
So it's just a separate phone number that they can call.
And any messages that go in there I'll know is calling about
somebody who's calling about a property for sale,
or I can just direct this to my own personal phone number.
And that's currently how I have it set up so that I can answer the phone
if it's calling during hours, I'm okay with answering the phone.
Otherwise, I'll just go to that voicemail message.
And then down here, this last extension.
So this also has its own separate phone number.
And basically when people call my main number
and they're allowed to hit an extension, they can hit 5
and it will go ahead and start ringing on my cell phone through this number.
Or if they happen to have this number, they can just call that directly.
And then they won't have to hit an extension.
It'll just start ringing on my phone.
Now what I want to show you here.
So in postcard leads, again, this is when I'm sending out mail.
This also goes on my buying website.
Anybody who calls this number, the reason they would be calling is because
they either want to sell their property to me, or I've made them an offer,
or they've seen this number on my buying website.
So that's the context of why they would be calling.
So where it says call handling and forwarding.
So I've actually got a separate video that explains more about what's going on in here.
I'm going to go ahead and link to that beneath this video, if you want to check it out
but just so you know there are a number of different ways you can handle this,
whether you want it to play an automated voicemail greeting
forward it to another person or answering service,
which is what I currently have set up right here.
But just so you know there's a number of different ways
you can configure this and again, go check out that other video
if you want to learn more about the different ways you can make this work.
And if you did want to play a longer automated greeting on your number,
which is another way I've done this, again, I'll explain it in that other video.
You can also upload that here as well.
You can hear what mine sounds like right now.
My name is Seth. And if you're hearing this message right now,
you probably just received a letter from me in the mail
with a cash offer to buy your property.
So I actually have a number of different types of greetings I've used on this,
depending on the type of mail I'm sending them.
And that it's pretty easy to record that stuff
and upload it right here to your RingCentral account.
Then over here in the sales department.
So again, this is a separate toll-free number that people can call.
And if somebody calls this number, if we go here to call handling and forwarding.
So first of all, it's going to ring on my personal phone number for six rings or 30 seconds.
And again, this is during business hours.
If they don't answer, then they're going to hear this message,
which again, this was something that I got professionally recorded
by a voiceover artist that I've found on Fiverr.
You can hear what that sounds like here.
Hello, and thank you for calling.
At the tone please leave your name, phone number, and a good time to reach you
along with any questions about the property that interests you.
Please remember to reference the property you are calling about
and where you saw our listing.
So you kind of get the idea.
Again that's only if I don't answer or if somebody's calling after hours.
So there you go.
RingCentral can do a lot of stuff. I didn't even show you everything here.
These are just the things that I use it for the most.
It's not perfect, but it's always done pretty well for me.
So again, I don't mean to pressure you
or say that this is the one you need to use,
but I can vouch for it in terms of being just a decent option,
I use it for a long time.
Hopefully, this tutorial helps show you around
and understand just the basic ways you can use it.
And yeah, again, if you choose to use RingCentral,
feel free to use our affiliate link retipster.com/RingCentral.
That does a lot to help us out as a company,
as we try to publish more helpful information like this.
And if you decide to use something else, that totally cool too.
I wish you all the best with whatever option you choose to go with.
And I wish you all the best in your business.
Thanks for watching. Talk to you again soon.