Auto attendant
The greeting that answers at seven in the morning and at ten at night.
Greetings and extensions
Boston, MA
Business VoIP in Boston, MA
Two area codes lie on top of one map here, the working day has people ringing at ten past seven and again at ten at night, and one week in September delivers a season of enquiries. None of that alters what a phone system is. All of it decides what yours has to do.
Disclosure: AldoMedia is a paid affiliate of Unitel Voice. If you sign up through a link on this page we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. We only recommend what we would set up for our own clients, and we say plainly below who should not buy this.
617 and 857 are the same doorstep
Boston is covered by 617 and 857, and the pair is not a split. They lie one on top of the other over the same streets, so 857 is not a suburb and 617 is not the downtown half.
Because two codes share one map, this city has dialled ten digits for years. Nobody here saves a keystroke by holding the older one. The code is not something a caller types thoughtfully. It is something they read off a van door or an invoice, once, in about a second.
What the code does say reaches well past the city line. Both of them run over Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Chelsea and Quincy as well, so 617 on an invoice places you inside that ring and no nearer. A laboratory across the river and a contractor south of the city read exactly as an office in the middle of the city does, which matters if you were counting on the code to do the work of an address.
The question worth more thought runs the other way. If your work is mostly outside the ring these two codes cover, an in town number can also read as in town pricing. If you already own a number none of this is your decision, and moving it without incident is on business phone numbers.
Two clocks, and the calls that arrive between them
Boston does not keep one working day. The hospitals, laboratories and teaching institutions turn over on shifts and timetables, so their people ring at the odd ends of the clock, early and again late in the evening once a shift finishes. The trades start before the streets fill, because a crew not on site by seven has lost its parking and half its morning.
The hours a serious enquiry can land are therefore wider here than in a nine to five market, and the caller often cannot ring back. Somebody just off a long shift will not try you again tomorrow at eleven, because tomorrow at eleven they are asleep. They ring the next name on the list.
So the parts to set up first cover both ends of the day: a short greeting that answers before anybody is in, described on auto attendant, and a rule sending the call to a mobile once the office empties, on answering from anywhere. A tradesman wedged into a spot on a narrow street will take a call in the cab. He will not unpark to reach a desk phone.
The honest bit: none of this software has heard of Boston
The phone service itself is not a Boston product, and we would rather say so than let you work it out later. There is no Boston edition of it: the same code routes a call whether the desk sits in a brick building here older than the telephone or in a shop in Kansas. Everything above is about who rings you here and when, which is a fact about your customers rather than a feature of anything sold.
We are not in Boston either. AldoMedia works out of one office in Buffalo, New York, and we are a paid affiliate of the provider rather than the company running the network. If you need somebody who can come to your building, we are the wrong firm and would rather say so early.
The mechanics sit on the main business VoIP guide, and the state view is on business VoIP in Massachusetts.
The first week of September, and what it does to a phone
Most cities spread a busy season over months. Boston compresses a good part of its year into a few days at the start of September, when an enormous number of leases all turn over at once. Movers, cleaners, locksmiths, plumbers, electricians and handymen take a season of enquiries inside a fortnight, from people who need the work done this week and will ring four numbers to find somebody who picks up.
April is the opposite shape. Massachusetts keeps a state holiday that month which most of the country does not, it falls on a Monday, and the working week loses a day without most of your out of state callers knowing it has. Deliveries do not arrive, half the offices are shut, and a business treating it as an ordinary Monday spends it explaining itself. Deep winter is a third: an ice storm does not raise your call volume gently, it drops a day of frozen pipes and ice dams on top of the day you already had.
None of that argues for a bigger phone system. It argues for deciding, in a quiet month, where a call goes when the first person is already on one. Recording a greeting on the second of September is a job nobody has time for.
What a caller here asks before they will book
The first minute of a call in this city is usually about access rather than the work. Where can the van go. Is a permit needed to sit on the street. Which door, and is there a lift or four flights of a triple decker.
That bears on the phone, because whoever answers is frequently not the person who knows. What makes those calls survive is a way to hand them on without handing out a second number: an extension for the role rather than the individual, and a message arriving as email so whoever knows the building reads it between jobs.
Keep the greeting short. A good share of callers here are standing in a corridor, a stairwell or a garage, on the sort of signal that ends a call at the third menu option.
The Boston reason to wait a while
The general no, the connection that stutters, the contract with time left, the copper something else is quietly riding on, is set out on the main VoIP guide. One item on it lands harder in this city than in most.
- Fax, if your work touches the hospitals. A practice attached to one of the teaching hospital clusters here, or a supplier billing into one, still takes referrals, prior authorisations and imaging orders off a machine, and the hospital end of that is not going to change first. Why a fax and this product do not get on is on the guide above. The Boston part is that the traffic is daily here, so settle the fax route before anybody touches the phones.
If what you are weighing up is the copper line you already pay for, that is on VoIP versus landline.
Common questions
Boston VoIP questions
Is a 617 number better than an 857 number for a Boston business?
No, and here the reason is structural. 617 and 857 lie over the same streets rather than dividing them, which is why a number in this city has wanted all ten digits for years. Neither code is quicker to dial and neither one narrows down where you sit, since both run out over Cambridge, Somerville and Quincy too. Whichever you end up with, print all ten digits and say them slowly at the end of the greeting.
My customers ring from hospital corridors and parking garages. Does that break a VoIP call?
Their end is their mobile signal, and nothing on your side can improve it. What you control is how much a caller on a bad signal has to do. One short sentence of greeting, then a person or a mailbox behind the first choice rather than the fourth. Nobody sits through a long menu twice from a basement garage.
We take a fortnight of calls at the start of September and far fewer the rest of the year. What should we set up?
Set up the routing rather than a bigger office. A call that rings one person, then a second, then a mobile, then lands in a mailbox somebody reads will carry a heavy fortnight. The mistake we see every year is arranging it during the rush. Whoever answers in September should have been added in August.
Related guides
The pieces of a phone system, each written up on its own page.
Answering from anywhere
One number reaching a cab, a counter and a laptop.
Answering from anywhereToll-free numbers
For the Boston business whose buyers are not in Boston.
About toll-freeEvery city we cover is on our business VoIP locations page.
Coverage
A VoIP line runs over the internet, so there is no network to be at the edge of and no corner of the country where the service gets thin. That is why this map has no holes in it. The shading is not signal strength, it is how much has been written down, and Massachusetts is one of the darker ones because it has city pages of its own.
- States with city pages
- States with a guide of their own
- The state you are reading about
Every state is linked. Business VoIP by state and city lists all fifty of them, and the 80 cities with a page, as ordinary links.
Sort the phones out in a quiet month
Tell us how calls reach you today, who answers them and which weeks are heavy. We will tell you whether a phone system is the fix, and say so when it is not.