Auto attendant
A recorded greeting, and a menu that can open with a language.
Greetings and extensions
New York, NY
Business VoIP in New York, NY
Four area codes sit over this city and not one of them says which part of it you are in. What is local here is when the phone rings, who is free to answer, and whether they have a signal where they are standing.
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.
Four codes over one city, and none of them narrows you down
New York City is covered by 212, 646, 332 and 917, and the part that matters is what those four are not. They are not four pieces of a map. All of them sit over the same ground, stacked rather than divided, so a code here places a business in the city and nowhere more precise than that.
Where codes split the territory, the number you are handed announces a part of town and a caller reads it off. Here there is nothing to read. Two things follow. Every local call takes all ten digits, so print all ten and say all ten at the end of a greeting. And which of the four you are offered depends on what the provider has spare that day, so ask, take what is available, and order the lettering afterwards. If you already hold a number it comes with you, which is on business phone numbers.
The one that carries a hint
917 came in for mobile phones and pagers, and plenty of people here still hear it that way. That is not a reason to refuse one, it is a reason to know what you are publishing. If it is going on a van and a sign and you want it read as the business rather than as somebody's own handset, ask what else is free first.
A working day with long edges at both ends
The day here is wider than the hours anybody is at a desk. Travel time is long at both ends of it, so the phone is live before the room is staffed and still live once it has emptied. The people calling are working themselves, which pushes them to the margins of their own day: early, over a lunch break, or once they have got home. A firm selling across the Atlantic is called while the rest of this country is asleep, and one selling west is called three hours after it locked the door.
What rings hardest here is the work attached to buildings and to other people's schedules. Heat and plumbing in old stock, locks, elevators, pest control, cleaning, moving, food supply, and the firms that sell to all of them. Very little of it is walk-in, and you cannot simply turn up at an address here either. Somebody has to be told you are coming, and the time gets confirmed twice, by voice because it is quicker.
None of that is a staffing problem, so do not try to solve it by asking somebody to stay late. Buy the two edges of the day instead: a greeting that answers when nobody is in, on auto attendant, and a rule passing the call to whoever is willing to take it out of hours, on answering from anywhere.
When the power goes, the fallback goes with it
The usual advice for a phone that runs on your internet connection is a rule that sends calls to a mobile whenever the system cannot answer. Why that is needed at all is on the main business VoIP guide. What belongs here is that this city breaks that plan in two ways at once.
The first is scale. Power here goes for a building or a block rather than a house, so one event takes your connection, the ones either side of you, and quite possibly the customers about to call. Late summer brings coastal storms, winter brings the heavy wet snow that comes in off the water, and a long stretch of heat leans on the grid from the other direction.
The second is signal. A great deal of commercial space here sits below ground level or deep inside thick masonry, where mobile coverage runs from poor to none. A rule pointing at a handset that cannot hold a bar reads perfectly on paper and fails on the day. Point the fallback at a phone that rings somewhere with coverage, set it the week the system goes in, and test it from the room the phones will really sit in.
The part worth saying plainly
Nothing in a phone system has ever heard of New York. The same software answers for a business here and for one in a town of four thousand people, and it does not know which of the four codes your number came from. Everything above is about when the phone rings and who is free to pick it up, because that is the only part of this decision the city changes.
We are not in New York City either. AldoMedia works from one office in Buffalo, at the far end of this state, and nobody here can drive to your building. Same clock as you, no local address, and we will not imply one. For a phone system that counts for less than it sounds, because ordering, changes and support happen at a distance whoever you buy from. We are a paid affiliate of the provider, not the company running the network. The wider view is on business VoIP in New York.
Two New York reasons to slow down
The general no, a connection that will not hold steady, a contract with months left on it, paperwork that still arrives by fax, is on the main VoIP guide and applies here unchanged. Two things come up in this city more than they do elsewhere.
- A greeting in one language can lose the call. A large share of callers here would rather do business in something other than English, and a menu with no route for them ends in a hang-up you never hear about. Either keep a person answering, or make the first choice a language and check that the extension behind it reaches somebody who can hold the conversation.
- Look at where the people answering will be standing. If the counter is below ground, or the work happens in a basement all day, an app on a phone is not the safety net it appears to be. Sort the coverage first, or keep calls landing on a cabled handset somebody is near.
Leases turn over quickly here and businesses move sooner than they expected to, which is the quiet argument for a number that is not tied to a building. If what you are weighing is the copper line itself, that is on VoIP versus landline.
Common questions
New York VoIP questions
We were offered a 917 number. Will people assume it is a cell phone?
Some will, because that is the reputation the code picked up, and it is worth knowing before the number goes on a sign. It is still not a reason to refuse one. Ask what else is free that day, and if 917 is what there is, take it. A caller decides far more from how fast somebody answers with a business name.
Our back room has no mobile signal. Does the forwarding rule still work?
Only if it rings somewhere that has signal, which is the part everybody skips. A rule pointing at a handset in a dead spot behaves exactly like no rule at all, and you find that out in the middle of the outage. Test it from the room the phones will live in, and point the fallback somewhere else if the answer is bad.
Most of our callers would rather speak another language. Should we skip the recorded greeting?
Not skip it, build it for them. A menu that only speaks English turns those callers away, and the hang-up never shows up anywhere you would look. Make the first choice a language, keep it to two options, and check that whoever sits behind that choice can hold the conversation.
Related guides
The pieces of a phone system, one page each.
Answering from anywhere
One number reaching a counter, a job and a laptop.
Answering from anywhereToll-free numbers
For the New York business whose customers are everywhere else.
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 New York 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 week
Tell us how calls reach you now, who answers them and where those people are standing when they do. We will say whether a phone system is the fix, and say so when it is not.