I tried out a new telephone service from BT called BT RingCentral. You get a 0800 or 0844 number and you can set it up with voice menus to direct people to the appropriate extension. The extensions can be landline or mobile numbers. It’s supposed to make your little company sound like a big company to callers. Sounded like a really good idea.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work, and you get all the poor service that I’ve come to expect over the years from BT. Here are just a few of the problems I had:

• It’s supposed to transfer the caller ID to the receiving telephone that you’ve set up as an extension. In my case this was a standard BT business line. Transferred calls always showed as Out of Area. The RingCentral call log showed the correct caller ID and I have no problems with caller ID on the BT business line with any other direct or transferred calls. RingCentral seemed incapable of transferring the caller ID.
• The number you get from RingCentral is supposed to be able to answer voice and fax calls. I found that if the receiving telephone has an answering machine then RingCentral starts sending what sounds like fax tones instead of putting the caller through.
• Several times while testing the system as if I was a caller phoning our business I got a recorded American voice stating that the RingCentral number had not been activated. I mean no offence to people from America, but that would create a good impression to our customers, wouldn’t it?
• You’re supposed to be able to transfer calls that you’ve received on one extension to another extension, where the other extension is, again, another telephone number. This is supposed to be as simple as pressing * and then the number you’ve associated with the extension. I did get it to ring the extension, and the caller got music on hold. You’re supposed to then simply hang up and the call gets transferred to the other extension. This never happened: the caller was left indefinitely listening to music on hold.

I raised several support tickets over a period of three days with BT RingCentral and got no response. Eventually I canceled my trial. After that I have received emails and phone calls from BT RingCentral saying that they want to help sort out the problems. Unfortunately, it’s too late as far as I’m concerned.