Our company recently looked at giving up on running our own voice mail system internally, and handing over that responsibility to a phone company. We are in the South San Francisco Bay Area. To our amazement, we could not find any company that offers a rich multi-level-menu voice mail offering. Can it be true?
We looked at AT&T Centrex, but it appears this system simply puts several separate phone numbers (at one or multiple locations) onto the same phone system. It has no integrated voice mail capability as an option (amazing that a company the size of AT&T would overlook that).
AT&T offers a "Universal Messaging" product, but this appears to be a joke: it is really just a voice mail extension for very small companies with a few employees. There is no ability to build multi-level menus, such as extension 1 for sales, and then under sales three extensions for different products, and then under one of those products, two extensions based on customer type, etc, with many options for call routing at the final voice destinations.
AT&T offers a DSL based voice mail product as well, but this also looks like it is geared to very small companies. And I don't have confidence in DSL's ability to sustain a 24x7 operation with perfect reliability, which is what we expect from our desk phones. If there were a real T-1 in place and VOIP over that, it might be a different case.
If you want a rich, robust multi-level voice mail system that can integrate well with many phone extensions, and you want to buy this as a hosted service instead of running the server yourself, what are your options? We would obviously prefer to find a vendor in the Bay Area since forwarding from the voice mail system to our extensions would be a local call, but at this point we will consider anything viable.