There are many services make it possible for a caller to dial a nationwide number and be routed to the geographically nearest store, branch office, etc. The problem with these services is that they simply route the caller to a single phone number, and it is up to the individual office to answer and manage its call traffic.

The VirtualPBX™ is a full-featured high-end business phone system which offers all of the features and more of an expensive business phone system or PBX. Thus instead of merely having a call from his area routed to it, a business using the Smart800™ VirtualPBX™ can geographically route calls and in addition have all of the features of a standard VirtualPBX™ customized for an individual branch location.

Because a high-end PBX (business phone system) can cost around $ 100,000, a company with a large number of branches, offices, locations, stores, franchises, etc. could spend many tens of millions of dollars in capital costs to install a full-featured PBX in each location. Even an inexpensive PBX (and hence one with fewer features) could cost several million dollars to install in all branches. The VirtualPBX™ requires no equipment purchase; and hence, there are no capital costs.

The VirtualPBX™ includes among other features the ability for employees to be anywhere not just at their office phone. Consultants at a clients facility, delivery vehicles underway, manufacture's representatives visiting a client, plumbers, electricians, etc. in route to or from a job, city employees in the field, architects at a construction site, etc. can all be reached by dialing the nationwide main business number followed by the extension of the called employee or by dialing a Sales, Tech Support, Customer Support, etc. queue or the Operator. In addition standard and advanced features such as Follow-Me Calling, Voice Mail with Automatic Call-Back, ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) Queues (i.e. Sales, Customer Support, etc.), Fax Mail, New Message Paging, VirtualDID (Direct Inward Dialing), and much more can be combined with geographic routing to each branch's individual business phone system (VirtualPBX™).

Examples of businesses which can benefit from this are:

• Consulting businesses with a large number of branch offices located nation-wide or world-wide. If a consulting associate carries a cell phone and enters the cell-phone number as a contact number in his VirtualPBX™ extension, he can always be reached; but all that the customer knows is that he has dialed the consultant's extension or one of the service queues. If the consultant does not carry a cell phone but is working at a client, he can enter the phone number at his desk as a temporary contact phone number and will always be reachable. Conversely, if he does not wish to be disturbed, he can mark his extension as "unavailable"; and all calls will be sent directly to Voice Mail.
• 1-800-FRANCHISES which have a generic vanity number for a widely distributed group of similar business which can be reached by dialing the single 800/888/877 number for the group. The advantage of the VirtualPBX™ for such a group is that they get a high-end business phone system tailored to each individual business as well as just the geographic routing. This is especially useful to business where the principals are usually underway with deliveries, repair services, installations, etc.
• Real Estate Franchises which have a common name for a wide number of offices which are members of the franchise. The VirtualPBX™ can be tailored to each individual real-estate office. This has two major advantages to real-estate brokers and salespersons. The first is the a typical real-estate agent's business card usually has a half dozen phone numbers, office, home, office fax, home fax, cell phone, pager, etc. leaving the poor client bewildered as which number to use to get his agent. This plethora of numbers can be replaced with the single nation-wide number of the franchise and the individual agent's extension. All of the agent's personal phone numbers can remain secret, yet he can be reachable or unreachable all of the time as he so chooses. If he wishes time off, he can become unreachable by marking his extension as "unavailable" in which case all calls will automatically go to Voice Mail. Every time that a Voice Mail is left, however, he will automatically be paged (on his cell phone if it is digital); and he will always know if an important call is trying to get through.
• Service Businesses where almost all of the principals are under way, at a customer, etc.
• Engineering development and research firms where an employee is just as often in the lab as at his desk and carries a cell phone as one of his extension's contact phone numbers.
• Franchise stores in general which wish to advertise one number nationally but have a tailored business phone system (VirtualPBX™) at each location.