When talking about the best VoIP providers in the business world, it can be hard to tell the real contenders apart from the pretenders unless you know the market well. PCMag is certainly one group that understands the business and technology world quite well and that’s why people tend to listen when they release their annual business choice awards. While there are some perennial favorites in the industry like ShoreTel, there is apparently a new company that is rising through the ranks.

Ooma was named as the top overral VoIP provider in the United States for 2014, thanks in large part to the fact that the company caters specifically to smaller companies that might need a little more personal touch when it comes to customer service. In PCMag’s overall rankings, Ooma blows away most of the competition, including some well-established VoIP providers like Cisco and RingCentral. With a total rating of 9.4, ooma is the only company that garnered a ratings score of more than 9.0.

While ShoreTel (News - Alert) might have been beaten out by ooma in the overall rankings, the website still has the larger company ranking ahead of other firms including Avaya, which actually came in fifth among all the VoIP providers in the company’s rankings. One thing that PCMag did point out is that ShoreTel was actually a company that had a large number of people claiming they needed quite a bit of customer service help. It appears that the firm has managed to mitigate some of the damage caused by a high number of customer service calls by having exceptional technical support for those calls.

When it comes to reliability among the top five VoIP companies, Ooma again leads the pack with a rating of 9.5, followed closely by ShoreTel with a rating of 8.9. Avaya (News - Alert), which pretty consistently finished at the bottom of the pack with a  7.0 overall rating is the last in this category as well with a  7.4 rating number.