8 mins read
In the past few years, tablets and smartphones have turned into a fundamental part of modern workplaces. Businesses and its employees utilize mobile devices for internal and external corporate communication, but businesses cannot carry out communication seamlessly without a dedicated business phone number.
The dedicated business phone number encourages you to keep the personal and business calls isolated. Additionally, it makes your business proficient and lucrative by providing on-time support to the customers.
Comparing Different Types of Business Phone Numbers
There are various kinds of business phone service available in the market.
- Landline numbers
- Toll-free numbers
- Virtual phone numbers
- Vanity numbers
But you must keep in mind that every type of business phone number has its pros and cons. Let us dig deeper to understand the basics of these business phone numbers.
Landline Numbers
The landline numbers are the most basic and regular type of telephone numbers. Organisations can use a landline number and avail a basic plan to run their communication processes. It empowers both the clients and leads to communicate with your business without paying high call charges.
But landline phone number has its set of constraints. Due to its wired structure, it remains fixed and immobile. Moreover, the number pattern of landline numbers is difficult for customers to recall and the major setback is the call handling capacity of these numbers. You cannot answer more than one call at a time on a landline number. Also, organizations today have a heavy inflow of customer calls where they need an efficient system to handle multiple calls at the same time.
Toll Free Numbers
Toll-free phone number is usually 1800 number which enables customers to contact your business without paying for any call charges. These easy-to-remember phone numbers further make it simpler for the customers to call business for assistance. Additionally, a toll-free number enhances your brand’s reputation and visibility by providing you with the flexibility to relocate and expand your business without any hassle.
Toll-free numbers make it easier for your business to manage inbound calls efficiently by providing salient features like call routing, forwarding and monitoring. You can also integrate an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solution to the toll-free number to automate customer calls and allow callers to use the self-service option.
Virtual Phone Numbers
Unlike standard telephone numbers, virtual phone numbers are not linked to a specific telephone line or system. You can use the virtual numbers to forward the incoming calls to other numbers. Services provided along with the virtual number allow you to route the incoming call to landline phones, mobile devices, and VoIP devices.
By forwarding your business calls to your personal numbers, the virtual phone number allows you to use your personal number as the business phone number. Like toll-free numbers, you can integrate IVR with your virtual number to automate your customer calls.
The cloud-hosted virtual phone number solutions help your business to handle high volume incoming calls efficiently by facilitating call routing, forwarding, recording, and analysis. You can further make the virtual number easier to remember and recall by choosing from an array of premium numbers. Business should go for virtual phone numbers to overcome the shortcomings of other types of business telephone numbers.
Vanity Numbers
Vanity phone numbers are nothing but fancy-looking toll-free numbers. They are easier to memorize as compared to local and traditional toll-free phone numbers. Vanity phone numbers also act as a powerful marketing and advertisement tool as the number represents your brand or services. These numbers are an efficient tool to enhance lead generation and run inbound marketing campaigns. But vanity phone numbers are available at premium prices in comparison to other existing business phone numbers.
For instance, a flower delivery agency can use 1800-FOR-FLOWERS as their vanity number. Here, the number is associated with their services and is quite easier to remember for customers. 1800-CAB and 1800-FOR-PIZZA are a few other vanity numbers used by organisations to expand their brand reach and promote easy brand recall amongst customers. Also, vanity numbers do not come with any restriction on number of digits like other toll-free numbers.
Choosing the Suitable Business Phone Number
You have the flexibility to choose from a variety of business phone numbers. But each type of business phone number has got its positives and negatives. Hence, it is essential to keep in mind several important factors before choosing a suitable phone number for your business.
1. Expands Business Presence
Nowadays, every business wants to enable customers to connect with them effortlessly from any geographic location. In such cases, you need to go for a telephone number that encourages you to set up and expand business presence across the globe.
The cloud-hosted virtual phone number solutions make it easier for you to enhance business presence. Businesses can market a single virtual number for all their business locations and then forward the incoming calls to their call centers.
2. Facilitates Call Management
You need to choose a phone number that helps your business to manage high volume incoming calls efficiently. The virtual phone numbers help your business to handle the surge in incoming call volume by routing the calls to various devices and numbers. They further simplify call management by providing advanced features like call routing, forwarding and recording.
3. Available at Affordable prices
A business phone number which is available at affordable prices is what all the businesses look for. Be it a start-up or a renowned brand; cost is a thing which affects the ROI of every business. A virtual number comes with a convenient setup at easily affordable prices. Also, virtual number is cheaper than a toll-free number as the calling charges are borne by the customer as well as the company.
4. Ports Easily
While running a business, expansion or relocation is an ongoing process. Thus, there are high chances that you are relocating or expanding your business in the long run.
Traditional landline numbers are fixed and thus are not a preferred option for such businesses. But in case of a virtual phone number, you can keep using the same number regardless of your geographic locations.
5. Implements IVR
Your business needs to hire additional call center agents to deal with incoming calls throughout the day. But you can allow customers to call your business anytime by automating customer service with IVR.
Unlike traditional business phone services, virtual phone number solution enables you to automate customer service delivery by implementing IVR solutions efficiently. The self-service options provided by the IVR will help you to deliver 24/7 customer service without deploying dedicated agents.
Many businesses these days prefer virtual phone numbers over other types of business phone numbers to handle inbound calls efficiently. But you need to opt for cloud-hosted virtual phone number solutions to avail smart call management features like call routing, forwarding and recording.
