Should You Get a Business Phone System?

Some companies these days don't have a phone number, and each employee is expected to use their personal cell phone, or maybe doesn't use the phone at all. If this describes your business, you might consider investing a small bit of money to have a single, permanent phone number for your organization, which can serve various purposes.

First, having a phone number on your website or social media profile can enhance potential customers' perception of your company's legitimacy and relevancy. When people are searching for services on the Internet, sometimes they'll encounter fake businesses that built nice-looking and convincing websites, but which typically won't have a phone number.

Especially with the right area code, your phone number will immediately signal familiarity and trustworthiness to new website visitors. If you want to appeal to a given locality, get a local area code; if you think an 800 number is more appealing, that's easy to acquire.

Exactly which local area code you use conveys perceptions, too, as you know. In Los Angeles, a 310 number means an established business in an office building, or at the very least a home office, in West L.A. or Beverly Hills. Same goes for 818 and the Valley. A 213 number makes people think of tall buildings downtown. The overlays like 424 or 747 indicate a freelancer using Google Voice or a similar mobile app who could be anywhere. Using 714 tells people you're more about Orange County than Los Angeles. Depending on the clientele you wish to reach, any of these might be your choice.

Some area codes are more difficult to get than others, but where there's a will, there's a way.

If you get a number mainly for this purpose, as for what happens when people call, you can set up just an announcement that talks about your business and how a caller can reach someone by chat, e-mail, or text. Or, set up voicemail if you have someone that will handle them. With a little more effort, you can return calls while showing your business number for your caller ID, to minimize the likelihood of screening by your potential new customer.

Next, when registering for various services, and especially for business filings with the government, often a phone number is required, and using a permanent business number would be preferable than the personal cell phone number of whichever officer or employee of yours happens to be doing the registering or filing.

Apart from all that, if your employees use their personal cell phones for work, signing up for business phone numbers can improve your employees' experience, the integrity of your customer lists and deals, and employee monitoring, all without needing desk phones or any other hardware.

What you could do is assign a business phone number, which you control, to each employee that currently makes or receives external calls for work. You could use a basic cloud phone service provider without much features for this, because, as it is, your company isn't using a feature-rich centralized phone system anyway. The employee can download a mobile app provided by your new business phone system provider, and make and receive calls through that.

You can choose whether each employee has a separate phone number, or all share your company's main number and use something like a three-digit extension number.

Either way, once this is set up, then your employees can keep their business contacts, call logs, and text messages separate from what they use for friends and family. If an incoming call goes to voicemail, your client will hear a professional announcement on it instead of whatever your employee uses for his or her personal voicemail. If your phone service provider supports it, you can allow callers to press 0 to reach someone else if a call goes to voicemail. You or your technical systems manager can see logs of business calls made and received through the app, and retrieve voicemails left for your employees from the phone provider's administrator console if necessary.

Most importantly, if an employee leaves the company, she doesn't take your customers with her. You can sign her out of your phone system so she loses access to the contacts and texts, and then you can reassign the number to another employee.

With a mobile app based phone system, though, ensure you account for how it may alter usage of each employee's personal mobile phone service. See, normal voice calls from a cell phone through its assigned number are generally unlimited, but an employee's mobile service plan might have limits on mobile data, where overage incurs a fee, or the bandwidth is throttled, when the data limit is reached. Phone calls through a cloud service provider's mobile app may use mobile data if your employee isn't on Wi-Fi at home or at your office.

Another potential drawback is that cloud phone systems can suffer from propagation delays as voice data travels through the Internet, as opposed to directly to the standard telephone network as with ordinary cell phone calls. Even split-second delays can cause people to talk over each other a bit, or for audio to cut out very briefly. Call quality will need to be monitored to ensure your employee don't revert to using their own numbers again, or your company's reputation doesn't suffer due to a perception you use poor quality systems.

One last consideration: Using text messaging (SMS) through a cloud business phone service provider might require some additional setup and maintenance, due to new rules put in place to limit unsolicited marketing texts ("spam"). Click here to learn more about SMS for business.

Whatever you choose, for all your IT and phone system service and support needs, J.D. Fox Micro is your best bet. Get in touch today!

Read the companion article: How to Choose the Right Phone System for Your Small Business.