Having a business phone number is almost a requirement for growing your company into the business that will support you and your family, instead of keeping it a small operation that you run part-time while balancing other work commitments. It signals your company’s seriousness by giving customers a way to reach out, and it’s not expensive. With today’s phones, it’s even possible to get a number that goes straight to your regular cell while identifying its source, helping you clearly distinguish between business calls and personal ones. That means almost any business can afford one. What many of these businesses don’t realize is that upgrading just slightly to a toll free number for business can be just as convenient, but it makes a much more powerful statement about your company. If you’re thinking about adding a business number, here are a few good reasons to make it a toll-free one.
1. Customer Perceptions of Your Resources
Companies that have toll free phone service send their customers the message that they will cover the expense of reaching out to resolve issues, whether it’s a problem or just a regular order you need to place with a person and not an automatic ordering system. While most phone plans today don’t have per-minute costs like they used to, some do, and a toll-free number gives them peace of mind about their bottom lines when they reach out, expanding your pool of prospective customers at the same time. Since you’re only paying for calls you receive under many toll-free phone plans, small companies with growing client bases still find the expenses easy to control, and customers view them as more securely established for it.
2. Costs Are Comparable To Regular Business Lines
Toll free numbers don’t actually cost much more than regular business lines unless you get the kind of call volume that requires them to be operated by groups of employees. If you run a small company and want the number to ring a single phone whenever calls come in, it’s really a comparable expense. Its higher costs are almost always due to scale of use. As communication gets more and more global, these costs are likely to keep getting closer together, too. After all, the cost of a toll free number has been falling for years.
3. Easily Works With Professional Answering Services
When your company gets busy enough that you do want phone service in your off-hours and other benefits that larger companies give their customers, a toll free number is easy to use with call center support and multi-line resources. In fact, they were built for companies that very often needed multi-line support. That makes it easy to start with a number that forwards to your regular business phone and then grow it into a larger operation as you go, without having to change numbers midway through your business establishing itself. From the customer’s side of things, this provides a continuity of experience that makes it easier for them to stick with you over the years, giving you the repeat business you need to keep growing.